Carl Sagan Warns Congress about Climate Change (1985)

in Current Affairs, Nature, Television | November 18th, 2021

With­out cli­mate change, we could­n’t inhab­it the Earth as we do today. The green­house effect, by which gas­es in a plan­et’s atmos­phere increase the heat of that plan­et’s sur­face, “makes life on Earth pos­si­ble.” So says Carl Sagan in the video above. He adds that with­out it, the tem­per­a­ture would be about 30 degrees centi­grade cool­er: “That’s well below the freez­ing point of water every­where on the plan­et. The oceans would be sol­id.” A lit­tle of the cli­mate change induced by the green­house effect, then, is a good thing, but “here we are pour­ing enor­mous quan­ti­ties of CO2 and these oth­er gas­es into the atmos­phere every year, with hard­ly any con­cern about its long-term and glob­al con­se­quences.”

It’s fair to say that the lev­el of con­cern has increased since Sagan spoke these words in 1985, when “cli­mate change” was­n’t yet a house­hold term. But even then, his audi­ence was Con­gress, and his fif­teen-minute address, pre­served by C‑SPAN, remains a suc­cinct and per­sua­sive case for more research into the phe­nom­e­non as well as strate­gies and action to mit­i­gate it.

What audi­ence would expect less from Sagan, who just five years ear­li­er had host­ed the hit PBS tele­vi­sion series Cos­mos, based on his book of the same name. Its broad­cast made con­ta­gious his enthu­si­asm for sci­en­tif­ic inquiry in gen­er­al and the nature of the plan­ets in par­tic­u­lar. Who could for­get, for exam­ple, his intro­duc­tion to the “thor­ough­ly nasty place” that is Venus, research into whose atmos­phere Sagan had con­duct­ed in the ear­ly 1960s?

Venus is “the near­est plan­et — a plan­et of about the same mass, radius, den­si­ty, as the Earth,” Sagan tells Con­gress, but it has a “sur­face tem­per­a­ture about 470 degrees centi­grade, 900 Fahren­heit.” The rea­son? “A mas­sive green­house effect in which car­bon diox­ide plays the major role.” As for our plan­et, esti­mates then held that, with­out changes in the rates of fos­sil fuel-burn­ing and “infrared-absorb­ing” gas­es released into the atmos­phere, there will be “a sev­er­al-centi­grade-degree tem­per­a­ture increase” on aver­age “by the mid­dle to the end of the next cen­tu­ry.” Giv­en the poten­tial effects of such a rise, “if we don’t do the right thing now, there are very seri­ous prob­lems that our chil­dren and grand­chil­dren will have to face.” It’s impos­si­ble to know how many lis­ten­ers these words con­vinced at the time, though they cer­tain­ly seem to have stuck with a young sen­a­tor in the room by the name of Al Gore.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Cen­tu­ry of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in a 35 Sec­ond Video

Watch “Degrees of Uncer­tain­ty,” an Ani­mat­ed Doc­u­men­tary about Cli­mate Sci­ence, Uncer­tain­ty & Know­ing When to Trust the Experts

Bill Gates Lets Col­lege Stu­dents Down­load a Free Dig­i­tal Copy of His Book, How to Avoid a Cli­mate Dis­as­ter

Carl Sagan Pre­dicts the Decline of Amer­i­ca: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “With­out Notic­ing, Back into Super­sti­tion & Dark­ness” (1995)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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A Fascinating 3D Animation Shows the Depths of the Ocean

in Animation, Nature, Science | November 9th, 2021

Deep sea explo­ration and the sci­ence of oceanog­ra­phy began 150 years ago when British sur­vey ship HMS Chal­lenger set off from Portsmouth with 181 miles of rope. The Roy­al Soci­ety tasked the expe­di­tion, among oth­er things, with “investigat[ing] the phys­i­cal con­di­tions of the deep sea… in regard to depth, tem­per­a­ture cir­cu­la­tion, spe­cif­ic grav­i­ty and pen­e­tra­tion of light.” It was the first such voy­age of its kind.

