Grün statt Grau: The garden of planetary politics

Abstract

Recently, I was invited to take part in a panel discussion at the Ludwig Maximilian University's (LMU) Center for Advanced Studies in Munich on the topic of “Global Climate Justice,” the fourth and final in a series there on “Climate Futures: Dialogues across the Science-Society-Policy Interface.” As the event date approached, my misgivings about my role kept intensifying. “You've invited the wrong person!,” I thought, as I struggled to frame my opening remarks, since I'm neither a climate historian nor a climate ethicist.

My climate history colleagues—such as fellow panelist Eleanora Rohland—are far more adept than I am at connecting past climate fluctuations, such as the seventeenth-century Little Ice Age, to agricultural yields and social dislocations, or in elaborating the connections among fossil-fuel use, colonialist legacies, and future vulnerability. Climate historians have also collaborated with earth systems scientists in correlating the industrial take-off in Europe around 1750 with the rapid rise in atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations that have led to global warming. This correlation informed the 27^th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) establishment of a “loss and damage” fund that acknowledges the Group of 20 (G20) countries’ historical responsibility for a stark planetary inequality: the nations least responsible for GHG pollution are suffering the worst effects of climate change. The 2023 Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has called for “climate resilient development,” mostly through technology sharing and financial loans, to achieve the targeted 2030 halving of emissions. It will be a monumental and costly task (Summary 24).

As an environmental historian interested in local landscapes and grassroots environmentalisms, I have shied away from tackling climate change or climate justice head on because the temporal and spatial scales of my work don't seem commensurate with a planetary crisis with no historical precedent. After all, as Dipesh Chakrabarty noted in his much-cited 2009 essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” climate change has merged human and geological time scales in ways that belie phenomenological continuities between past and present. In his view, the “we” of the Anthropocene only emerges in reference to a geo-historical past that has included “us” for just a small sliver of time. Yet we have become a geophysical “force” on par with the asteroid that triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs over 65 million years ago (Chakrabarty 207). In Chakrabarty's view, it isn't useful to blame the agents of capitalism, socialism, nationalism, or any other ideology for this mess—humans as a species “stumbled” (217) into their role as fossil-fuel burners, reshaping the planet's geochemical cycles and the parameters for human evolution even as they sought enlightenment, fought for human rights, and built magnificent cities. Chakrabarty has been roundly criticized for the relativism of this view, but his essay still leaves me with an uncomfortable dilemma: Do traditional environmental justice concerns—the burdens of toxic contamination or land losses that disproportionately burden the world's poor—align with climate justice? Or does a focus on atmospheric protection call for radical new ways of thinking about the human (or nonhuman) that lie beyond our collective historical experience?

Lurking behind my reticence about my role on the panel was a gnawing suspicion that our political and social responses to climate crises have overshadowed or even worsened the slower violence (Nixon) of bio-cultural diversity loss or landscape ruination that doesn't make it into anxious headlines about 42°C temperatures in Rome or Austin. My early research focused on nineteenth-century Heimat protectionists who worked to save the Siebengebirge on the Rhine from basalt mining; moved on to documenting the trauma of African Americans’ racist exclusion from so-called wilderness reserves in the US Southeast; and in recent decades encompassed post-independence struggles between European conservation organizations and Indigenous communities in and around Serengeti National Park in Tanzania over pastoral grazing rights. At the LMU's Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC), my 2023 Fulbright summer MA seminar on Green Cities immersed students in stories about the strange bedfellows in New York, Curitiba, and Munich who have mobilized across party, generational, and ethnic lines to sustain livable neighborhoods by protesting autobahn expansion or by salvaging urban gardens from the bulldozer. Climate resilient development, at least as it appears in the IPCC assessment and similar report, does not yet leave sufficient space or time for these intimate topographies of livelihood and loss.

