According to reporting by New Scientist (via the resplendent BLDG Blog), electrical engineers in the Netherlands are field testing the potential of various grasses and marshy plants for suitability as a passive electrical grid.
I wonder what might come from this sort of harvest, should the landscape and fallow-fields be conduced to generate electricity. I am not sure how exactly the translation from vital energy resounds as electricity, and I believe that this is something different from the pedigree of harbours and dams and the unexpected consequences of manicuring nature. Modern science has not really managed to harness or capture much of the potential that streams around human enterprises (and given that we are sheltered from some of the violence by those same untamed forced, it does beg the question how much we should be trying to bend our environment to our will on top of making a general mess of things)--after all, nothing is a solar power house like any given vegetation. Maybe conventional ideas about power are too restricted by the greedy threshold of efficiency, what's worthwhile to disinter, and instead of allowing the business of power and movement to develop in grooves and ruts, like other engines of society, and the tendency has kind of been to yank it forward, expecting more from less, precision or at least endurance without craftsmanship or innovation. Though the technical aspect may not yield the most efficient results, it is not as if inventors are inspired by nature's own perpetual motion machines, and care should be taken that this or similar experiments do not go the way of bio-fuels, green-washed and stunted, one should not be afraid to tinker and maybe not dig so deeply, only because that's what worked before.
