white wilderness

Another instalment of Disney’s revisionist record (see previously here and here) and trying to prompt and preserve its wholesome image and promote its extensive and often problematic as worthy of our nostalgia wholesale comes to us courtesy of Hyperallergic in their staged series of nature documentaries with the particular cruelty of the Academy Award-winning White Wilderness, an exploration of our arctic animal friends that has been excised from available programming.
Though not the first time that the production company peddled a myth that was to awkward to otherwise own or disabuse, the film in question revived and reinforced the misconception that lemmings have the tendency to commit suicide en mass (the origins come from a pre-Enlightenment belief that the small hamster like rodents appeared during rain storms by spontaneous generation) by flinging the poor creatures rounded up and flung off cliffs at speed to portray this behaviour for entertainment value.

subpar parks

Having been reminded recently how placing everything at the mercy of critical reviews and reception leaves nothing sacred, graphic designer Amber Share’s project, we discover courtesy of Boing Boing, really spoke to us: finding the one-star ratings left for each of the sixty-four US national parks, like the appraisal pictured for Sequoia National Park founded in 1890, and hand-lettering a poster in WPA (see previously) style. See a whole gallery at the artist’s website and at the link above.

7x7

goetheanum: a visit to the seat of the General Anthroposophical Society in Dornach in the canton of Solothurn

0107 – b moll: a brilliant short by filmmaker Hiroshi Kondo on cityscapes, commutes and light—via Waxy

musical instrument digital interface: every possible melody has been played in MIDI format, copyrighted and promptly released into public domain

pivot point: we are entering the era of Peak Car—see also

gratuitous diacritics: a peek inside the world of extreme heavy metal logos—via Things Magazine

autoritatto: an artist commissions a neural network to generate her a self-portrait out of thousands of selfies

it’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood: documenting the wildlife traffic over this log bridge in Pennsylvania enters its second year

burolandschap

As part of a larger project rehabilitating and restoring its lake district and wetlands in Bokrijk National Park in Limburg, authorities have commissioned landscapers to replace some of the traditional plank bridges with unique, submerged, sunken trails to allow hikers and cyclists to experience the ponds and lakes from a periscope’s perspective. More at designboom at the link up top.

wollemia nobilis

Via Super Punch, we learn about the clandestine, successful mission pulled off by botanists, park rangers, conservators and New South Wales’ brave firefighters to save the only known wild population of Wollemi pines.
The trees, which may be up to one hundred thousand years in age, number about two hundred individuals and prior to their discovery in 1994 (akin to finding a living dinosaur), were believed to be extinct and only known through the fossil record. The operation was kept secret so as to not disclose the grove’s location as caretakers fear that visitors could bring contamination that could harm the critically endangered species. Clones have been propagated worldwide and have distinct broad needles and knobbly bark.

palm house and parterre or bulletin of miscellaneous information

Underpinning nearly all life on Earth and comprising a majority of the planet’s biomass, the kingdoms of plants and fungi are constantly yielding up new discoveries that we must cherish and preserve as best we can, for their own sake and to mediate on the strange and novel adaptations and chemical magic that Nature has developed, some habitats lost before we could fully appreciate or even identify what sorts of treasures we’ve destroyed. Curators at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew have selected ten superlative finds out of the some one hundred and nine newly, officially recognised species all across the globe to highlight this wonderful and surprising realm, including a berry that has the effect on the human palette of turning sour tastes to sweet (Synsepalum Chimanimani) and a tenacious shrub confined to a single waterfall that produces its own adhesive to stick to rocks and prevent it from being swept away.

9x9

ideograrch: the iconic works of architecture abstracted in Kanji-like calligraphy by Federico Babina

quasi-modo: a Russian DJ that combines his skill with bell-ringing with techno music

head in the clouds: a look at cities in the sky

dreigroschenoper: a gallery of playbills and references that cover the works of Bertolt Brecht—via Strange Company

pelagic zone: a deep sea explorer from Neal.fun (previously), via Kottke

fine html products: a survey of superlative links of the 2010s

apotropaic charms: stunning enamel pins from Lydia Daum, via Swiss Miss

you have the right to hush-up: Slaw & Order, courtesy the Art of Darkness

冬: Aoi Huber Kono’s 1972 picture haiku book Winter

årets ord

Collins Dictionary has unveiled, beating out other neologisms, most of which are main-streamed and in common-parlance to the point where they need no definition, that played heavily into our conscious these past months like deepfake, bopo (body-positive), influencer, cancel-culture, rewilding and non-binary, its selection for Word of the Year as Climate Strike, a sustaining and motivating bit of traction and Trost (though we have had quite enough of the solace of hope without action) in a world otherwise pummelled with anxiety and confusion.

