Yesterday's post about the global importation of aerosol reminded me of the Tarim Desert Highway, which crosses the great expanse of the Taklimakan (or Taklamakan) Desert in western China, the region I referred to as a Hell Mouth. I've blogged about it several times over the years, first briefly appearing as a pruning, which I later expanded into a full post, before using it as a starting point for some speculative terraforming scenarios.
The thing that so absolutely fascinates me about the highway, second only to its shelterbelt, is its maintenance crew—a total of 110 couples, according to The Telegraph's math—who are “housed in huts every four kilometers along the road. Life in the desert was judged too lonely for single men, so only couples could apply for the job.” Their duties include turning on the irrigation pumps in the morning to water the plants and…that's about it. The rest of the day is spent “pretty much doing nothing.”
Perhaps it's me augmenting their lives spent in spartan cubicles in the middle of utter wilderness with the romantic image of life as a lighthouse keeper that explains the interest: solitary figures living in the open dune sea, guiding caravansaries through fog banks of atomized earth; park rangers in their lookout towers, peering out for wildsands that might snuff out their midget forests; caretaker pilots of deep space mining ships, ensuring critical resources are safely navigated through interstellar deserts, with Mother or Father as their only companion. These desert ashrams may be fully connected to the rest of civilization via television and mobile devices, but there's always that undertone of the monastic.
Perhaps China, faced with a future of persistent drought, accelerating desertification, and an afforestation program in total failure (the combination of which may mean more intense and more frequent sandstorms that smother the most economically dynamic cities in the world, degrading their already poor urban air quality into a public health hazard), will expand the Tarim shelterbelt to cover the entire Taklimakan Desert (and the Gobi Desert, too), grafting a checkerboard of midget forests that not only will protect a strategic oil route but also suppress the creation of sandstorms or at the very least weaken them and shorten their reach.
This Super-Shelterbelt would be a megalopolis of sorts, the largest city in the world in terms of area, gridded out into four-square-kilometer parcels. In a corner of each plot will be a blue house with a red roof, of course, where the comparably small populace will live in pairs. One wonders what social structures will emerge out of this gigantic urban air conditioner land grabbed from the hinterlands. What manner of urbanism will something so utterly centerless, diffused, but altogether bound by fealty to distant megacity overlords, generate?
Last year, NASA and university scientists released a study revealing that half of the airborne particles, or aerosols, in the skies above Canada and the United States come from foreign sources. (“That's a huge number — half.”) Indeed, analysis of satellite data showed that “64 million tons of dust, pollutants, and other particles cross the oceans and mix into the air over North America each year. That’s nearly as much as the estimated 69 million tons of aerosols produced domestically by natural processes, transportation, and industrial sources.”
While particulate pollution from Asia usually gets the most attention, most of the imported particles, or 88 percent (56 million tons) of the total, is naturally produced dust, which, like man-made pollution, can have a direct impact on human health, weather and climate. As you can see in the upper left screen corner of the animation embedded above, “strong source points” of these fine grains are located in central China near the Taklimakan Desert, that large gaping wound bleeding out a vermillion sea. The Hell Mouth of a grotesque earth body.
It's universally accepted that high-speed surface winds kick up the fine desert particles into the air, fountaining pulverized earth all the way through the mega-cities of East Asia. If Beijing's recent airpocalypse was bad, imagine if it had been springtime, the high season of sandstorms.
But there's another culprit: China's Defense Aerosol Research Project Agency (DaRPA). Zoom in on those so-called “source points” on Google Earth, and you'll find the playgrounds of aberrant geologists, gonzo climatologists, avant-gardeners and desert shamans.
Quoting a Wikipedia article yet to be written:
The Defense Aerosol Research Projects Agency is a blue-sky thinking agency charged with developing new aerosol technologies for use by the military. Current research include [1] weather weaponization, such as granular blitzkrieg; [2] homeland soil transport through air corridors for island building in claimed extraterritorial waters; [3]nano-drones for domestic and foreign intelligence gathering; [4] dust cloud urban pacification for city-wide protests, a project codenamed Curfew; and what the international media and their beat reporters have dubbed the [5] Great Blurwall of China.
If you're wondering why the progress of the Green Wall of China has been painfully slow, if not a downright failure, one reason is the stalling attempts of DaRPA researchers, as an afforested desert would certainly ruin their experiments.