To accom­plish its objec­tives, Chal­lenger swapped all but two of its guns for spe­cial­ized equip­ment, includ­ing — as assis­tant ship’s stew­ard Joseph Matkin described in a let­ter home — “thou­sands of small air tight bot­tles and lit­tle box­es about the size of Valen­tine box­es packed in Iron Tanks for keep­ing spec­i­mens in, insects, but­ter­flies, moss­es, plants, etc… a pho­to­graph­ic room on the main deck, also a dis­sect­ing room for carv­ing up Bears, Whales, etc.”

Find­ings from the four-year voy­age totaled almost thir­ty-thou­sand pages when pub­lished in a report. But the Chal­lenger’s most famous lega­cy may be its dis­cov­ery of the Mar­i­ana Trench. The ship record­ed a sound­ing of 4,475 fath­oms (26,850 ft.) in a south­ern part of the trench sub­se­quent­ly called Chal­lenger Deep, and now known as the deep­est part of the ocean and the “low­est point on Earth.” The most recent sound­ings using advanced sonar have mea­sured its depth at some­where between 35,768 to 36,037 feet, or almost 7 miles (11 kilo­me­ters).

Chal­lenger Deep is so deep that if Ever­est were sub­merged into its depths, the moun­tain’s peak would still be rough­ly a mile and a half under­wa­ter. In 1960, a manned crew of two descend­ed into the trench. Dozens of remote oper­at­ed vehi­cles (ROVs) have explored its depths since, but it would­n’t be until 2012 that anoth­er human made the 2.5 hour descent, when Avatar and The Abyss direc­tor James Cameron financed his own expe­di­tion. Then in 2019, explor­er Vic­tor Vescoso made the jour­ney, set­ting the Guin­ness world record for deep­est manned sub­ma­rine dive when he reached the East­ern Pool, a depres­sion with­in Chal­lenger Deep. Just last year, he best­ed the record with his mis­sion spe­cial­ist John Rost, explor­ing the East­ern Pool for over four hours.

Last year’s descent brings the total num­ber of peo­ple to vis­it Chal­lenger Deep to five. How can the rest of us wrap our heads around a point so deep beneath us it can swal­low up Mount Ever­est? The beau­ti­ful­ly detailed, 3D ani­ma­tion at the top of the post does a great job of con­vey­ing the rel­a­tive depths of oceans, seas, and major lakes, show­ing under­sea tun­nels and ship­wrecks along the way, with man­made objects like the Eif­fel Tow­er (which marks, with­in a few meters, the deep­est scu­ba dive) and Burj Khal­i­fa placed at inter­vals for scale.

By the time the ani­ma­tion — cre­at­ed by Meta­Ball­Stu­dios’ Alvaro Gra­cia Mon­toya– sub­merges us ful­ly (with boom­ing, echo­ing musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment) in the Mar­i­ana Trench, we may feel that we have had a lit­tle taste of the awe that lies at the deep­est ocean depths.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A Rad­i­cal Map Puts the Oceans–Not Land–at the Cen­ter of Plan­et Earth (1942)

What the Earth Would Look Like If We Drained the Water from the Oceans

Cli­mate Change Gets Strik­ing­ly Visu­al­ized by a Scot­tish Art Instal­la­tion

Film­mak­er James Cameron Going 36,000 Feet Under the Sea

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Footage of the Last Known Tasmanian Tiger Restored in Color (1933)

in Nature, Science | October 5th, 2021

Last month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Ser­vice announced that near­ly two dozen wildlife species would be removed from the endan­gered species list, as CNN report­ed, includ­ing the ivory-billed wood­peck­er, “the Bachman’s war­bler, two species of fresh­wa­ter fish­es, eight species of South­east­ern fresh­wa­ter mus­sels and 11 species from Hawaii and the Pacif­ic Islands.” This is not good news. The ani­mals have been delist­ed because they’ve been added to a list of extinct crea­tures, one that grows longer each year.

Most of us have seen few, if any, of these ani­mals and can­not grasp the scope of their loss. What does it mean to say there are no more Bachman’s war­blers left on Earth? Species wiped out by cli­mate change, over­farm­ing, over­fish­ing, or the encroach­ment of humans and inva­sive species can feel far away from us, their loss a dis­tant tragedy; or extinc­tion can seem inevitable, like that of the Dodo or Sicil­ian wolf, crea­tures that seem too fan­tas­tic for the world we now inhab­it. So too, the dog-like mar­su­pi­al Tas­man­ian tiger — or thy­lacine — an ani­mal that lived as recent­ly as 1936 when the last rep­re­sen­ta­tive of its species, named Ben­jamin, died in cap­tiv­i­ty in Aus­tralia.

