In what style should we terraform? Geoengineering, planetary gardening and the creation of flourishing ecologies of practice

Abstract Reflecting on the myriad practices involved in the production of landscapes and the ways these can result both in local metabolic rifts and aggregate in a planetary carbon rift, this essay offers a model for the interaction of spatial practices on the land, and asks how these confluences of practices might be tuned towards a flourishing planet. In the contemporary Western context, these practices can be broadly organized into manifestations of either modern or counter-modern sensibilities. Linked with these sensibilities, two categories of planet-minded practices are identified that are argued to reflect these two sensibilities, geoengineering and planetary gardening, respectively. The latter, it is argued, is a more imaginative, pluralistic and effective approach to governing climate action. The work of planetary gardening affords landscape architects new opportunities and challenges, but also new allies, human and nonhuman, and techniques for landscape care, old and new.