Restoring Nature

Peter Fiekowsky, an MIT-educated physicist and engineer, has written "Climate Restoration: The Only Future That Will Sustain the Human Race" to address the problem of the shortfall of the Paris Accords (COP21) which will not reduce emissions sufficiently to keep global temperatures at or below 1.5C. This will necessitate removing a trillion tons of excess CO2 from the atmosphere by 2050, and he proceeds to lay out the technologies for achieving this. He identifies four major technologies for greenhouse gas removal and storage: Ocean iron fertilization; synthetic limestone manufacture; seaweed permaculture; and methane oxidation.These technologies are existing practices and they require little if any government funding, since they can be financed largely through existing markets. These are necessary approaches because mechanical systems for removing carbon don't even come close, and building out these systems has a significant carbon footprint.

COP26 in 2021 did not improve on the emissions reduction quotas, but "Adaptation and Loss and Damage" was incorporated as another dimension of the accords. Philanthropies and country governments pledged funds for loss and damage. These efforts could be scaled up considering the mounting challenges of the most vulnerable communities. Last year's COP27 held in Egypt further incorporated the impact of climate change on water, food security and forests because of the increasing aridification around the globe that threatens the natural resources that we rely upon for life.

So there's a significant amount of work needed for policy development among the world's countries, which Fiekowsky has been instrumental in establishing. The Foundation for Climate Restoration (FCR), which works with scientists, innovators, policymakers, citizens, faith leaders, activists, and students to create the understanding and policy needed to further climate restoration. The Foundation has been instrumental in the adoption of climate restoration as a goal by both the Vatican and the United Nations.

Ecosystem restoration offers the opportunity to effectively halt and reverse degradation, improve ecosystem services and recover biodiversity. One interesting thought problem about natures' ability to reconstruct itself in the absence of humans is offered up by Emma Bryce. Her article, "What would happen to Earth if humans went extinct?". But this process would take millions of years to restore the earth to establish the original wilderness that existed before humans migrated out of Africa. It might behoove us to retain just a few million humans to get back to some semblance of balance in the ecosphere, and significantly reduce the human carbon footprint.

Trees of Life

The film above is from Patagonia Films - Treeline: A Story Written in Rings, available in full for the first time. Follow a group of skiers, snowboarders, scientists and healers to the birch forests of Japan, the red cedars of British Columbia and the bristlecones of Nevada, as they explore an ancient story written in rings. Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist working in the old-growth forests of British Columbia, discovered that trees “communicate,” or share carbon with each other, through giant fungal networks under the ground. In the film, she explains why we might have deeply rooted (no pun intended) connections to these immobile giants. “When we look at the pattern of a mycorrhizal network,” she says, “when we actually dissect it and look at all the mathematical relationships, it’s the same pattern as a neural network…it’s kind of like a brain.” The principles of this ecology, plus its application to urban planning and urban forestry, is discussed here as being grounded in Frank Lloyd Wright's view of design with nature.

Trees are not just a symbol of life, they are the actual givers of life on this planet, providing oxygen, food and nutrients and absorbing carbon. Yet our human civilization is bent upon destroying these crucial life-giving forests for energy and profits. Extensive documentation of the global dwindling forests has been done over the last 30 years, and time is running out on conserving them. World Wildlife Foundation studies deforestation and and the increasing rate of forest degradation. The main cause of deforestation is agriculture (poorly planned infrastructure is emerging as a big threat too) and the main cause of forest degradation is illegal logging. We’re losing 18.7 million acres of forests annually, equivalent to 27 soccer fields every minute.

Are there ways to push back at the local level? An example is provided by: Planting Trees as Resistance and Empowerment: The Remarkable Illustrated Story of Wangari Maathai, the First African Woman to Win the Nobel Peace Prize. This blogpost examines a lifetime of forest renewal by a woman who used social strategies and organizational protest to protect and expand the Kenyan forests. On October 8, 2004, midway through her sixty-fifth year, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. By the end of her life, the movement she started had planted thirty million trees, re-imagining the ecological and economic landscape of possibility for generations of Kenyans to come, and modeling for the rest of the world a new form of civic agency standing up for nature and humanity as an indivisible whole.

