The Carbon Garden
Injecting aerosols into the atmosphere to block incoming sunlight could possibly be the most effective way to deal with the climate emergency. But there will be other extreme requirements, and they’ll be undertaken where people live. Holly Jean Buck suggests that there are two levels to carbon removal. The first level is aesthetic, niche, boutique, symbolic, and the second is gigaton scale “climate significant” cleanup (Buck 2019: 31). So sure, the carbon garden project is about addressing social inertia at level one in order to make level two a reality. Getting folks on board. But it’s also, fundamentally, a critique of the separation of science and society.
The project develops a design for a biodiverse carbon capture landscape within a neighborhood in North St Louis. The design investigates the biophysical and social requirements for conducting science experiments in public space. It brings ecologists, soil scientists, population biologists, public health specialists and other researchers together with the people who live within a district that has been designed both as an urban field laboratory and, crucially, as an aesthetic – “niche” landscape that addresses social goals as well – such as propinquity with nature, personal health, and clean air and water.
The Carbon Garden does not intend to stage or perform an actual physical landscape (or at least, not yet). Its purpose is conceptual investigation. The project asks if the landscape-embedded technofix of the science garden can address, challenge, extend, or ambiguate the problem/solution modality that the idea of the Anthropocene invites. It explores the consequences of the potentially hubristic belief that humans are in charge of the “Earth system.” In attempting to overcome the localist agroecological vs technoscience binary that stifles climate discourse, it introduces concrete imaging that evokes the care and maintenance actually required to make bioenergetic carbon capture and storage infrastructure.
We are not saying we should do this. Instead, if we did do it, this is how it might look, what it might involve, what opportunities it provides.
Reference
Buck, Holly Jean 2019 After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair and Restoration. Verso: London and New York