nacho typical arbour day

In light of Ethiopia’s big stride towards its goal of reforestation of four billion trees as part of a wider campaign and being cognisant that good efforts need some expertise to back them up, we appreciated this selection of products and projects from Futurekind, which included this sort of compostable chip-and-dip bowl for saplings called Cocoon, having taken part in many of these huge arboreal efforts, that helps boost survival rates by reducing the need for follow-up irrigation. Much more to explore at the links above.

me + t

Having explored the proven and somewhat more esoteric ways that plants are networked and sustain one another in the past, we really appreciated Open Culture’s take on plant communications and how, if the titular character of Shel Silverstein’s story, had not been in isolation a You Gotta Be Kidding Me Tree would have intervened when the giving came to taking. See a suite of lessons on how trees talk to one another at the links above.

boreal

Though not totally out of the woods (like the paradox that holds one can only wander half way into the forest because after that point, one is on the way out), Swiss researchers bring the encouraging news that planting a trillion trees could reduce carbon dioxide levels by fully two-thirds, sequestering the green-houses gases that man has been flagrantly pumping into the atmosphere for the past quarter of a century.
That last third will be tough to eliminate but together with continuing emission reductions, dietary changes and advancing technology, the task at hand no longer seems as hopeless—the boost from the trees, according to new models, far greater than expected. Not only would the massive greening of the planet be logistically tenable and a bargain too great to pass up—at around thirty cents per sapling, it would cost all of three-hundred billion dollars—and despite the considerable space that this many extra trees would need to grow, continental America plus China, surveyors have found room at the borders and verges and in derelict land without taking any places used for growing crops and urban spaces—though more trees would dot pasture lands and be to the benefit of grazing livestock. Everyone can take part and aside from the intrinsic and aesthetic value of trees (helping to stop erosion, drought, flooding and preserve biodiversity), it’s moreover an intervention that is not predicated on convincing the nay-sayers and science-deniers otherwise.

buckeye state

Recommended by Digg, we really enjoyed reading this nuanced, thoughtful essay that explores the project to restore North America’s blighted chestnut forests (see also) by creating a genetic hybrid whose DNA contains material from wheat that makes it resistant to the fungus that wiped out the trees.
Given how some of our exuberance to adopt GMOs was misplaced—and conversely fears over it, it is especially vital to get the science right before releasing something synthetic into the wild as trees not thrive outside of our laboratories, fields and plantations, they are also a vital part of the landscape and ecosystem, host to their own particular constellations of Nature. What do you think? Testing is extensive and circumspect and well worth considering all the trials conducted and considered but one in particular stands out: tadpoles fed with either natural or transgenic chestnut leaf litter thrived equally well, but grew at nearly twice the rate of their siblings that had to make due with a diet of maple and beech leaves—their only option since the chestnuts disappeared a century ago, suggesting that the ecosystem is missing these magnificent and useful trees far more than we can appreciate.

↖ boulder brook trail

Via the always brilliant Kottke, we are introduced to a family of typefaces from the Design Outside studio inspired by the US National Park Service signs (see also here and here)—the sort of classic guide posts and way-pointers that are carved with a router bit, very evocative of the sense of space and time to wonder and wander. Much more to explore at the links above.

die unendliche anziehungskraft der natur

Inspired by a sketch executed in 1971 by fellow Austrian Max Peinter (*1937, a cousin of Ettore Sottsass) called “The Unending Attraction of Nature” art collector Klaus Littmann will bring the picture to life by transplanting a forest of trees in the sports stadium of the industrial city of Klagenfurt as public art installation of the same name.
Calling the government officials out for their inaction on climate change and habit loss (lifestyle choices do matter and have an impact but the real and difficult sacrifice is in legislating the polluters), Littmann fears that in the near future, such displays of Nature might in fact be within the purview of the viewing platform or gallery, like animals in zoos. They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum. Once the project concludes (9 September – 27 October 2019), the trees will be given a permanent home at a nearby location on public lands.