Forest Trends goes further with very specific larger efforts and global financial strategies in their series about how forests are our best climate hedge. There are very specific approaches outlined towards saving and expanding our natural carbon sinks, and there have been historic difficulties in establishing markets for conserving tropical forests, among others.

Our planet is on the cusp of collapsing with its ecosystem decimated by human growth and consumption. A new report explains how close we've come to irreversible changes in our environment, and urges immediate, global action.This report suggests ‘High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End’ starting in 2050. The climate change analysis was written by a former fossil fuel executive and backed by the former chief of Australia's military.

A Reckoning

Bill McKibben has just published an article in the New Yorker: How Extreme Weather is Shrinking the Planet. With wildfires, heat waves and rising sea levels, large tracts of the earth are at risk of becoming uninhabitable. But the fossil-fuel industry continues its assault on the facts. However, the impacts of our changing climate have now hit home with a vengeance, and it's our collective responsibility to deal with its causes and the consequences of our civilization's activities on our planet.

With the Camp Fire in northern California two-thirds contained, the Woolsey Fire in southern California all but extinguished and a sky-cleansing rain, with possible flash floods forecast for Northern California today or tomorrow, Californians are now facing a grim reality: these staggering catastrophes are becoming routine. They've been dubbed the "new abnormal". By the century’s end, simultaneous disasters—three or more at once—could in fact be California’s norm, unless aggressive measures are taken, according to a major paper published this November in the journal Nature Climate Change.

California climate policies are currently shifting rapidly to address the impacts of climate change, as well as establishing carbon-neutral strategies as a result of these catastrophic events. These extremes are now occurring regularly, as well as the impact of a drier climate that reduces the availability of water in the state, which is also happening across the entire US southwest.

But the real work lies ahead in an immediate, aggressive reduction in the carbon dioxide emissions across the planet, in order to keep the temperature changes below the 1.5C threshold as negotiated via the UN Climate Change secretariat through the annual COP meetings. At the Global Climate Action Summit, which concluded in San Francisco this last September, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa said: “This Summit and its Call to Action make an important contribution towards achieving our collective goal: to keep global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius in line with the Paris Agreement. It will encourage governments worldwide to step up their actions, demonstrating the vital role that states and regions, cities, companies, investors, and civil society are playing to tackle climate change.”

This summit was a preparation for the upcoming COP24 that will be held in Katowice, Poland this year on December 2 - 14. At this time, more commitments from all countries and worldwide corporations will need to be made so that global actions can be undertaken which moves our civilization into a radically different mode of energy use, transportation and building construction. Our forests on all continents must be restored and allowed to expand into healthy ecosystems as part of the climate mitigation that will have to happen. The preparatory dialogue for this collective action is being supported by some of the major corporations, as well. They are prepared to participate in Katowice and implement the necessary actions according to the framework and goals outlined at COP24. A good example is Iberdrola, a leading renewable energy company that exemplifies the benefits of moving rapidly to a non-carbon based economy.

It will take an enormous, unprecedented effort by all countries and corporate entities to engage in immediate and very radical transformations of our economy and our way of living in concert with the natural environment. It's the biggest challenge that humanity has ever faced, and will reflect our collective ability to undertake actions that regenerate our planet and reconfigure our cities to reduce humanity's footprint in favor of natural processes.

Update 12/13/18: Many mega-projects simply aren’t worth the risk to investors, host nations, or the environment.

Update 12/16/18: Major companies like McKinsey are pursuing business in countries with little regard for human rights.

