Scientists have theorized that a gamma-ray burst may be responsible for “an unusual level of a radioactive type of carbon known as carbon-14” found in ancient cedar trees in Japan.
“These enormous emissions of energy,” explainsBBC News, “occur when black holes, neutron stars or white dwarfs collide - the galactic mergers take just seconds, but they send out a vast wave of radiation.” If the source is within our galactic neighborhood, it might trigger an extinction event, or even something far worse. If much farther afield, say, in another galaxy, most of the radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere, where it triggers an increased production of radioactive elements, which rain down on waiting trees.
Botanical daguerreotypes chemically etched with the remnants of dead celestial spheres; an organic archive of cosmic megaspectaculars. In a sense, then, forests don't constrict your vision, rather they add perspectives, telegraph your gaze into deep space-time.
I can't resist the temptation here of imagining ancient Druidic sects of silviculturists, spread out all over the world, tending to patches of dark woods, steamy jungles and rain forests, astronomical observatories each manned by a hermetic crypto-astronomer recording supernovas, solar flares, the death pangs of black holes, and intergalactic jets of many dark brightnesses. And centuries later, Jodie Foster in the guise of Indiana Jones go out looking for their remnants, an orchid hunter in search of the rarest of rarest astral efflorescences.
According to the Forest History Society, aerologging is logging with the use of blimps and balloons to transport felled trees.
This practice, they explain, has economic and environmental benefits, as “[l]ifting the logs could help limit soil erosion, as logs would not be skidded along the ground. Logs also suffered less breakage moving through the air, and the use of balloons would theoretically lessen the need for additional forest road construction.”
Cue parallel world.
In this parallel world, the world's rainforest are off limits to logging thanks to a U.N. Security Council resolution making deforestation a war crime. It was passed as a way to combat climate change.
With the supply of precious jungle timber chocked off and the sub-par quality of wood from the still legal tree farms too offensive to the sensibilities of flooring aficionados and grain-conscious Scandinavian furniture designers, aerologgers are hired to provide them with some contraband logs. Just one or two, these smugglers and their clients reason, won't make much of a negative impact.
So floating in on their stealth blimps, they scour the forest for some nice specimens, abseilling down with their chainsaws when found. Once felled, they haul the lumber up and make a run for the border and out to sea, where their cargo is dropped and picked up by speedboats in the night, bound for clandestine sawmills.
Sometimes they find trees that, while much sought after like an Old Masters painting, aren't in the job ticket, so they mark their GPS coordinates for later retrieval. This inventory is like a map of secret ruins, whose artifacts can be selectively picked off depending on their client's wish list.
In any case, these botanical pirates are careful to avoid detection not only from the forest police but from other pulp traffickers as well, all floating in their own blimps. To avoid being spotted, they dive down below the canopy, all silence on deck, and bob to the surface again when the coast is clear — like an aerial narco submarine.
If two belligerent parties meet, however, then it's a Master and Commander engagement of airborne vessels: first a cat-and-mouse chase through fog banks and tempestuous storms culminating in a proper aerial battle. There is also brief sojourn for ecological tourism.
Meet Treebot, a robot that can climb irregularly shaped trees autonomously.
The design of Treebot is fairly unique: it uses a set of flexible linear actuators connecting two gripping claws to allow it to move around like an inchworm. While the back gripper holds on, the front gripper releases and the body extends forward, allowing the robot to literally feel around for a good place to grip.
When a more advanced version is developed, one that has greater maneuverability, adaptability and durability (plus the ability to harness the metabolic energy of trees), drop thousands of them to the Amazon, each one with the instructions to recreate Notre-Dame out of the rainforest.
Once deployed, they'll link up together to form a chain: one treebot gripping another. This chain will in turn knit itself with other chains to create a lattice binding trunks, branches, vines and canopies together. It is also anchored to the forest floor. Simultaneously, the treebots will attach themselves to these future columns and buttresses like a full-body orthopedic brace of facehuggers.