botantical mysogyny

Though admittedly a simplification of a host of factors and vectors coming together to exacerbate seasonal allergies and tree sex and gender are far more complex, we learn via the always excellent Kottke people experience outsized hay-fever and respiratory responses in part in America at least (and there’s surely counterpart problems created unintentionally elsewhere) because of a misguided appeal to urban planners decades ago to line the streets with greenery exclusively of the male variety, reasoning that then we could dispense with messy blossoms, fruits and pods that female tree would produce.
Not that trees were not incorporated into cities and sidewalks prior to the 1940s—but many of the stately, oldest residents had been blighted with the outbreak of Dutch Elm disease when production demands of World War II made the usual quarantine process that kept the pests at bay infected all American elms—and the reforestration effort was thought out along more deliberative but short-sighted lines, perhaps tidier and have a certain aesthetic like our ridiculous, manicured lawns but unbalanced with row upon row of bachelor trees spewing out too much pollen and making us noticeably suffer. What do you think? Sexism in the plant kingdom is not the same as the attitude that excludes women from medical studies and clinical trials as they are deemed unfit control subjects and most treatment and dosage comes from a pointedly male perspective but has consequence nonetheless.  I wonder what the second- and third-tier effects are that we can’t even begin to appreciate.

gewöhnlicher spindelstrauch

There’s a rather unassuming shrub growing in the backyard with the scientific nomenclature Euonymus europaeus, the European Spindle that colourfully blooms with these clashing and poisonous pink and red flowers in early September that begin to bud (below) in April.
This small tree that inhabits the edge of forests and whose hard wood was the preferred material for making spindles for spinning wool and other implements. The infrequent surname Swindler, rather than the obvious connotation, derives from a northern dialectal variant for those who make spindles—the ‘sw’ transformation less taxing on the tongue than ‘sp.’

sequoia

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that posits that while the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, the number two best time is today, and via the always excellent Kottke’s Quick Links, we learn about an ambitious consortium of conservators and arborists who have successfully cloned one hundred saplings of giant redwoods from the stumps of five of most majestic trees (previously thought dead) felled in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  The Archangel Ancient Tree Archive—inspired by a near-death experience, aims to re-establish the forests of the North American Pacific Northwest Coast as a bulwark against climate change—though these colossal trees are susceptible to environmental degradation, being extraordinarily long-lived, they could teach humans a thing or two about living on Earth in terms of weathering change and wildfires. The trees sequester as many tonnes of carbon in their trunks as two hundred and fifty regular trees and the cloned specimens are not only seeding the coastline but are also being exported to places around the world. More to explore and learn how to get involved at the links above.

rewilding

We took a drive through the countryside and stopped at the foothills of the Rhön and hiked up the stony and wooded slope of the Schafstein, the Sheep Rock. A lot of forests are maintained in a sustainable manner (or at least so we’d like to hope, not really appreciating the impact of our harvesting has on the ecosystem) in Germany but there are few untrammelled places but since the 1990s, the inner core of the trees growing here, within a much larger reserve, have been left to their own devices in hopes of re-establishing an old-growth forest.
Please click on the pictures for larger images.  Basalt boulders and fallen trunks covered with different mosses punctuated the terrain and were stepping stones for the ascent, not treacherous but certainly a demanding climb. Let’s hope more places are allowed to revert to their pristine state. Afterwards we continued on to Guckaisee, a series of lakes at the base of the mountain whose water levels had been essentially negated due to the hot, arid summer—though visiting ducks were content to plop into the lake bed and do a little bit of mud surfing.

der once-ler

Recognising that (beyond the intrinsic value of trees and woodlands in themselves) afforestation and reforestation efforts are as important as reducing emissions and that every little bit helps, Berlin-based search engine Ecosia (previously) the Guardian reports has offered the energy company that owns the land that the remnant of Hambacher Forest a million euros to purchase the parcel and preserve it in perpetuity.  Ecosia’s search machine is in an browser overlay that is non-intrusive and generates revenue through advertisements which are used to support tree-planting and other conservation campaigns and one can learn more at the links above and get updates at the organisation’s own blog here.

bürgewald

It’s bad enough that the majority of human history is myopic and making a public declaration of it seems even worse—one shouldn’t be rewarded for being “self-aware” indiscriminately.
Consigning a small remnant of a primeval wood outside of Köln to axe to expand a lignite extraction operation seems incredibly short-sighted—saying that Germany’s immediate energy needs outweigh the patch of twelve thousand year old Hambacher Forest, home to a unique ecosystem and archaeological sites that have never been properly assessed. Protesters have occupied the forest in tree houses in order to protect it for the past six years but have recently been evicted by police, and activists and some panel members on the coal company’s board of directors (which own the land) believe any decision should be deferred until the terms of Germany’s strategy for withdrawing from the mining business altogether are finalised.