The deforestation of Bolivia's tropical dry forest continues apace as the above false-color image shows. And no, it isn't the aftermath of some boozy rampage by Michael Heizer and some rogue scientists from Dugway Proving Ground. These Suprematist geometries are actually the physical results of a massive agricultural development program and the resulting intensive resettlement of people from the Andean highlands to the Santa Cruz lowlands.
In the scene above, “land use types are delineated with lines. Solid white lines show the locations of planned colonies, dashed white lines show spontaneous colonies, and dotted white lines show Mennonite colonies. All other regions of development are non-Mennonite industrial soybean farms.”
If you'd like to go on a scopic drive through the Tierras Bajas, download this placemark from the Google Earth Community and then fire up Google Earth.
Be sure to inspect the rather fascinating radial patterned fields. Visible Earth tells us that “[a]t the center of each unit is a small community including a church, bar/cafe, school, and soccer field-the essentials of life in rural Bolivia.” Which sounds or rather looks like a bastardization of the Green City movement.
In case you're wondering about the sustainability of some of the cleared land, they aren't. This entry from Business & Politics in Bolivia explains: “You shouldn't be surprised by the fractioning of the land, this is a common feature of 'ancestral' altiplanic methods of production. In post-colonial altiplano, land is/was inherited in such a fractional manner, and of course, with time, efficiency began to suffer. Eventually the mini-fundio became commonplace and nowadays, some communities subsist even under a 'surco-fundio' system. The pattern is being replicated in the Bolivian lowlands, despite the availability and knowledge of alternative production methods, we can only expect the same ultimate result for any redistributed lands. The fields illustrated in the photograph are not producing soybean or any other 'cash crops' such as rice or wheat, they are too small for efficient production.”
As always, then, there is jarring contrast between the messy lived experience on the ground and the hypnotic beauty of satellite imagery.
Another pragmatic utopia, this one envisioned by Bruce Mau, in which Greenland harvests its melting iceberg water and market it to places with severely limited access to clean water, e.g. Africa.
According to the catalogue, which you can download from the website of the exhibition Too Perfect: Seven New Denmarks, “Greenland's Home Rule government issued the first license to collect and export its melt water to Aquapolaris, a private company. In Beverly Hills, bottles of iceberg water sell for $10 U.S. each. And in Newfoundland, icebergs are replacing fish as the basis of new business opportunities. Every spring, icebergs from Greenland parade south, past the coast of Newfoundland. The same people who used to fish now harvest icebergs from a floating barge, using a grapple crane to break off chunks of ice. The ice is crushed, melted and stored in tanks. The water is used for free by the Canadian Iceberg Vodka Corporation to produce Iceberg Vodka.”
So instead of letting others profit from their own natural resource, instead of drowning Manhattan and Bangladesh, before all those tons of fresh water catastrophically disrupts ocean circulation and with it world climate, Greenland can bottle up the billions of liters of water flowing into the sea, and acquire a portion of the lucrative bottled water market. And it needn't be a big portion. As Bruce Mau calculates, for Greenland's 57,000 citizens, “controlling just one percent...produces an additional capital income of 62,000 euros.” With that much wealth, a country could create national infrastructure, improve educational services, and achieve economic, social and ecological sustainability.
Meanwhile, in case you're wondering, Bruce Mau writes that “[u]sing the ocean to transport bulk water is an industry in its infancy, but evidence of experiments and new technologies abound.”
For instance, the Medusa Bag, “a giant bag designed in 1988 by James Cran of Calgary, Alberta to meet the anticipated requirement for large scale water imports to California as well as to Israel, Jordan and Palestine. It can carry 1000,000 m3 of bulk water. The Norwegian Shipping Company used a similar bag to transport water in Scandinavia.”
Gorgeous renderings of the geology of the Martian and lunar polar regions, just the right patterns to replace the rose windows of Notre-Dame. Because surely there's something more transcendent when one is lit with the creative primordial forces of alien landscapes, your entire body aglow with abstracted asteroid impact craters, volcanic ejecta and ancient river channels, rather than with dubious hagiography and occultish propaganda. Right?
The cacophony you're presently hearing is the recursive, strengthening screaming of “Marvelous!” echoing through Pruned Headquarters for Bridge, a site-specific installation by Michael Cross.
“Housed in a former church,“ a project statement reads, “the piece comprises submerging two thirds of the inside of the church in water, and producing a series of steps which rise out of the apparently empty man-made ‘lake’ as you walk across them. Each step emerges one step in front of you and disappears back underneath behind you as you go. This ‘bridge’ is purely mechanical, the weight of the person on it depresses each step a little, this force activates a submerged mechanism which raises the next step.”
And yes, in what will certainly precipitate an outbreak of messianic prophecies, marian visions and apocalyptic auguries, “the public are invited to walk out on it as if walking on water, eventually reaching the middle of the lake, thirty steps and twelve meters from the shore. There they will stand alone and detached, stranded in the middle of a plane of water until they choose to return the way they came. For some people this experience of being cut off and surrounded by water will be peaceful, for others terrifying. For some walking across the water will be pure childish joy, whilst others will be too scared to try.”
Meanwhile, we are forced to quote a few biblical passages on the redemptive and sublime qualities of water.
