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In “There isn’t one Green New Deal,” Jon Goodbun argues that the Green New Deal should be understood less as a single policy package than as an emerging field of political, ecological and semiotic struggle: a Green New Dialogue. Written as a reflective conversation after the Making Futures school in Berlin, the text situates the GND in the intensified crises of the early 2020s: climate breakdown, Covid-19, ecological collapse, inequality, racialised exposure, and the defeats and partial continuities of socialist and progressive movements around Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and Alaxandra Ocasio-Cortez.

Goodbun outlines the shared propositions of many GND programmes: green public works, just transition, new democratic and financial infrastructures, and environmental justice. However, he insists that these cannot remain trapped within nationalist, Westphalian, technocratic or green-capitalist frameworks. Without international worker solidarity and a transformation of global supply chains, the infrastructural ambitions of richer nations risk reproducing extractivism, colonial violence and “Green New Colonialism,” especially through the mining of lithium, cobalt, copper and other materials necessary for decarbonisation.

The essay’s central move is to reframe the GND as a many-worlds dialogue. Goodbun draws on radical municipalism, indigenous critique, The Red Nation’s Red Deal, Zapatista formulations, ecological semiotics, cybernetics and Batesonian ideas of double bind, requisite variety and abductive learning. Planning, for him, must be defended but also transformed: it cannot remain a purely rationalist, linear and solutionist practice trying to dominate a future that will always exceed it. Instead, socio-ecological planning must become experimental, polyphonic, dialogic and poetic, able to hold together justice, complexity, uncertainty, maintenance, care and the agency of more-than-human worlds.

For architects, urbanists, landscapers and designers, the text proposes a demanding role beyond opportunistic participation in green public works. Design knowledge must be reorganised in relation to communities, workers, activists, scientists and other ways of knowing. A radical GND requires not only new infrastructure but also a new ecological language: a meta-modern poetics of planning for a world in which many worlds fit.
Published together in the Making Futures book, “On the Possibility of an Ecological Dialogue” and “There isn’t one Green New Deal” form a compact theoretical and political sequence. The first text establishes the epistemological and aesthetic problem: environmental justice is necessary, but any simple reckoning is impossible, because ecological damage unfolds through complex systems, historical violence, and feedback loops that exceed linear blame, restitution, or solution. Drawing on Gregory Bateson, David Bohm, Peircean abduction, dialogue, double description and metalogue, Goodbun argues that environmental thought must become more than policy or moral demand. It must learn to perceive the patterns that connect social, ecological, semiotic and aesthetic relations. Dialogue here is not merely conversation, but a meta-aesthetic and ecological form: a way of holding multiple voices, agencies and scales together without reducing them to instrumental purpose.

“There isn’t one Green New Deal” then extends this argument into the political terrain of Green New Deal discourse. Goodbun presents the GND not as a single programme but as a contested, plural and emergent field: a Green New Dialogue. The text recognises the need for radical democratic socio-ecological planning, green public works, just transition and new institutional infrastructures, while warning that nationalist, technocratic or green-capitalist versions of the GND risk reproducing extractivism, colonial violence and a new green imperialism. Indigenous critiques, The Red Nation’s Red Deal, radical municipalism, worker solidarity and supply-chain politics become essential to any adequate ecological planning.

Read together, the two pieces argue that architecture, urbanism and design must participate in a transformation of planning itself. Design cannot simply serve green infrastructure as a new market, nor can it imagine itself as solving ecological crisis from above. It must become experimental, dialogic, poetic and abductive: capable of working with double binds, uncertainty, many worlds, more-than-human agency and the limits of conscious purpose. The task is not only to build new systems but to invent the ecological languages and learning environments through which a survivable planetary future might become thinkable.