The thy­lacine looks like an evo­lu­tion­ary odd­i­ty, too weird to sur­vive. But this judg­ment is a mis­ap­pli­ca­tion of Dar­win­ism as egre­gious as the idea that only the “fittest,” i.e. those who can take good beat­ing, sur­vive. The day Ben­jamin died, Sep­tem­ber 7, has been com­mem­o­rat­ed in Aus­tralia as Nation­al Threat­ened Species Day, which rais­es aware­ness about the hun­dreds of plant and ani­mal species close to extinc­tion. The day also cel­e­brates the hun­dreds of species found nowhere else in the world, ani­mals that could come to seem to us in the near future as strange and exot­ic as the thy­lacine — a fas­ci­nat­ing exam­ple of con­ver­gent evo­lu­tion: a mar­su­pi­al canid that evolved com­plete­ly inde­pen­dent­ly of wolves, dogs, and oth­er canine species with which it had no con­tact what­so­ev­er until the British arrived.

Found only on the island of Tas­ma­nia by the time of Euro­pean set­tle­ment, thy­lacine pop­u­la­tions were destroyed by dis­ease, dogs, and, pri­mar­i­ly, human hunters. Before the final mem­ber of the species died, they were kept in zoos and cap­tured on silent film by nat­u­ral­ists like David Fleay, who shot the black-and-white footage just above of Ben­jamin at Beau­maris Zoo in Hobart, Tas­ma­nia. In the video at the top, we can see the same footage in vivid col­or — and full dig­i­tal restora­tion — thanks to Samuel François-Steininger and his Paris-based com­pa­ny Com­pos­ite Films.

Sent an HDR (High Dynam­ic Range) scan of the film by the Nation­al Film and Sound Archive of Aus­tralia (NFSA), François-Steininger had to make a lot of inter­pre­tive choic­es. Next to “orig­i­nal skins pre­served in muse­ums,” the NFSA notes, his team “had to rely on sketch­es and paint­ings because of the lack of orig­i­nal col­or pic­tures or footage that could be used for research.” While there are 9 short film clips of the ani­mals from the Lon­don and Hobart zoos, these are all, of course, in black and white. “Writ­ten descrip­tions of the thy­lacine’s coat gave them a gen­er­al idea of the tints and shades present in the fur, infor­ma­tion they sup­ple­ment­ed with sci­en­tif­ic draw­ings and recent 3D col­or ren­der­ings of the ani­mal.” The results are incred­i­bly nat­ur­al-look­ing and star­tling­ly imme­di­ate.

Are the thy­lacine, Bach­man’s war­bler, and oth­er extinct species vic­tims of the Anthro­pocene? Will our chil­dren’s chil­dren chil­dren watch films of polar bears and koalas and won­der how our plan­et could have con­tained such won­ders? Geo­log­i­cal epochs deal with “mile-thick pack­ages of rock stacked up over tens of mil­lions of years,” Peter Bran­nen writes at The Atlantic, and thus it over­states the case to call the last four cen­turies of cli­mate change and mass extinc­tion an “Anthro­pocene.” The word names “a thought exper­i­ment” rather than a span of deep time in Earth’s his­to­ry. But from the per­spec­tive of crit­i­cal­ly endan­gered species — maybe to include, even­tu­al­ly, humans them­selves — the trans­for­ma­tions of the present seem square­ly focused on our reck­less behav­ior and its effects on habi­tats we nev­er see.