FLLW: Nature is my manifestation of God

An article from the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change discusses the means by which we could now limit climate change to 1.5°C , employing the chart shown above. It shows six carbon dioxide removal strategies, including afforestation and reforestation. It will be a major struggle to pull it off without employing some form of technological carbon capture. So in other words, we not only need to leave all the fossil fuels in the ground, starting immediately, but also absorb most of the carbon we've released in the last 50 years. But according to the latest issue of Science magazine, which is devoted to forest health, every major forest biome is struggling. While each region suffers from unique pressures, the underlying thread that connects them all is undeniably human activity. Deforestation is changing our climate.

We need to immediately stop the destruction of forests and watersheds, and find ways to restore them. Understanding how they work as an ecosystem is an important first step. Scientists that study biology and horticulture know that plants talk to each other and communicate using an internet of fungus. “Mother Trees” use fungal communication systems to preserve forests in a mutual cooperation strategy. Suzanne Simard has developed this approach for decades. Her TED Talk, How Trees Talk To Each Other, is here.

We also need to provide for a diversity of the forest ecosystem, which is an important component of its system resiliency. Biodiversity and complexity are anti-entropic. Science Magazine examines this in a special issue: "Forest health in a changing world." Preservation of global ecology and a Green New Deal will be critical to drastically reducing the global carbon emissions.

Regeneration and expansion of our urban forests can be another key approach to creating carbon sinks. Provide landscaped environments in places where the land has been paved over and the forests plowed under. Restoration of functional green areas and watersheds in the urban heart of a city can be key to its financial regeneration as well, such as the Master Plan for the Los Angeles River Revitalization currently underway.

Regeneration

The idea that human habitation can be used as a tool to regenerate ecology is finally coming into its own after experimentation with projects all over the world. It's not a zero-sum game, it's a way of bringing together all the environmental and engineering factors together in a place such that it renews natural processes instead of destroying them. It takes a great deal of skill, knowledge and experience to work out the systems that result in the creation of place that interconnects all these factors. Many major corporate engineering, design and development firms are investing in think tanks to take this to the next level, such as Arup, a global design, planning and engineering firm.

Jerry Yudelson's moderation of a panel at Greenbuild 2011, hosted by the Green Building Council in Toronto, centered on a discussion of Ecodistricts. An ‘ecodistrict’ is an urban planning term for a specific section of an urban area, whether a neighborhood, school campus, industrial park, etc. that can operate as a self-contained and self-sufficient entity, while remaining connected to other adjacent ecodistricts. This concept is widely used throughout Europe and parts of Asia, but is still relatively unknown here in North America. The ecodistrict concept brings technologies such as district heating, decentralized wastewater treatment, and local food production down to a manageable scale, both for construction and financing.

Howver, many of our college, university and school campuses in the USA are designed with this fundamental concept as a basis for infrastructure design because of the efficiencies involved. The use of ecology as part of its inherent function is the more advanced and recent application of the "green" ethos. Shared resources and local sourcing go beyond just the idea of energy conservation or LEED buildings, since systems and supply chains are integrated with biological systems to regenerate the local ecology. Major firms have developed this expertise, for example the Bioengineering Group, which is entirely about solving these kinds of challenges.

Urban areas are capable of tremendous regeneration, as well as becoming a node for this kind of intelligence in managing ecologies for the better. These nodes of density can also be nodes of regeneration given that the systems are synergistic and balance off of each other. The World Futures Council has developed an outline policy that can be used as a template for this kind of organic, metabolic pattern of habitation.

Thus regeneration is necessarily the paradigm of the future, and it doesn't need to be a bleak vision of dense boxes and rigid limits. Life is abundant if it is handled intelligently and reverently, something our mechanistic societies have taken thousands of years to figure out. Limits are the fount of creative thinking and living, and decisions made by a society for its best integration with natural systems and bounds will provide the needed resources and balance with natural environments. Our best engineers and designers are entirely capable of creating these systems if the will to make regeneration a priority exists in our societies.