As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. (Psalms 42:1)
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. (Psalms 32:1-2)
Save me, O God; for the waters are come into my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me. (Psalms 69:1-2)
“What if Denmark farmed pharmaceuticals?” asked NORD.
What if Denmark — no longer encumbered by the dichotomy between the natural and the manmade — began to cultivate fields of mine sweeping plants and vaccine-laden tomatoes just outside of Copenhagen?
What if Denmark — two-thirds of which is devoted to low value traditional farming — reprogramed its agricultural production landscape to include high value biotech agribusiness?
What if Denmark — with the ability to generate more revenue from less land — returned all the unnecessary farmlands back to the people?
And what if Denmark also transformed some of those former farmlands into “Wilderness,” a new landscape that covers 20% of the country and one that is more or less continuous?
And here's another intriguing question: what if Denmark — by lessening its dependence on massive EU agricultural subsidies — fostered a freer global market, allowing developing countries to enter the market and begin self-sustaining economies?
For the answers, you can view the presentation slideshow or download the catalogue.
Jonathan Kirschenfeld Architects is reintroducing a floating pool to New York City. At the turn of the previous century, we are told, the city “had as many as 15 floating bathhouses moored along the East and Hudson rivers. These floating bathhouses were tied up to existing piers during the summer, usually near the tenement districts and provided an opportunity for the public not only to bathe, but to learn to swim.”
Once completed it “will be towed to its designated waterfront site, which might vary from summer to summer. Acting as a kind of 'migrating recreation pier', the pool would serve neighborhoods which would otherwise lack direct access to public pool facilities.”
Next on the production line: a floating oxygen greenhouse for those neighborhoods without direct access to clean air. Also: for those without direct access to clean drinking water, a floating river.
It seems that a Japanese laboratory has constructed a machine that can write text and draw images on the surface of water.
Taking information culled from here, Pink Tentacleswrites: “The device, called AMOEBA (Advanced Multiple Organized Experimental Basin), consists of 50 water wave generators encircling a cylindrical tank 1.6 meters in diameter and 30 cm deep (about the size of a backyard kiddie pool). The wave generators move up and down in controlled motions to simultaneously produce a number of cylindrical waves that act as pixels. The pixels, which measure 10 cm in diameter and 4 cm in height, are combined to form lines and shapes. AMOEBA is capable of spelling out the entire roman alphabet, as well as some simple kanji characters. Each letter or picture remains on the water surface only for a moment, but they can be produced in succession on the surface every 3 seconds.”
Of course, we cannot wait until a larger version of the AMOEBA gets built, something continental or oceanic in scale. And then rather than propagating saccharine heart shapes and smily faces or boring letters and numbers, one could inscribe the Gardens of Versailles in their entirety somewhere in the South Pacific.
Hydrology coalescing into elaborate parterres, Baroque statues, marvelous topiaries and geometric hedges — all of which doubling as aquariums. A pack of humpback whales, for instance, will be gliding gently alongside as you sail down the main axis, their timeless chanting filling the breezy tropical air. Enter any one of the many bosquets dotting the landscape and you'll be surrounded by a swarm of fish. Enter another one and you'll be privy to the mating rituals of giant jellyfishes, seemingly weightless, ethereal. Watch out for the one with the great white sharks though.
Unfortunately, there is also the possibility of weaponizing AMOEBA waves in the same way one could turn any natural earth systems, e.g. earthquakes, into a national security threat. Because once the device falls into the hands of al-Qaeda, hydro-terrorists can then easily wipe Los Angeles off the map with a tsunami. In the shape of Versailles.
It'll be a new kind of maritime warfare. New York comes under attack by an endless barrage of Italianate gardens propagated from Atlantic waters. First the Villa Lante, then the Villa d'Este, next comes the Boboli, and then another one and another. Vaux-le-Vicomte is mathematically translated into a Bessel function and then supersonically launched towards Boston. San Francisco gets torpedoed with dozens of allées. Miami is under siege by zen gardens. No coastal cities would be safe. Unless, of course, you have your own AMOEBA machine, in which case you could simply send your very own waves to cancel out any incoming tsunamis.
An über hydromechanical complex is set to rise in the Everglades when “engineers next month will begin building one of the world's largest manmade reservoirs - the size of a small city - as efforts continue to restore natural water flow to the Everglades,” the Associated Press via Wired Newsreports.
The “flagship” project of a multi-decade, multi-billion dollar wetland restoration initiative, this staggeringly huge theatrum machinarum, “roughly 25 square miles in area, is set for completion in 2010. It will hold 62 billion gallons of water, equivalent to about 5.1 million residential swimming pools, and will be seven miles across at its widest point.”
It's so vast, in fact, that it will lower water levels at the much, much bigger Lake Okeechobee. And “when you stand on one side of this reservoir, you will not see the other side.”
Moreover, “most reservoirs are built amid mountains and valleys or where a natural water source feeds the pool. In this case, 30 million tons of earth will be dug from flat land and surrounded by a 26-foot high, 21-mile long levee, making it larger than any other reservoir not connected to a natural source.”
If you are as thoroughly fascinated in wetlands and wetland restorations as we are, make sure you stop by the South Florida Water Management District. To simultaneously satisfy your inner civil engineer and verify that the whole thing isn't merely Michael Heizer recreating Tenochtitlan, you can download all manner of plans and reports at Acceler8. But make sure you read the article though.
