Christopher Carter - "Cloister and the Plow"

The "Cloister and the Plow" was my favorite chapter in the Ecology of Eden. The chapter talks about Byzantium Monks that lived in cells around a central garden. Many people that witnessed these spectacles said that they "looked into a prefigured heaven". What did it look like? What would have it

According to an account from the book, the St. Benedict monastery had "all necessaries" to be found within cloister walls. I think this is an amazing thought. To think that everything was found in these beautiful "Echoes of Eden" makes me want to actually make one of my own.

I always wonder about the effect of "Zen Gardens" on people. Do they calm people in a similar way that the Cloisters of the Monasteries calmed Byzantium Monks, just in a smaller way?

Slowly but surely all of the technology from the monks builds from a plow, to greater farming, to more products, to production and capitalism. This cataclysmic chain reaction probably could have been seen by a lot of people, but I don't know how many people would have stopped it out of sheer need for food and greed. People do not want to stop producing or stop growing out of "necessity." It is now necessary for people to want to go to the grocery store and purchase mass amounts of food for themselves and their family, not just enough to survive for the day.