This mesh system will slowly reconfigure itself, contracting segments here and elongating segments there, along the way guiding and controlling the growth of the trees. Once it begins to look like a 3D grid model of the cathedral's superstructure, or a scaffolding without the building, the autonomous swarm will then coppice and pleach and pollard and espalier and inosculate a dense thicket to fill in the grid and fully enclose bosquets of chapels, atriums and honeycombed crypts.
In but one narrative thread we can choose to trace through the ensuing decades and possible centuries of micro-silviculture, we see this project gradually getting purged from the collective memory, Onkalo-style. Long before the work is completed, it's completely forgotten. But the work continues apace until it's finished, when, per their programing, ancient by now, the treebots go into hibernation, frozen like gargoyles. They wake only when some trimming is needed.
For a long time, the finished facsimile remains lost the descendants of its original programmers, to the whole of humanity in fact. There's no one to explore its understory caverns, no one to listen to the nesting critters singing their cacophonous hymns in a neverending liturgy. There's no one even to climb it.
Then one day, just by accident, members of an uncontacted tribe stumbles upon it. In need of a new settlement, they move in and make it their new village: a vegetal Notre-Dame transformed into a longhouse. Amazed and bewildered as well by the still scampering treebots, the tribe develops a cargo cult around them, venerating them by placing fruits, animals and the occasional virgin on the leafy altar.
Quite mysteriously, the tribe leaves, never to return. Notre-Dame is abandoned. With the treebots no longer functioning, it becomes a ruin, its giant columns toppled over and overgrown with itself. There are no more master craftsmen to tend to the garden, nothing to dam the natural, unhinged forest from flooding back in. Everything rots away.
A few years ago, in a patch of California forest, researchers were “linking up more than 100 tiny sensors, robots, cameras and computers,” giving them “an unusually detailed portrait of this lush world, home to more than 30 rare and endangered species.”
Wireless motes, cameras and other sensors track the nesting habits of birds, the life cycles of moss and the carbon dioxide uptake of various soils. Robots move along wires strung from tree to tree, lowering sensors to take temperature, humidity and light-level readings at different levels.
So when a tree falls in the forest, they will hear it. Always. In real-time. And over the internet.
If you allow us to indulge ourselves for a moment, we're reminded of that scene in Red Planet (2000) in which Val Kilmer, stranded in the extraterrestrial wilderness of Mars but incredibly near the Mars rover Sojourner, used parts of the robot to construct a makeshift radio to communicate with a fellow astronaut still in orbit. A rescue plan is hatched, after which he has some run-ins with a rogue robot, stumbles into a swarm of oxygen-excreting native Martian insects, and saves the Earth because of that discovery.
Stranded in the terrestrial wilderness of the forest but again incredibly near a smart patch, Val Kilmer will again cobble together a makeshift radio but this time out of dormant tiny robots to communicate with a fellow hiker still at the trailhead. A rescue team is dispatched, after which he has some run-ins with a rogue treebot belaying and gliding from treetop to treetop, stumbles into a swarm of climate change data saved by but not downloaded from the network, and saves the Earth because of that discovery.
Returning to the first smart forest, when it was being implanted with sensing devices, “the field [was] young.” There was “an emerging world of very large networks that combine motes and portable gear with larger technologies to improve the depth, duration and range of monitoring.”
Among these very large networks was the $200-million EarthScope, planned to comprise of “3,000 stations that are to track faint tremors, measure crustal deformation and make three-dimensional maps of the earth's interior from crust to core. Some 2,000 more instruments are to be mobile - wireless and sun- or wind-powered - and 400 devices are to move east in a wave from California across the nation over the course of a decade.”
Another one is the $500-million National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON, which then envisioned to include “15 circular areas 250 miles in diameter, each including urban, suburban, agricultural, managed and wild lands.”
Each observatory would have radar for tracking birds and weather as well as many layers of motes and robots and sensors, including some on cranes in forest canopies. If NEON gets a green light, construction is expected to start in 2007 and last five years.