But it must be said that not all the work by DaRPA are quite so malevolent. You might recall the discovery that one of the “world's most desolate places,” the Bodele Depression in north central Africa, is keeping “one of the most lush,” the Amazon, stay lush.
About half of the 40 million tons of dust that are swept across the Atlantic from the Sahara to the Amazon each year come from the Bodele Depression, a small valley that accounts for only 0.2 percent of the entire Sahara and is only 0.5 percent the size of the Amazon itself. The discovery of this surprisingly large single source of mineral dust raises many fascinating questions about how far-flung parts of the Earth system are connected, including how large the dust reservoir in the Bodele depression is, how long it has been emitting such a huge amount of dust, and how long will it continue to fertilize the Amazon.
You can go a long way in answering such questions after realizing that this foreign soil exchange, this planetary umbilical whirligig, is [6] a Land Art installation by DaRPA. An aerosol garden of earth-fountains evoking the extinct, aggregated landscapes of Gondwana, thus an art that disregards not only political boundaries but also the barriers of Deep Time.
Howling, suffocating, blinding, Marvelous, it's a Spiral Jetty for the troposphere, which just happens to be a new form of [7] mineral trade that bypasses conventional resource extraction and established global fertilizer supply chains. Counter-desertification strategies in the works. Foreign Phosphorus Aid.
The US — misinterpreting this monumental piece of performance art as a manifestation of China's African Century and BRICSmanship, the objective of which is a further entrenchment into the geopolitical spheres of Africa and South America — start their own DaRPA within the original DARPA.
The Shimizu Corporation has already envisioned the Great Man-Made River post-conflict as Dubai-style hydrological flamboyance. Transnational canals crisscross the post-liberation terrain of the Maghreb, delivering not fossil water, which is non-renewable, but seawater to Gaddafi's reservoirs mutated into Herman Sörgel's utopian lakes, on the shores of which are desalination plants powered by Desertec's Apollonian fields. Orbiting these islanded oases like planetesimals, just beyond Magnus Larsson's circumnavigating erg-cathedrals, are crop circles growing saltwater tolerant, drought resistant GM vegetables.
Dreams grafted on dreams grafted on dreams grafted on dreams grafted on dreams.
Here are the five reservoirs of Libya's Great Man-Made River, Muammar Gaddafi's megaproject bringing “fossil water” drawn from aquifers in the desert south to the coastal cities. These are the terminal points of the project's Phase I water pipeline, running roughly through the middle of the country for some 1,200km. Additional pipelines run through the eastern and western parts.
Also check out BLDGBLOG's dispatch from this segment of the Super-Versailles — half a decade ago!
If you're around Burbank, CA, this Thursday, November 11, and are interested in arid water systems, then consider attending a lecture by Aziza Chaouni and Liat Margolis at the Arid Lands Institute, Woodbury University. Titled Out of Water: Innovative Technologies in Arid Climates, they will cover recent research projects in Morocco, the Sahara, and the Israel/Jordan/Palestine watershed that showcase contemporary design strategies for managing water scarcity.
If you can't make it, there is still their Out of Waterwebsite. It archives some of the projects included in their traveling exhibition and no doubt will be featured in their lecture.
Their talk, meanwhile, is part of a very interesting lecture series.
The human need for water has ordered landscapes, given rise to culture, and shaped architecture + urban form throughout history.
Excavating Innovation: The History and Future of Drylands Design examines the role of water engineering in shaping public space and city form, by using arid and semi-arid sites in India, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and the New World to explore how dryland water systems throughout history have formed and been formed by ritual, hygiene, gender, technology, governance, markets, and, perhaps above all, power.
The line-up of speakers is stellar. The first was our hero, Katherine Rinne, whose ongoing research project, Aquae Urbis Romae, “examines the 3,000-year history of water infrastructure and urban development in Rome.” Her upcoming publication, The Waters of Rome, is a much eagerly awaited book. Here's the blurb:
In this pioneering study of the water infrastructure of Renaissance Rome, urban historian Katherine Rinne offers a new understanding of how technological and scientific developments in aqueduct and fountain architecture helped turn a medieval backwater into the preeminent city of early modern Europe. Supported by the author’s extensive topographical research, this book presents a unified vision of the city that links improvements to public and private water systems with political, religious, and social change. Between 1560 and 1630, in a spectacular burst of urban renewal, Rome’s religious and civil authorities sponsored the construction of aqueducts, private and public fountains for drinking, washing, and industry, and the magnificent ceremonial fountains that are Rome’s glory. Tying together the technological, sociopolitical, and artistic questions that faced the designers during an age of turmoil in which the Catholic Church found its authority threatened and the infrastructure of the city was in a state of decay, Rinne shows how these public works projects transformed Rome in a successful marriage of innovative engineering and strategic urban planning.