In thinking through the tensions between climate justice and environmental justice, these local encounters have led me to emergent and embodied forms of climate adaptation that are not yet part of the global climate justice conversation about financial instruments and technology transfer. During my archival research trip to Tanzania in 2013, I asked a Maasai elder about how pastoralists might cope with a changing climate. He maintained that he and his fellow herders were quite adept at dealing with extended drought; what they really needed was sufficient room to move their cattle, expand water boreholes, and tinker with their earthen irrigation systems—he made no mention of the solar-powered kiosks that were just becoming popular at the time. Our conversation's tacking between a planetary emergency and pastoral livelihoods reminded me of an earlier mismatch between global imperatives and customary land use in the Serengeti: Is it a Global Heritage of All Mankind threatened by desertification and “overpopulation,” as the West German zoological garden director Bernhard Grzimek declared in his 1959 film Serengeti darf nicht sterben, or is it the ancestral homeland of Maasai pastoralists, Sukuma farmers, or Ikoma hunter-farmers who had inhabited these lands on their own terms before the onset of colonialist land grabs? Claims to rural cultural landscapes as global hotspots have long reflected imperialist, Cold War, and speculative neoliberal objectives masquerading as universal moral crusades. Framing the atmosphere as a planetary commons under expert stewardship revives uncomfortable memories of earlier globalisms that disenfranchised locals in the name of saving the earth. We already see US, European, and East Asian firms engaged in a scramble for business opportunity focused on marketing and installing smart grids, solar arrays, wind turbines, EVs, and hempcrete structures across Africa, South Asia, and Latin America that could easily run roughshod over local terrains. Here, at the intersection between real, existing sustainability and an eco-modern future, global climate justice and local environmental justice will converge, collide, and create new forms of accommodation, resistance, and hope.

In the localities I study, my informants and narrators care deeply about climate change and recognize its multi-faceted threats to their families’ lives and livelihoods. Nonetheless, they usually do not see climate as the “be-all and end-all” of environmental care or activism. Or, they bundle climate anxieties with stories of place-making that express aspirations, identities, and fears far beyond a neoliberal accounting of ecosystem services. The Green Cities summer seminar unexpectedly brought this mismatch between emergency management and the slower pace of community stewardship into sharp relief. Through RCC friends, I learned about a North Munich coalition that is trying to save a historic garden district known as the Eggarten-Siedlung (See Figure 1). A former Wittelsbach royal pheasantry (Fasanerie) located in the city's Moosach District, the Eggarten settlement has fallen on hard times and is slated to be paved over with more than 800 apartment units. The construction firm that now owns the land claims it will create a zero-carbon, model quarter powered by solar and geothermal energy and replete with shaded walking paths, a community garden, and ample common spaces for work and play. The firm's representatives and their supporters in city hall offer a neighborhood vision attuned to UN Sustainable Urban Development goals of compactness, affordability, mobility, waste recycling, and emission reductions: one appealing vision of a greener, climate-ready future.

And yet Eggarten residents—many of them senior citizens from working-class and Mittelstand backgrounds—insist that their existing gardens offer cooling winds, abundant shade, rare heritage fruit trees, social conviviality, and flourishing biodiversity built on a century of cooperation with fellow insects, amphibians, and rodents (See Figure 2). They are fearful about climate change, but they insist on rejuvenating the city's remaining Grün rather than expanding its concrete Grau—irrespective of the latter's newfangled energy sources. They envision neighborhood renewal powered by a new museum, reestablished community gardens and beehives, refurbished small houses, and ample room for fellow critters in derelict old ponds and kitchen gardens (we might call their campaign LIMBY: “Leave It in My Backyard!”). In this multispecies refuge, they imagine respite from both the urban heat island and debilitating work rhythms, not energy-efficient structures that force residents back inside when it gets above 35°C and which they can never afford to rent.

I learned quickly on this visit that Germany's old Schrebergärten and small landscape-protection zones—important topics of my 2004 book Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885-1945—are fast disappearing due to both a desperate need for affordable housing and sustainable urbanist principles that call for intensified densification (Nachverdichtung) to save green spaces further afield. Eggarten sits just a few blocks from the 1970s-built Olympia Shopping Mall. As my seminar students and I walked from the Olympia underground station along Hanauer Strasse to meet our tour leaders, we noticed the signs of green gentrification: billboards advertising sleek, mixed-use condo complexes for smiling IT professionals walled off from the surrounding rent-subsidized Sozialwohnungen (Kumnig, Rosol, and Exner). I came away from our visit skeptical that global climate justice—at least as international bodies currently frame this concept now—can uplift working-class, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities’ variegated eco-imaginaries. Instead, it will empower technocratic smart solutions favoring global consultancies over humble, backyard gardeners—thus concretizing the power imbalances that accelerated global warming in the first place.