We are far less impor­tant to geo­log­i­cal time than we think, Bran­nen argues, but it does, indeed, seem up to us at the moment whether there is a future on Earth filled with plant, ani­mal, and yes, human, life:

We haven’t earned an Anthro­pocene epoch yet. If some­day in the dis­tant future we have, it will be an astound­ing tes­ta­ment to a species that, after a col­icky, globe-threat­en­ing infan­cy, learned that it was not sep­a­rate from Earth his­to­ry, but a con­tigu­ous part of the sys­tems that have kept this mirac­u­lous mar­ble world hab­it­able for bil­lions of years.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Are You Ready for the Return of Lost Species?: Stew­art Brand on the Dawn of De-Extinc­tion

The Pra­do Muse­um Dig­i­tal­ly Alters Four Mas­ter­pieces to Strik­ing­ly Illus­trate the Impact of Cli­mate Change

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How Mushroom Time-Lapses Are Filmed: A Glimpse Into the Pioneering Time-Lapse Cinematography Behind the Netflix Documentary Fantastic Fungi

in Biology, Film, K-12, Nature, Photography, Science | September 3rd, 2021

Mush­rooms are hav­ing a moment, thanks in part to pio­neer­ing time-lapse cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Louie Schwartzberg’s doc­u­men­tary Fan­tas­tic Fun­gi.

Now stream­ing on Net­flix, the film has giv­en rise to a bumper crop of funghi fantat­ics, who sprang up like, well, mush­rooms, to join the exist­ing ranks of cit­i­zen sci­en­tists, culi­nary fans, week­end for­agers, ama­teur grow­ers, and spir­i­tu­al seek­ers.

Schwartzberg, who ear­li­er visu­al­ized pol­li­na­tion from the flower’s point of view in the Meryl Streep-nar­rat­ed Wings of Life, is a true believ­er in the pow­er of mush­rooms, cit­ing funghi’s role in soil cre­ation and health, and their poten­tial for rem­e­dy­ing a num­ber of press­ing glob­al prob­lems, as well as a host of human ail­ments.

Fan­tas­tic Funghi focus­es on sev­en pil­lars of ben­e­fits brought to the table by the fun­gal king­dom and its Inter­net-like under­ground net­work of myceli­um:

  1. Bio­di­ver­si­ty

A num­ber of projects are explor­ing the ways in which the myceli­um world can pull us back from the bring of  deser­ti­za­tion, water short­age, food short­age, bee colony col­lapse, tox­ic con­t­a­m­i­nants, nuclear dis­as­ters, oil spills, plas­tic pol­lu­tion, and glob­al warm­ing.

  1. Inno­va­tion

Mush­room-relat­ed indus­tries are eager to press funghi into ser­vice as envi­ron­men­tal­ly sus­tain­able faux leather, build­ing mate­ri­als, pack­ag­ing, and meat alter­na­tives.

  1. Food

From fine din­ing to for­ag­ing off-the-grid, mush­rooms are prized for their culi­nary and nutri­tion­al ben­e­fits.

  1. Phys­i­cal Health and Well­ness

Will the hum­ble mush­room prove mighty enough to do an end run around pow­er­ful drug com­pa­nies as a source of inte­gra­tive med­i­cine to help com­bat dia­betes, liv­er dis­ease, inflam­ma­tion, insom­nia and cog­ni­tive decline?

  1. Men­tal Health

Researchers at Johns Hop­kins, UCLA, and NYU are run­ning clin­i­cal tri­als on the ben­e­fits of psy­che­del­ic psilo­cy­bin mush­rooms as a tool for treat­ing addic­tion, depres­sion, anx­i­ety, PTSD and sui­ci­dal ideation.

  1. Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty

Of course, there’s also a rich tra­di­tion of reli­gions and indi­vid­ual seek­ers deploy­ing mind alter­ing psy­choac­tive mush­rooms as a form of sacra­ment or a tool for plumb­ing the mys­ter­ies of life.

  1. The Arts

Direc­tor Schwartzberg under­stand­ably views mush­rooms as muse, a fit­ting sub­ject for pho­tog­ra­phy, music, film, poet­ry, art and oth­er cre­ative endeav­ors.

 

With regard to this final pil­lar, many view­ers may be sur­prised to learn how much of the 15 years Schwartzberg ded­i­cat­ed to cap­tur­ing the exquis­ite cycle of fun­gal regen­er­a­tion and decom­po­si­tion took place indoors.

As he explains in the Wired video above, his pre­ci­sion equip­ment excels at cap­tur­ing devel­op­ment that’s invis­i­ble to the human eye, but is no match for such nat­ur­al world dis­rup­tions as insects and wind.

Instead, he and his team built con­trolled grow­ing envi­ron­ments, where high­ly sen­si­tive time lapse cam­eras, dol­lies, timed grow lights, and more cin­e­mat­ic light­ing instru­ments could be left in place.