The speaker scheduled for next week is Morna Livingston, author of a book on Indian stepwells.
From the fifth to the nineteenth centuries, the people of western India built stone cisterns to collect the water of the monsoon rains and keep it accessible for the remaining dry months of the year. These magnificent structures—known as stepwells or stepped ponds—are much more than utilitarian reservoirs. Their lattice-like walls, carved columns, decorated towers, and intricate sculpture make them exceptional architecture, while their very presence tells much about the region's ecology and history. For these past 500 years, stepwells have been an integral part of western Indian communities as sites for drinking, washing, and bathing, as well as for colorful festivals and sacred rituals. Steps to Water traces the fascinating history of stepwells, from their Hindu origins, to their zenith during Muslim rule, and eventual decline under British occupation. It also reflects on their current use, preservation, and place in Indian communities. In stunning color and quadtone photographs and drawings, Steps to Water reveals the depth of the stepwells' beauty and their intricate details, and serves as a lens on these fascinating cultural and architectural monuments.
A “magnificent architectural solution to the seasonality of the water supply” in India they may be, but our favorite use for them is as the stage for the spectacular death scene of Charles Darwin, the naturalist, and Wallace, his companion monkey and fellow lepidopterist.
The titles of the other two scheduled lectures, Canalscape: Ancient and Contemporary Infrastructures of Phoenix and Indigenous Infrastructure and the Urban Water Crisis: Perspectives from Asia, make us wish they were going to be streamed online.
A quick postscript to our previous post on the Out of Water Project: you can now browse the website that's been set up for the exhibition and its forthcoming book version. Just a few of the projects have been uploaded, though we're assuming more will be online in the coming months.
If you know of a case study or a technology for collection, conversion and distribution of water sources in arid climates — or if you have a project of your own — and want it to be considered for inclusion in the book, send an email to info @ oowproject dot com.
The Out of Water Project is both a traveling exhibition and a book scheduled to be published by Birkhauser Publishers in 2010.
Organized by Liat Margolis, co-author of Living Systems, and Aziza Chaouni, of Bureau E.A.S.T., the exhibition currently features 24 international case studies of innovative projects and technologies for water scarcity on multiple scale, plus 10 Futures Scenarios designed by invited young designers such as Fletcher Studio, Proxy and MatSys. The book will be more comprehensive in scope and will include a set of self-generated mappings of global water scarcity, as well as an in-depth catalogue of cross-referenced case studies and future scenarios.
The exhibition will travel to Ohio State University this Fall semester. Previously, it was presented at the Daniels Faulty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto. Mason White, who is a faculty member there, posted some of the projects in his blog, InfraNet Lab.
Below are some of the other projects, courtesy of Liat Margolis.
Quoting the project brief in full: “Porous adaptive membrane was developed as a deployable structure for a clinic for Doctors without Borders. The membrane consists of dispersed micro-pore structures. Those form a series of self-adjusting thermal flues, intended to regulate the temperature of the air as well as the collection of air-borne moisture. The morphology of the pore was developed to open and close in response to changes in ambient temperature, solar gain and humidity. The skin, through its pores collects, then conveys condensation via an inner skin down to a large water bladder. The bladder acts as the foundation ballast but is also used to filter and store local water for sanitation and drinking use. Condensation replenishes water supply. The bladder is oriented to absorb solar energy, utilizing the water as a heat sink to filter the collected water by solar radiation. Both skin and bladder operate in accordance with solar radiation to collect, convey and convert water.”
Another documents an existing infrastructure for effluent reclamation in Israel. The main organization in charge of this is KKL (Keren Kayemet LeIsrael), or JNF in English (Jewish National Fund), which is the philantropic organization overseeing all aforestation projects in Israel for the last 50 years. In the last 20 years or so, they started building waste water recycling infrastructure for agricultural irrigation.