Renewal

A meditation on the natural world: Ave Maria (Gounod), performed by Edward Simoni

This time of new birth in deepest winter reminds us to pay attention to our strategies for regenerative landscaping and watershed restoration. Our global forests are the crucial carbon sinks needed to reverse the effects of climate change. Progress made in recent years shows that mankind is not doomed to strip the planet of its forest cover. But the transition from tree-chopper to tree-hugger is not happening fast enough. Read further in this article from The Economist.

What's the Buzz?

The built environment is emerging as an amalgam of land forms, existing and historic structures, freeform interventions in urban landscapes, and an immense variety of spatial experiences that are responsive not only in form and space, but in energy applications as well as land and water conservation. These complexities and problem-solving exercises that were formerly too difficult to document, understand and develop have now become more accessible with the emerging tool of laser scanning. This technology is impacting all kinds of human interface with the environment, opening up avenues of design that were formerly too complex to carry out within mid-range budgets.

The technique of using laser scanning to capture very detailed data about existing landscapes and urban forms is relatively simple, generally using available laser scanning equipment in conjunction with aerial mapping data. This creates very accurate documentation of existing forms, but at the same time generates tremendously large files of point clouds that need to be imported into a 3D CAD (BIM) program with the use of extraction software. These are really, really gargantuan amounts of data that have to be manipulated in discrete portions with high-end computers and servers by experienced people in order to generate accurate digital models and specifications.

It's very time-consuming; however the technology is advancing to the point where its cost is coming into line with the detailed surveying and 3D documentation that has traditionally been used with existing structures. For major structures this cost is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but expending the time (months) and money to produce accurate 3D documentation of historic structures, especially, gives the designers and engineers an extremely accurate documentation of an existing site and its structures and landscapes. This allows for very fine-tuned design.

The implications of this kind of technology are that very accurate design analysis and engineering is possible at the beginning of the project, which leads to the sort of project concepts that let the structures and landscape integrate seamlessly into the ecosystem and potentially repair ineffective energy and water use issues. The reduction in cost of construction and the lifecycle expense to run and maintain an environment is the ultimate payoff in the new way of viewing the true costs of all structures. The effective, small interventions into the energy flows of a place are now much easier to comprehend, study and respond to with forms that do most of the work in a relatively passive way, capturing the sun, wind and water of its place. The effective miniaturization of the power and water systems can enhance the basic approach established by form and be expressed as small, quiet components of the form itself. People can then interact very flexibly with their public and private spaces; it becomes about choices and things that create positive experiences.

Miniaturization and life cycle strategies are the direction of the future, and this technology, applied in the early research of a place, can bring human habitation back into concert with its ecosystem. It can assist the natural energy and water flows instead of fighting them, and return the natural cycles of place to functional ecosystems. Intelligently applied, it can heal the wounds of earlier, clumsy development that didn't understand the world that existed around it. The flat Cartesian grid and the rigid boundaries can give way to gentler and more sympathetic scale and better engineering that responds to the dynamic forces on a site. The use of technology to increase our understanding and leverage intelligent use of tremendous amounts of data can lead the way to a regenerative process in our human habitats.

EcoRepairs: Urban Forestry

A method of re-establishing the critical carbon sinks around the world in order to balance the destructiveness of human development is that of planting urban forests and managing their growth and care. This vision of nature coexisting with human development instead of being subservient to it is beginning to take hold. What easier thing than to flow with the energy cycles of nature that provide water, oxygen, shade and food to the local climate regions? The principle that life adapts to the available resources is not only universal, but critical to the balance of nature.

There are examples of this urban forestry taking hold through community cooperation with government policies. The city of Johannesburg in South Africa has been documenting, managing and growing its massive urban forest since 2000. It is one of the largest urban forestry projects existent, to the point that it has regenerated lands that were previously barren:

On satellite pictures, the city looks like a rain forest, albeit man-made, but because the city does not get the required amount of rainfall to qualify as one, it passes as an urban forest. In the 1860s, when trekkers first settled on the Witwatersrand, there was not a tree in sight, and the area of rocky grassland was dotted with the odd shrub and several streams.