Set dress­ings of moss and logs, cou­pled with a very short depth of field helped to bring the Great Out­doors onscreen, with occa­sion­al chro­makeyed panora­mas of the nat­ur­al world fill­ing in the gaps.

Even in such lab-like con­di­tions, cer­tain ele­ments were nec­es­sar­i­ly left to chance. Mush­rooms grow noto­ri­ous­ly quick­ly, and even with con­stant mon­i­tor­ing and cal­cu­la­tions, there was plen­ty of poten­tial for one of his stars to miss their mark, shoot­ing out of frame.

Just one of the ways that mush­rooms and humans oper­ate on rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent time­lines. The direc­tor bowed to the shrooms, return­ing to square one on the fre­quent occa­sions when a sequence got away from him.

Pro­vid­ing view­ers an immer­sive expe­ri­ence of the under­ground myceli­um net­work required high pow­ered micro­scopes, a sol­id cement floor, and a bit of movie mag­ic to finesse. What you see in the final cut is the work of CGI ani­ma­tors, who used Schwartzberg’s footage as their blue­print.

Net­flix sub­scribers can stream Fan­tas­tic Fun­gi for free.

From Octo­ber 15 — 17, film­mak­er Louie Schwartzberg is host­ing a free, vir­tu­al Fan­tas­tic Fun­gi Glob­al Sum­mit. Reg­is­ter here.

You can also browse his col­lec­tion of com­mu­ni­ty mush­room recipes and sub­mit your own, down­load Fan­tas­tic Fungi’s Stoned Ape poster, or have a ram­ble through a trove of relat­ed videos and arti­cles in the Mush Room.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

John Cage Had a Sur­pris­ing Mush­room Obses­sion (Which Began with His Pover­ty in the Depres­sion)

Alger­ian Cave Paint­ings Sug­gest Humans Did Mag­ic Mush­rooms 9,000 Years Ago

The Gold­en Guide to Hal­lu­cino­genic Plants: Dis­cov­er the 1977 Illus­trat­ed Guide Cre­at­ed by Harvard’s Ground­break­ing Eth­nob­otanist Richard Evan Schultes

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Brood X Cicadas are her mush­rooms. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch Venice’s New $7 Billion Flood Defense System in Action

in Architecture, Nature, Technology | August 11th, 2021

There are cap­i­tals unlike­ly to be much afflict­ed by ris­ing sea lev­els — Indi­anapo­lis, say, or La Paz — but Venice looks set for a much more dire fate. Still, there is hope for the Float­ing City, a hope held out by large-scale engi­neer­ing projects like the one pro­filed in the Tomor­row’s Build video above. Called MOSE (an acronym stand­ing for MOd­u­lo Sper­i­men­tale Elet­tromec­ca­ni­co), the sys­tem con­sists of “78 gates, each 20 meters wide, that rise up out of the water when flood­ing is immi­nent.” This sounds like just the tick­et for a city that, “built in the mid­dle of a lagoon,” has “been sus­cep­ti­ble to a nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­non known as acqua alta, or ‘high water,’ since its found­ing in the fifth cen­tu­ry.”

MOSE is now “final­ly up and run­ning, eigh­teen years after con­struc­tion began” — and a decade after its orig­i­nal com­ple­tion dead­line. This was too late, unfor­tu­nate­ly, to spare Venice from the 2019 flood that ranked as its worst in 50 years, leav­ing 80 per­cent of the city under­wa­ter.

“The good news is, it passed the first major test,” suc­cess­ful­ly pro­tect­ing the city in Octo­ber of last year “from a 1.3‑meter high tide, and it’s per­formed mul­ti­ple times since. But this does­n’t mean that flood­ing’s been stopped entire­ly. In Decem­ber, it was unable to pre­vent an unex­pect­ed­ly high tide from sweep­ing in and drench­ing the city once again.” Tech­ni­cal­ly, that inci­dent was­n’t MOSE’s fault: “Weath­er fore­cast­ers under­es­ti­mat­ed how high the water would get, so author­i­ties kind of did­n’t think to switch it on.”