Again quoting the project brief in full: “Israel's reuse of wastewater accounts for 75% of crop irrigation and alleviates severe shortage of drinking water, which is comprised of 10% desalinated water (project to increase to 50% in the next 20 years). Without treated effluent, intensive agriculture would be impossible. This national program (KKL-JNF) consists of an interlinked network of over 200 open-air reservoirs, with static volume of 150 MCM and a dynamic volume (emptying and refilling) of 270 MCM of treated effluent a year. Those distribute water seasonally via an extensive pipe infrastructure. In the case of the Jezreel Valley, the most production valley in Israel, 15-20 MCM of effluent per year enable irrigation of 4000 ha of cotton . While loaded with fertilizing nutrients, effluent environmental quality is significantly ungraded due to settling and oxygenation, microbial breakdown of remaining organic matter, and UV to suppress pathogens.”
Next is a network of water storage units by Ruth Kedar. It is modeled after indigenous water management systems.
Yet again quoting the project brief in full: “The cistern is a contemporary adaptation of historical and regional desert technologies. The modular storage structure utilizes available and pre-cast concrete to offer a kit of parts that can be sized and aggregated according to the catchment area, topographical conditions, and inhabitant demand. The cistern network is modeled after the Nabatean systems of runoff agriculture, which used very low channels and surface modification to collect water from great catchment areas. The reservoir employs the principles of the Qanat, an underground tunnel that diverts runoff into a series of vertical wells. Each cistern is outfitted with an outlet to interlink them together, but also allow for diversion toward irrigation. As the need for water increases, the system can be expanded to accommodate additional catchment and storage. Specifying a smaller reservoir and a shorter exposed conveyance distance can reduce evaporation.
Last is the Dixon Land Imprinting Machine, which was covered by InfraNet Lab but it's so cool that we're going to replicate it here and enter it into our archives.
Final copy-paste: “Absorptive soil ensures against the devastation wrought by the twin desertification hazards of drought and deluge. The Dixon Land Imprinting machine restores the microroughness and macroporosity of compacted and barren soil to accelerate infiltration and revegetation processes. It is most effective in areas with low rainfall, degraded-, brushy-, rocky-, sandy-, and clayey soils, overgrazed ranges and abandoned agricultural land. The roller drops seeds onto the soil surface and imbeds them in the imprint surfaces. The imprinter forms interconnected water shedding and absorbing v-pockets, which function as rain fed micro-irrigation system. Down-slope furrows feed rainwater into cross-slope furrows where it collects and infiltrates. Revegetation is rapid because the imprints hold rainwater in place and captures seed, water and windblown plant litter, which works as mulch to suppress evaporation.”
We'll be pining for the rest of the projects, and if permitted, we'll post them here as they come in. We will certainly be posting updates on where and when the exhibition will be traveling to next. Keep a look out here for those.
This is “Chicago”, the fake Arab town built by Israel in the middle of the Negev desert to train its military forces in urban warfare.
Though artificial, our hometown's dessicated twin is “highly realistic.” Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, whose photographs of “Chicago” are collected in this book and are replicated here, wrote: “To create this alternative universe, Palestinian architecture has been carefully scrutinized. Roads and alleyways have been constructed to mimic the layout of towns like Ramallah and Nablus. In one corner the ground has been covered in sand, a reference to unpaved refugee camps like Jenin. Graffiti has been applied to the walls with obscure declarations in Arabic: 'I love you Ruby' and 'Red ash, hot as blood'. Burned-out vehicles line the streets.”
Perhaps more interesting than its spatial “authenticity” is the fact that the “history” of this ghost town “directly mirrors the history of the Palestinian conflict.”
The first and second Intifada, the Gaza withdrawl, an attempted assassination of Saddam Hussein, the Battle of Falluja; almost every one of Israel's major military tactics in the Middle East over the past three decades was performed in advance here.
This is where generations of Israeli soldiers rehearse over and over again like actors in a Hollywood studio set. Here, with props on hand or littered about, they perfect their stage presence, try out some new moves and hand gestures, and fine tune their dialogues in front of cardboard cutouts of generic terrorists. Here also, they practice their showstopper: walking through walls. And then it's time to step out in front of live television cameras, the whole world already a captive audience, to play out their well-choreographed routines.
