The Planetary Garden: Humankind in the Garden of Good and Evil

The New Frontier of Biodiversity

Biodiversity is one of the new frontiers in thinking about a sustainable future or, alternatively and equally true, the next big issue organizations need to get their heads around. Climate is all well, but environmental concerns are so much broader than CO2e emissions.

The False Paradox: Business vs. Nature

Based on the work of Gilles Clément, we argue that there is no such thing as your company/industry/economy vs. nature. This is a false paradox. There is no boundary. Understanding biodiversity in the light of your own self (your own business operations and future strategy) is key to mitigating the risk of biodiversity loss as well as mitigating biodiversity loss in itself.

Oh, and ‘restoring nature’ is impossible, so although the ‘nature restoration law’ coming into effect is a good thing, its consequences will be anyone’s guess.

The Inevitability of Change

Everyone who knows anything about statistics will understand that nothing is impossible. If chances are ridiculously small but you compound those small chances over time, in the end everything will happen. If you give a monkey a fountain pen and ink and enough time, at some point it will in one go write the collected works of Shakespeare. There is not enough room in the universe for the ink needed for all the tries, but metaphysically speaking the chance is not zero, and thus it would happen eventually.

Nature’s Long-Term Horizon

That same long-term horizon is very real in the world around us. Everything you see, all of nature and all the inanimate world, is the result of endless time and unlimited tries. For aeons, nature took its own course. Evolution made species come and go. Local plants and animals traveled the world at an excruciating slow pace. Rocks circumvented the globe in millions of years. Mountains collapsed and changed into beaches. The writer James Michener is an icon of putting into words these processes, which have no goal other than to keep going, and I highly recommend his books.

The Anthropocene: Human Impact on Nature

Since the dawn of humankind, we as a species have increasingly affected the world around us in ways that to the best of our knowledge no other species has ever done. We live truly in the ‘Anthropocene’, the time defined by the effect humans have on the planet. Gilles Clément authored a seminal book called ‘The Planetary Garden’ which is important to mention in this light. In an adjacent interview in The Architectural Review, he communicates the core of his thinking, which I quote directly, as it would do the idea harm to paraphrase.

“Planetary intermingling has increased enormously over the past decades because human activities mean that we are constantly moving and making everything else move. Consequently, plants and animals meet in new and unforeseen circumstances, not permitted spontaneously by geography.”

The Garden in Motion

In other words, we are constantly and increasingly changing the world around us, and this changes – quite literally – the face of the earth. I am as I write these words literally in my garden where the cause and effect are the same as everywhere else. I have taken what was there and changed everything. It is the same garden, but by decisions and (in)actions from my side, it has been indefinitely altered, echoing in a certain way Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence. What I chose to do, or not do, will have consequences that will never again go away. To put it differently and in the famous cliché: if you put a rock in the river, you change the course of history. Clément again:

“Nature is not at the service of man: we exist within her, submerged in her, intimately associated with her. The ‘planetary garden’ is a means of considering ecology as the integration of humanity – the gardeners – into its smallest spaces. Its guiding philosophy is based on the principle of the ‘garden in motion’: do the most for, the minimum against. The ultimate goal of the planetary garden is to exploit diversity without destroying it, perpetuating the ‘planetary machine’ and ensuring the existence of the garden – and hence the gardener. If the planet is a garden, we are all gardeners – perhaps not aware of it, yet the choices and lifestyles of each of us have an impact on the biosphere and on our collective, vital space.”

The Impact of Our Choices

As they say, ‘every dollar you spend is a vote’, meaning your consumption defines the impact you have on the world. To focus this on biodiversity: your interaction with the world around you, either directly in the garden or indirectly via the choices you make as a consumer or producer, really matters. It will affect the economy, the climate, and – truly relevant – nature around you and your own wellbeing.

Biodiversity and Business: Dependency and Impact

To scope this to companies, the following. There are two main pathways by which biodiversity loss will impact your financial results and business model: through dependency and impact. Dependency refers to your business model or supply chain being disrupted because it is dependent on nature. Impact refers to the negative impact your business operations have on biodiversity and the potential financial impact and potential reputational damage, legal action, or financial losses. As Clément argues, righteously so I feel: the gardener is part of the garden and vice versa. You are part of nature and nature is part of you. This is true for individuals and companies alike.

The Nature Restoration Law

In June 2024, the European Union adopted in parliament its own Nature Restoration Law. The law in practice seeks to restore all ecosystems in Europe in need of restoration by 2050 and to achieve that, it imposes upon member states a series of binding targets to restore a diverse array of ecosystems, from forests and oceans to farmlands and urban green spaces by 2030 through 2050. I am certain the law is well-meant, but the law is fundamentally based on a logical fallacy. It suggests that there is a kind of ‘natural state’, which we disrupted and which we can bring back by turning things around.

The Challenge of Restoration

There are two problems with that reasoning. Firstly, what is the ‘natural state’? I think most of the time it is implicitly considered the pre-industrial revolution state, say mid-1800’s. Or is it the 1950’s? Or is it earlier? Or later? My point is, with nature constantly in flux it is highly debatable where to ‘restore back to’. There is no ‘normal’, no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – it is just states. Secondly, and even more fundamental, it is quite often impossible to ‘restore’. Peter Wohlleben, in his important book ‘The Hidden Network of Nature’, brings up a telling metaphor. He likens us to a toddler that finds a Swiss watch and takes it apart. You can then ask the toddler to put it back together again, but as she or he doesn’t know what they did when they took it apart, the chance of success is very limited indeed.

The Complexity of Ecosystems

The same is true for the Swiss watch which is our ecology. It is so delicate and intricately connected that you can’t just take something out or put something in and know what the result will be. Wohlleben tells the story where reintroducing the wolf changed the course of rivers. In the 1930’s the last wolf was shot in Yellowstone Park. In the 1990’s it was reintroduced, which started off a cascade effect among animals, plants and inanimate surroundings which is still only superficially understood. The return of the wolf made the existing elk populations move around more, which relieved the burden on willow trees which were able to become more dense, which was good for beavers that use the branches of these willows for their dams, the changing dams changed the course of the rivers, while the more dense willow bushes were also beneficial for the fish population in said rivers. The point is: there was a Yellowstone Park of early 20th century where the wolf was present, the wolf was taken out of the system and reintroduced decades later. The result was not the Yellowstone Park of the early 20th century but a new balance altogether.

Beyond CO2: The Broader Environmental Risks

To conclude, to think that environmental risks stop with the effect of CO2e emissions in the atmosphere is naive. Biodiversity loss is a very real risk, not only existential to us as species but also in the short term for your company. I highly urge you to take biodiversity into account in your ESG approach and sustainability risk management, including stress testing and scenario analysis, while understanding that whatever the future will be, it will be different than the past influencing your business model and risk profile through dependency and impact pathways.

A Call to Action

Ultimately, I want to urge a call to action, regardless of whether we can understand the results. Nature is in decline, which is bad in itself but also jeopardizes our existence as species. You do not need to understand all causalities or believe in the outcome to feel we need to do something. As Luther said: ‘If I knew the world was going to end tomorrow, I would still plant a tree today’. That is the spirit.