This speaks to the dif­fi­cul­ty of not just design­ing and installing a com­plex mechan­i­cal defense mech­a­nism, but also of get­ting it to work in con­cert with the oth­er sys­tems already per­form­ing func­tions of their own (and at var­i­ous lev­els of reli­a­bil­i­ty). At a cost of over €6 bil­lion (or $7 bil­lion), MOSE has become “far more expen­sive than first pre­dict­ed,” and thus faces that much high­er a bur­den of self-jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, espe­cial­ly giv­en the cloud of “cor­rup­tion, envi­ron­men­tal oppo­si­tion, and ques­tions about its long-term effec­tive­ness” hang­ing over it. Seen in action, MOSE remains an unques­tion­ably impres­sive work of engi­neer­ing, but its asso­ci­at­ed headaches have sure­ly con­vert­ed some to the posi­tion on Venice once advanced by no less a schol­ar and lover of that sto­ried city than Jan Mor­ris: “Let her sink.”

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Venice Works: 124 Islands, 183 Canals & 438 Bridges

Huge Hands Rise Out of Venice’s Waters to Sup­port the City Threat­ened by Cli­mate Change: A Poignant New Sculp­ture

The Venice Time Machine: 1,000 Years of Venice’s His­to­ry Gets Dig­i­tal­ly Pre­served with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence and Big Data

Watch City Out of Time, a Short Trib­ute to Venice, Nar­rat­ed by William Shat­ner in 1959

Venice in a Day: From Day­break to Sun­set in Time­lapse

Venice is Way Under Water…

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How Radical Gardeners Took Back New York City

in Environment, History, Nature, Travel | June 25th, 2021

New York­ers’ rela­tion­ship to New York City com­mu­ni­ty gar­dens is large­ly informed by how long we’ve lived here.

Do you remem­ber the 60s, when a fis­cal cri­sis and white flight result­ed in thou­sands of vacant lots and aban­doned build­ings in low income neigh­bor­hoods?

Activists like Hat­tie Carthan and Liz Christy sprung from such soil, cre­at­ing youth pro­grams, haul­ing away debris, and putting con­stant pres­sure on elect­ed offi­cials to trans­form those urban waste­lands into green oases.

Ver­dant sites like the Bow­ery Hous­ton Com­mu­ni­ty Farm and Gar­den (now known as the Liz Christy Gar­den) improved air qual­i­ty, low­ered tem­per­a­tures, and offered a pleas­ant gath­er­ing place for neigh­bors of all ages.

In the ‘80s, the city boast­ed 1000 com­mu­ni­ty gar­dens, most­ly in neigh­bor­hoods con­sid­ered blight­ed. School aged chil­dren learned how to plant, tend, and har­vest veg­eta­bles. Immi­grant mem­bers intro­duced seeds new to Amer­i­can-born gar­den­ers, to help com­bat both home­sick­ness and food inse­cu­ri­ty. On site arts pro­grams flour­ished. There were al fres­co birth­day par­ties, con­certs, movie screen­ings, hol­i­day cel­e­bra­tions, per­ma­cul­ture class­es, com­mu­ni­ty meet­ings…. Gar­dens became focal points for com­mu­ni­ty engage­ment. Par­tic­i­pants were under­stand­ably proud, and invest­ed in what they’d built.

As Yon­nette Flem­ing, founder of the com­mu­ni­ty-led mar­ket at the Hat­tie Carthan Com­mu­ni­ty Gar­den and Farmer’s Mar­ket, says in the above episode of Vox’s Miss­ing Chap­ter: “Com­mu­ni­ty gar­dens grow com­mu­ni­ties, for the peo­ple, to be run by the peo­ple, for the ben­e­fit of the peo­ple.”

In the mid-90s, new­ly elect­ed May­or Rudy Giu­liani sided with devel­op­ers over cit­i­zens. More than half of the city’s gar­dens were bull­dozed to make way for lux­u­ry res­i­dences.

Tra­di­tion­al­ly low-rise neigh­bor­hoods like the East Vil­lage and Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuyvesant would become increas­ing­ly fash­ion­able dur­ing the ear­ly days of the new mil­len­ni­um. New arrivals with lit­tle inter­est in neigh­bor­hood his­to­ry might assume that the side­walks had always been lined with cute cafes and hip­ster bars, not to men­tion trees. (In real­i­ty, Carthan was 64 when she began her suc­cess­ful cam­paign to line Bed-Stuy with trees, and land­mark a ven­er­a­ble Mag­no­lia that was at risk of being torn down.)