Meanwhile, “Chicago” is so named because its bullet-ridden fake walls apparently recall the punctured real walls of Al Capone's Chicago. While still acknowledging the dizzying complexity of Arab-Israeli relations, one wonders if a small yet meaningful step towards lasting peace could be taken if, on Israel's side, it stops vicariously engaging with the Palestinians in secret, replicant cities after first exorcising this mythological, gangster-infested Chicago from their collective memory and replace it with something real and true?
Not everyone was a mobster then, the same way not everyone offered something to our former governor for Obama's senate seat. The same way not all Palestinians are terrorists.
In any case, should the ultranationalist Avigdor Lieberman and his party's racist ideology get their way in a ruling coalition with Benjamin Netanyahu, and all Israeli-Arabs get expelled from Israel, their homes and cities dismantled and resettled over, at least part of their history, albeit one written by others, has been recorded for future archaeologists to study.
Remember in our post last month about the Tarim Desert Highway when we said it would be worthwhile to track down some of the research that went into protecting the highway from the creeping sand dunes? We've been doing just that since then, though, scientific journals being what they are, we kept stumbling into firewalls after firewalls. In other words, all that we have gathered so far are abstracts, which are perhaps fine for now. They're enough of a fodder for unhinged minds.
One abstract in particular describes an experiment using different kinds of “liquid polymers” to stabilize sand. These were sprayed onto test sandbeds in a wind tunnel and also on a patch of the Taklimakan Desert, where they “produced a strong crust 0.2-0.5 cm thick.” The last sentence reads:
Our results suggest that all the stabilizers exhibited good infiltration, crushing strength, and elasticity, and that they could thus be used to control damage to highways caused by blown sand in the Taklimakan Desert.
Obviously, the most logical next step here is not to do more studies but to give us an oil tankerful of this earth glue. With it, we'll paint the entire desert, thus freezing the landscape in time and space.
Better yet, how about re-sculpting the Taklimakan to mimic the landforms of, say, the Painted Desert of Arizona. The dramatic, stratified coloring won't be copied, but all its contour lines would be replicated exactly. Of course, in China, simulating exotic terrains isn't new. Remember Huangyangtan?
How about gouging deep canyons, which are graded, arranged, oriented, networked and coated with the binding agent in such a way as to enable strong, steady wind currents flowing through this bifurcated aeolian-shed? These air channels would then be planted with a forest of wind turbines. Or wind-dammed.
How about taking the sand glue to Inner Mongolia? Its desert dunes feed the powerful sandstorms that regularly blanket northern China and choke Beijing in a thick, suffocating fog of pulverized earth. These granular blitzkriegs then cross over high seas to bombard cities in the Koreas and Japan, causing respiratory and eye diseases. With the desertification of the region continuing apace and water resource too scarce to support afforestation, maybe these chemical encrustation will be increasingly considered as a viable solution to a whole list of environmental problems.
And again, instead of spraying it around willy-nilly, how about “stabilizing” a city: a false ruin seemingly long buried in the sand but only just recently revealed by the wind. Hundreds of such cities forming a new Great Wall of China protecting real cities against advancing deserts.
One could even suround Ordos, wherein the lucky owners of one of the 100 boutique cabins can undertake an Antonionian adventure. Their carefully planned disappearance will surely be the talk of the whole village. And everyone will be grateful to you, because what else could be interesting to talk about? For many, “trying” to find you would be good sporting fun in the middle of nowhere. “So Monica Vitti,” one habitué of The Moment Blog will remark.
Last year, the above photograph of the Tarim Desert Highway in western China was used to decorate a post in our now retired Prunings series. We've always thought that it should have its own separate post, so here it is.
As described by Wikipedia, the highway “crosses the Taklamakan desert from north to south. The highway links the cities of Luntai and Minfeng on the northern and southern edges of the Tarim basin. The total length of the highway is 552km; approximately 446km of the highway cross uninhabited areas covered by shifting sand dunes, making it the longest such highway in the world.”
“In 1994,” says People's Daily Online, “the Tarim desert highway was expanded to the central area of the Tarim Basin, and the completion of the central Tarim oil-gas field, the largest of its kind in China, will make Xinjiang become a strategic substitute area for China's oil and gas resources. Following this, the highway continued to expand in the desert and has turned into a macro-artery for bringing along the economic development in southern Xinjiang.”
In other words, it plays a key role in the country's energy security. And if we may be allowed to indulge ourselves for a moment and parse that last sentence, the highway is also an important tactical infrastructure of pacification through which state control, in the guise of “economic development,” can easier be meted throughout the mainly Muslim and violence-prone region.
