ABSTRACT
Gardening activities are likewise identified with material and social techniques, with values such as care, beauty and benefit, and of course with questions of lifestyle, of comfort and design. All of these seem to be useful in reflecting on practices of maintenance and sustainability. For about 15 years, the label “Anthropocene” has been used to highlight the urgency to manage planetary boundaries. Increasingly, the concept was identified with a matter of concern about the occurring changes to the human condition and debated in an interdisciplinary field. During these debates, different sociotechnical imaginaries have been used, such as a stewardship of Planet Earth, of an organismic entity Gaia, of Planet Earth as a patient and of garden earth. The latter is particularly promising in investigating the tensions and disagreements that have been assembled under an umbrella term “garden management”. The term is used likewise by geoengineers, by climate scientists, by politicians and of course by gardeners (and many other actors). At the same time they pursue very different purposes, ranging from merely promethean ideas using high-tech to literal gardening practices. In this chapter, the concept of Homo hortensis is proposed to offer an extension of Homo faber and also the Zoon politicon as they were conceptualized by Hannah Arendt. Furthermore, the vantage point of Homo hortensis is expected to help shift attention to focus more on epistemic and normative capacities at hand being already available in the Anthropocene discourse. Local gardening practices and their forms of life provide reflective techniques that may contribute considerably to solving global problems in the Anthropocene.