Per­haps hop­ing to com­mand younger view­ers’ atten­tion, Vox’s Miss­ing Chap­ter opens not with the rich his­to­ry of New York City’s com­mu­ni­ty gar­dens, but rather the many recipes for seed bombs on Tik­Tok. The glass half full per­spec­tive on our 500-strong sur­viv­ing gar­dens can ring a bit emp­ty to those who lost the fight to pre­serve a num­ber of East Harlem gar­dens just a few short years ago.

Don’t for­get your roots! Christy’s type­writ­ten, hand illus­trat­ed Green Gueril­las recipe for seed bombs is below. (If you want to try it at home, please use seeds native to your area.)

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A New Inter­ac­tive Map Shows All Four Mil­lion Build­ings That Exist­ed in New York City from 1939 to 1941

Behold the New York City Street Tree Map: An Inter­ac­tive Map That Cat­a­logues the 700,000 Trees Shad­ing the Streets of New York City

New York City: A Social His­to­ry (A Free Online Course from N.Y.U.) 

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Art of Creating a Bonsai: One Year Condensed Condensed Into 22 Mesmerizing Minutes

in Art, Nature | June 4th, 2021

To be a good writer, one must be a good read­er. This is made true by the need to absorb and assess the work of oth­er writ­ers, but even more so by the need to eval­u­ate one’s own. Writ­ing is re-writ­ing, to coin a phrase, and effec­tive re-writ­ing can only fol­low astute re-read­ing. This con­di­tion applies to oth­er arts and crafts as well: take bon­sai, the regard­ing of which con­sti­tutes a skill in and of itself. To craft an aes­thet­i­cal­ly pleas­ing minia­ture tree, one must first be able to see an aes­thet­i­cal­ly pleas­ing minia­ture tree — or per­haps to feel one. “Bon­sai trees (and inspir­ing art in gen­er­al) give me a ‘feel­ing’ that is hard to describe,” as prac­ti­tion­er Bucky Barnes puts it in the video above. “I’m not get­ting it from this tree yet, so I know I need to con­tin­ue tweak­ing.”

That tree is a Japan­ese larch bon­sai, Barnes’ year of work on which the video com­press­es into a mere 22 min­utes. The work is more than a mat­ter of water and sun­light: aspects that must be con­sid­ered and aggres­sive­ly mod­i­fied, include the plan­t’s view­ing and pot­ting angle, the num­ber and direc­tion of its branch­es, and even the struc­ture of roots spread­ing through the soil below.

Barnes breaks out a range of clip­pers, knives, pastes, brush­es, and wires — part of a suite of tools that, at least for the mas­ters back in bon­sai’s home­land of Japan, can get expen­sive indeed. To us lay­men, the tree that results from this year of work looks pret­ty respectable, but by bon­sai stan­dards its exis­tence has only just begun. Over the com­ing decades — or even the com­ing cen­turies — it could take on oth­er qual­i­ties alto­geth­er. When well main­tained, bon­sai only improve with age.

As demon­strat­ed in the video just above, how­ev­er, not every bon­sai receives such main­te­nance. A prod­uct of the same Youtube chan­nel, Bon­sai Releaf, “Restor­ing a Neglect­ed Chi­nese Juniper Bon­sai” begins with a tree that, to many of its near­ly four mil­lion view­ers so far, prob­a­bly does­n’t look too bad. Barnes sees things dif­fer­ent­ly: begin­ning by sketch­ing the tree, appar­ent­ly a stan­dard stage of his pro­fes­sion­al bon­sai-view­ing process, he sets about cor­rect­ing a host of defi­cien­cies like “low­er branch­es com­pet­ing for light,” exces­sive upward or down­ward growth (as well as some­thing called “weak crotch growth”), and dead tis­sue not delin­eat­ed from liv­ing. This labo­ri­ous oper­a­tion requires an even wider tool set, encom­pass­ing Dremels and even flames. But by the video’s end, any­one can see the dif­fer­ence in the tree itself — and more impor­tant­ly, feel it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art & Phi­los­o­phy of Bon­sai