To protect this supposedly strategic highway from getting buried by the encroaching sand dunes, rows of vegetation were planted on both sides of the road. An extensive irrigation network was laid down to sustain this artificial ecosystem, pumping water from underground reservoirs and then distributing it throughout. Although the water has a high saline content, this greenbelt has successfully taken root. The desert blooms.
While we cringe at reading that this greenbelt has somehow “improved” the ecology of the desert, it would be worthwhile to track down some of the research that were conducted in preparation for the project. We might, for instance, find out some new techniques that would help plants survive extended periods of drought. We're also interested in their plant list. Perhaps they have discovered that some species, previously not known for their hardiness, actually have a high tolerance for sandy soil and salty water, and then later, have genetically modified them to improve their survival rates. And who knows, maybe their experiments are paving the way for food crops, not just ornamental ones, to be cultivated in deserts and watered with sea water.
Considering that climate change will turn many places into deserts, these Tarim xeriscapers could offer us some helpful advice in adapting to our arid future.
And what's happening in the photo above? At first glance, we thought that they had covered the desert with hardscaping material, but on closer inspection, those are just rows of plants.
Still, we're hoping that someone will come along and leave a comment saying that for large sections of the highway where the vegetation cannot take root, the Chinese government had hired someone to pave over the dunes, a sculptor wanting to stop the migrating dunes dead on their tracks as a kind of long-form performance art. And then, due to several bouts of heatstroke and because that abrasive sand keeps getting into his crotch all the time, he just went out of control.
He's now concretizing the whole desert!
Meanwhile, notice the red-roofed blue buildings. According to National Geographic, they “appear every few miles [and] house workers who maintain the greenbelt.” The workers sign up for stints that may last up to two years. They may be with their spouses or get paired up with someone else, but essentially, they live solitary lives, an eccentric group of monastic botanists in a mystical struggle to arrest this ephemeral landscape in time and space.
A motorist in Al Ahsaa City, Saudi Arabia captured these few minutes of the earth exhaling. It's lo-res, cinematically shaky but still a sight to behold, wondrous and sublime. As it must be commented on — for it's hardly unnoticeably — we are told that the soundtrack is an exaltation of one or several of the divine's multitudinous attributes but we are sure it's a paean to the hidden but knowable geological forces at work eternally shaping the landscape. And just slightly off camera are a flock of demoiselles about to re-enact Busby Berkeley's famous pyramid fountain of lascivious ladyflesh. Of course.
Last week, The Guardianreported that Europe is looking to Africa to serve part of its energy needs by basically turning the continent into one giant solar power plant.
Europe is considering plans to spend more than £5bn on a string of giant solar power stations along the Mediterranean desert shores of northern Africa and the Middle East.
More than a hundred of the generators, each fitted with thousands of huge mirrors, would generate electricity to be transmitted by undersea cable to Europe and then distributed across the continent to European Union member nations, including Britain.
Billions of watts of power could be generated this way, enough to provide Europe with a sixth of its electricity needs and to allow it to make significant cuts in its carbon emissions. At the same time, the stations would be used as desalination plants to provide desert countries with desperately needed supplies of fresh water.
Of course, one is compelled to wonder here what would happen if Africa provided Europe with all of its electricity?
Most likely that won't happen; no European country would want to subject their whole energy security to regional volatility. However, one could imagine a fairly optimistic scenario wherein this energy cooperation would provide a stabilizing force to unstable states, help cure both continents' post-colonialhangover, counteract China's growing geopolitical influence in the region — and all the while reducing carbon emissions to zero.
But, as always, what we are immediately most interested in is this: in what ways would this energy pact be physically manifested in Africa?
As but one illustration of how energy consumption is spatialized, there is the so-called mountaintop mining, whereby whole mountains are leveled off, literally grounded down, to get at coal deposits instead of using tunnels. The erased geology would then be dumped nearby, chocking streams and old growth forests.
In one of the best (and certainly longest) articles on the subject that we have ever come across, Eric Reece, in Harpers Magazine, writes:
Where once there were jagged forested ridgelines, now there is only a series of plateaus, staggered grey shelves where grass struggles to grow in crushed rock and shale. When visitors to eastern Kentucky first see the effects of this kind of mining, they often say the landscape looks like the Southwest - a harsh tableland interrupted by steep mesas.