One goal is to track invasive species, which cause more than $100 billion in agricultural losses each year. Another is to forecast changes in the biosphere that may accompany climate shifts so planners and government officials can make better choices about land use and restoration.
One wonders to what extent these networks were implemented over the years. How much of the $1 billion the National Science Foundation saw itself spending on these ecological projects did it actually dole out? Are there now, together with Charlie Sheen's global-spanning blanket of missives, layers upon layers of eco-data giving us a totalizing view of the entire planet?
It seems like everywhere you turn this week you hit something BIG, either their ski mountain incinerator plant or their pyramid condo. We though we'd join in all the drive-by copy-pasting fun with a favorite project: their design proposal for a crematorium in the famed Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm, Sweden.
“The new crematorium,” they write, “will be located in a small clearing within the piece of untouched forest.” This clearing can be reached via 3 paths: “two for the pedestrian that cross each other in the clearing, and one for vehicles to reach the clearing and return. At this intersection we imagine the new crematorium as a clearing in the forest rather than a built object. The two intersecting paths carve through the soil of the undergrowth descending slowly while opening the ground up to the light and the air of the skies above.”
As a counter proposal, instead of this high energy funeral rite, how about a forest version of a Zoroastrian Tower of Silence or a Tibetan sky burial? Low energy but still utra rapid atomization.
PROPOSAL: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power a maintenance-free, mesh-networked sensingsystem to predict and detect forest wildfires.
COUNTERPROPOSAL #1: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power a remote arboreal border homeland security system.
COUNTERPROPOSAL #2: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power an apparatus which acclimatizes a parcel from its present northern climes to conditions last seen when the area was straddling the equator, thus enabling the survival of formerly native tropical flora and fauna.
COUNTERPROPOSAL #3: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power concealed speakers sculpting the extinct sonic landscapes of a former ecosystem.
COUNTERPROPOSAL #4: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power mobile telecommunication devices long enough for passing hikers, park rangers and loggers to send a couple of tweets.
COUNTERPROPOSAL #5: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power fog machines which can be used, depending on your artistic persuasion, to render non-classically the very much classical scene of an aerosolized Jupiter raping Io, or equally classical scenes of wars and heroes, for instance, napalm defoliation during the Vietnam War.
“Around Jerusalem,” write Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin in Chicago, “acres of pine forest are used as popular family picnic spots. On the weekends they fill up with cars, people, pets, barbecues. But in the early mornings, just after dawn, the forests are completely silent, serene and untainted, giving the impression of timeless landscapes in which trees have been standing forever.”
But this apparent natural wilderness is a carefully constructed scene, as “many of these forests have been systematically planted on the expropriated land of Arab villages, which were forcibly evacuated and deliberately destroyed in 1948. It was not only sandy desert that was forested, but also cultivated olive groves and rural villages, the underlying intention being to obscure the locations of these villages so as to prevent any further cultivaton or re-settlement of the land by non-Jews.”
Discovered via the breathless Bryan Finoki of Subtopia and his epic feral version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon is Sinnoveg, a France-based tree nursery and horticulture research center specializing in “securitizing sites, goods and persons by a concept of anti-intrusion security integrated into the environment.” As described, this “natural concept is based on planting of a hedge of thorny plants, weaved into each other and into metallic elements of reinforcement.”
According to Agence France-Presse, the company has planted “vegetation barriers around a nuclear research centre outside Paris, a juvenile detention centre, train stations and airports.” And now, they want to take their patented shrubs to Baghdad's Green Zone and replacing its “vast network of concrete blast walls with terrorist-proof trees and bushes.”
To make the vege-walls more secure, “traditional barbed wire, tyre spikes, sensors and even metal barriers can be placed within the hedges - an invisible back-up layer of security sure to surprise any potential suicide bomber.”
Ben Katchor has a fancy concept “for the edification and pleasure of the nation's 40 million hay fever sufferers” but arguably for a site no less natural than Yosemite National Park.