This 392-Year-Old Bon­sai Tree Sur­vived the Hiroshi­ma Atom­ic Blast & Still Flour­ish­es Today: The Pow­er of Resilience

A Dig­i­tal Ani­ma­tion Com­pares the Size of Trees: From the 3‑Inch Bon­sai, to the 300-Foot Sequoia

What Makes the Art of Bon­sai So Expen­sive?: $1 Mil­lion for a Bon­sai Tree, and $32,000 for Bon­sai Scis­sors

Daisu­gi, the 600-Year-Old Japan­ese Tech­nique of Grow­ing Trees Out of Oth­er Trees, Cre­at­ing Per­fect­ly Straight Lum­ber

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Art of Balancing Stones: How Artists Use Simple Materials to Make Impossible Sculptures in Nature

in Art, Nature | May 31st, 2021

Not so long ago, a wave of long-form entreaties rolled through social media insist­ing that we stop build­ing rock cairns. Like many who scrolled past them, I could­n’t quite imag­ine the offend­ing struc­tures they meant, let alone recall con­struct­ing one myself. The cairns in ques­tion turned out, mun­dane­ly, to be those lit­tle stacks of flat rocks seen in parks, along­side trails and streams. They’re as com­mon in South Korea, where I live, as they seem to be in the Unit­ed States. Both coun­tries also share a great enthu­si­asm for Insta­gram, and it’s the appar­ent Insta­gram­ma­bil­i­ty of these cairns that has increased their num­ber (and con­se­quent eco­log­i­cal and cul­tur­al harm) in recent years.

No mat­ter how many likes they gar­ner, these com­mon cairns require lit­tle or no skill in the build­ing. The same can hard­ly be said of rock bal­anc­ing, an art that demands a great deal more dis­ci­pline and patience than many an influ­encer can muster. The Wired video at the top of the post pro­files one of the most famous liv­ing rock-bal­ancers, a Cana­di­an named Michael Grab.

“One of my core dri­ves is to make the for­ma­tion as impos­si­ble as pos­si­ble,” he says, refer­ring to the appar­ent defi­ance of grav­i­ty per­formed by all the rocks he finds and arranges into stacks, arcs, orbs, and oth­er unlike­ly shapes. In fact, it is grav­i­ty alone that holds his art­works togeth­er — and repeat­ed­ly destroys them in the count­less tri­als and errors before their com­ple­tion.

Yes, Grab has an Insta­gram account: Grav­i­ty Glue, on which he show­cas­es his pre­car­i­ous­ly sol­id sculp­tures as well as their nat­ur­al con­texts. So does Jon­na Jin­ton, a Swedish “artist, pho­tog­ra­ph­er and Youtu­ber” who also bal­ances rocks. “It’s such a great way to also bal­ance myself,” she says in the short video just above, “and to cre­ate some­thing beau­ti­ful at the same time.” For her, the art has become a form of med­i­ta­tion: “As I try to find a tiny, tiny lit­tle bal­ance point, my thoughts are com­plete­ly silent, and that’s a very good feel­ing.” Jin­ton does­n’t say whether she per­son­al­ly ensures the destruc­tion of her works, as Grab does. But doing so, as one should note before enter­ing the rock-bal­ancer lifestyle, may keep you on the bet­ter side of the eco­log­i­cal rec­om­men­da­tions and indeed the law. But then the afore­men­tioned anti-cair­nism seemed to hit its zenith in ear­ly 2020, since which time, it’s fair to say, the world has had more press­ing con­cerns.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Philo­soph­i­cal Appre­ci­a­tion of Rocks in Chi­na & Japan: A Short Intro­duc­tion to an Ancient Tra­di­tion

Dis­cov­er the Japan­ese Muse­um Ded­i­cat­ed to Col­lect­ing Rocks That Look Like Human Faces

Watch a Mas­ter­piece Emerge from a Sol­id Block of Stone

A Mod­ern Drum­mer Plays a Rock Gong, a Per­cus­sion Instru­ment from Pre­his­toric Times

Watch an Archae­ol­o­gist Play the “Litho­phone,” a Pre­his­toric Instru­ment That Let Ancient Musi­cians Play Real Clas­sic Rock

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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