In other words, heating up your ex-urbian McMansion is right now turning Appalachia into Arizona and New Mexico.
One can easily picture Julie Bargmann and her D.I.R.T. Studio, like ambulance chasers circling a scene of devastation, salivating over photos of negative mountains, scheming away at plans to reclaim them from destruction, waiting for that commission.
But returning back to our question: what will Google Earth tourists see when they point their vigilant eyes towards an electrified North Africa? Will they come upon vast plantations of coronal fields, perfect geometries arrayed in similarly perfect arrangement, irrespective of terrain but nevertheless finely attuned to the sky? Pure form, pure function coexisting without contradiction.
And what about the people on the ground? Where once was desert, might they now enjoy newly sprouted oases fed with water from solar-powered desalination plants?
An Emerald Necklace of Olmstedian design inscribed in the Saharan landscape.
Will foreigners descend en mass to undertake a Bowlesian journey, trekking from one incomprehensible terrain to another equally unfathomable recess of the desert, utterly unprepared for the otherness of it all but obviously so seduced that they travel on, even while in the grips of dysentery, losing themselves psychologically and literally to the sands? All bearings and comfort are lost.
And then just as things couldn't get any stranger, they will come upon a stand of solar updraft towers; there are hundreds of them, possibly thousands, forming a kind of arid rainforest mechanically evapotranspirating.
But in their parched and hallucinatory conditions these adventurers will mistake them for Persian tower tombs, divining the surrounding air into a vortex, the whirring blades resonating ghostly howls.
Perhaps the duo are presently occupied with Over the River?
Meanwhile, wouldn't it be deliciously intriguing to hear that Dubai is scheming to snatch the project away from its rival and that Christo and Jeanne-Claude are receptive to a change of venue?
In his novel, The Songlines, the peripatetic Bruce Chatwin tries “to get to grips with the concept of the Dreamtime,” and learns, in somewhat rudimentary terms, that one “had to understand it as an Aboriginal equivalent of the first two chapters of Genesis — with one significant difference.”
“In Genesis,” Chatwin explains, “God first created the 'living things' and then fashioned Father Adam from clay. Here in Australia, the Ancestors created themselves from clay, hundreds and thousands of them, one for each totemic species.”
And “each totemic ancestor, while traveling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints, and how these Dreaming-tracks lay over the land as 'ways' of communication between the most far-flung tribes.”
Furthermore, “a song can be thought of as both map and direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country.”
So, “in theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. There was hardly a rock or creek in the country that could not or had not been sung. One should perhaps visualize the Songlines as a spaghetti of Illiads and Odyssey, writhing this way and that, in which every episode was readable in terms of geology.”
Illegal immigrants planning to cross the desert and enter the US on foot are to be given hand-held satellite devices by the Mexican authorities to ensure they arrive safely.
Those who get lost or fall sick during the dangerous four-day crossing will be able to activate the device, to alert frontier police on both sides of the border.
The satellite tracking service will require would-be illegals to register their intentions before setting off — a paradoxical move, given that secrecy is necessary for success — but Mexican authorities are predicting that about 200,000 devices will be handed out when the project is launched formally in the coming year.
I once thought - in fact, I still think - that it'd be interesting to grow a garden using only seeds and plants seized at the Customs office.
A garden of seized plants. Captured flowers. Find out what weird, hybridized landscape results. Take pictures of it and submit the film for an ASLA award. Write a new Pamphlet Architecture book about it.
Grow more of the things. Seize whole landscapes coming over the border. An 18-wheeler hauling an open truck bed gets stopped at the gate - because the bed is planted with seeds seized at Customs a year earlier. A small, somewhat disorganized garden grows. So of course, you let it through... It's going back to where it came from...
But you don't. You re-seize it. The loop starts all over again.
You take a dozen or two prospective immigrants. So as to minimize controversy, let's identify them as French.
Through an unimaginably improbable series of events — including years despairing about their country's economic model; being inexplicably listed on the FAA's no-fly list; and a Congress growing increasingly impotent when dealing with immigration reform — they find themselves outside the border of the US, looking in. Just beyond that grove of trees is Arizona.
And they've just eaten some fruits, you see, or brushed up against a pollen-field plant, indigenous to Mexico but not the desert Southwest — or, since this is a design project after all, you, the designer, have them swallow the seeds and lodge a few more on their persons, in their hairy chests, lanky arms, and perfumed armpits. And for good measure, you surreptitiously stuff their pockets with ones you've gathered from other exotic locales.
Then off they go.
Unfortunately, most of them will die. Without a map, they will get lost, and dehydration will come long before they reach Tucson. That or they get accidentally killed by members of the border militia or by wildlife, if distinguishable. But where they stumble and fall, a garden grows.
These gardens would then act like vegetated outposts, a constellation of caravansaries which subsequent border crossers can follow or add to. Wave after wave, and tragedy after tragedy, this new underground railroad would become as well-established and well-marked as elephant jungle tracks, and as easily traceable as a Songline.
A hundred years later, they'll become the de facto national memorial park for immigrant America, a landscape record for the migrant experience.
The Ellis Island of the Southwest.
To follow a trail there is to embark on a pilgrimage, a sacred reenactment of collective memory and a paean to the soul of the country.
VII.
Can you connect the dots?
Below is a map showing the locations of migrant deaths in 2003, as compiled from maps available on the website of Humane Borders. Red dots are deaths due to heat; yellow dots, unknown causes; and light blue, vehicles. In areas beyond the map, deaths have occurred due to exposure to cold temperatures, homicide, drowning, existing medical condition and train accidents.
The built-up area at the top is Phoenix, Arizona. The white line at the bottom is the US-Mexico border.
No, Al-Qaeda has not mastered the trigonometric art of granular blitzkrieg. Simply it's the Earth-Fountain undergoing some preliminary tests in Iraq to resolve some mechanical kinks before its delivery to yet another outrageously themed megapark in Dubai.
In the meantime, go here for more ridiculous sand storm photos. We do not know who the photographer is, but please, anyone, let us know. The same person presumably took these amazing photos of ordnance disposal as well.
Meanwhile, how about designing a landscape where the earth is truly destabilized, temperamental. Where the ground plane is not treated as an immovable canvas whereupon trees and paths and benches are simply thrown in. After all, we stand on a surface that shifts and glides everywhere, all the time.
So you're strolling down the beach one afternoon — walking the dog, if you will. That night the 67th hurricane of the season comes along and plows through your oceanfront enclave. You think everything has been destroyed. But the morning after, you find that you can still walk your dog along the same path, on that same boardwalk. It may have migrated half of a mile and is now oddly reconfigured, but it's still functional nevertheless.
Or a levee system that meanders with the river. End the tyranny of cement and the Army Corps of Hubris for all time.
From GlobalSecurity.org: “The mission of Dugway is to test U.S. and Allied biological & chemical defense systems; perform Nuclear Biological Chemical survivable testing of defense material; provide support to chemical and biological weapons conventions; and Operate and maintain an installation to support test mission. Dugway is located approximately 80 miles west-southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah in Tooele County. DPG, covering 798,855 acres, is located in the Great Salt Lake Desert, approximately 85 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah. Surrounded on three sides by mountain ranges, the proving grounds terrain varies from level salt flats to scattered sand dunes and rugged mountains.”
What goes on the ground sounds utterly fascinating and frightening at the same time, but only a lucky few ever gets to see them. For those without the necessary security clearance, TerraServer provides the perfect alternative. Taking a cue from Polar Inertia, here are some satellite photos of the military installation.
First of all, the sights from above are stunning. Despite the fact that they are the landscape markings of killing machines, capable of annihilating the entire global population, they are graphically beautiful. The US Army surely has outdone both Richard Long and Walter De Maria several times over. More sublime (in the true sense of the word) than Spiral Jetty. More relevant than Double Negative. The Department of Defense should definitely donate the site to Dia if and when it's decommissioned. Still contaminated, still littered with unexploded ordnance.
A comparison can certainly be made to Thomas Jefferson's Land Survey grid system imposed over much of the American landscape, overriding topography and pre-settlement cultural and ecological systems. Like its counterpart, the landscapes of lines at Dugway are governed by analytical methodology, mathematical hierarchies, mechanics, trigonometry. But rather than being an expression of democracy, settlement, domesticity, even the heroic rural life, this Jeffersonian grid has mutated into a sinister expression of global terrorism, surveillance, and chemical and biological warfare. The Apocalypse distilled as geometry and algebraic equations.