This was achieved with partnerships by many entities, public and private, and includes, by necessity in all urban reforestation efforts, a public re-education about the actual value that trees in managed ecosystems can provide.

Another one of the oldest and largest urban forests is in Rio de Janiero and its environs. Interestingly, the deforestation caused by human development generated an outcry in 1658 because of the degradation that impacted the water supply; without the trees that had created the natural forest, the wetlands dried up, as did the water supply. So in 1860 it was mandated that the barren hills be reforested with native plants and trees. It's an impressive story, but the warning is that 400 years later the forest has still not recovered its natural biodiversity, so the wild and natural forests are not yet able to maintain natural systems. This means that the natural regenerative mechanisms are still not back in place, and it's incumbent on us to take this to the next level - which is to pull back from the edges and allow natural regeneration to happen. More recent, urgent issues are created by political events in Brazil - In 20 years, Curitiba, Brazil has increased the green space per inhabitant from 0.5 to 52. The intention was to plant one and a half million trees in 20 years for, since the 1988 murder of Chico Mendes (the campaigner to save the rainforest), Brazil had been on the defensive in ecological circles.
Many communities worldwide foster their urban forest in an informal way with guidelines and arguments for citizens to cooperate in keeping the urban tree canopies healthy and promote undergrowth such as shrubs and mulch. It's a much more natural feel than you'd find in typical suburban roof farms that are acres of asphalt and a few scraggly trees captured in concrete sidewalks. This form of cancer can and should be reversed for the sake of sustainable habitation.

The New Climate

Armillaria root disease, also known as “oak root fungus,” is caused by Armillaria mellea. This fungus is native to forest trees in California. Its range includes the Central Valley, the San Gabriel Valley, the Coastal Mountains, and elevations up to 6,000 ft. of the Sierra Nevada. The pathogen known as Phythophora Root and Crown rot is a type of spore that lives in the soil, and is prevalent throughout the US.

Both of these are devastating gardens all over Southern California, including mine. I've spent the better part of the last two days dealing with identification through soil samples with LA County Agriculture and discussing this with knowledgeable nurseries and gardeners. It's quite a project to deal with these spores and fungi that are attacking the woody plants (azaleas, camellias, some of the roses) because of the humidity that's been so prevalent over the last few years, and the very cool summer we've had this year that keeps moisture in the ground. So the plants are losing the battle, and I'm looking at some ways to balance the humidity with plants that can tolerate them, as well as shifting the soil acidity. This changing humidity and increasing heat are creating the conditions that make it difficult to keep a garden healthy and "breathing". There's also the aspect that gardens are small, isolated fragments of nature and don't work together except as a possible urban tree canopy, which might just point the way towards re-establishing some healthy biospheres in suburban areas.

There's some interesting maps that show how land use change and forest fragmentation upsets the natural balance of the original ecosystems.

Loss of open space is a very real threat to the ability of ecosystems to repair themselves and remain in reasonably good health.A number of recent assessments cite the loss of open space as a top threat to the health and sustainability of ecosystems. This loss also reduces the ability of forests and grasslands to provide a multitude of public benefits, services, and products, including clean water and air, wildlife habitat, scenic beauty, and recreational opportunities.

Loss of open space has three aspects:

1. conversion – the replacement of natural areas with buildings, lawns, and pavement,
2. fragmentation – the division of open space into smaller isolated areas, and
3. parcellation – the subdivision of large acreages into smaller ownership parcels.

These processes must be stopped in the wilderness areas of Southern California because they're so destructive to the ecosystem. This urban fringe needs to pull back, and tracts of wilderness re-introduced so that the system can balance itself over time. Mountainous ridges, valleys, canyons and creeks must be protected and restored, not developed. There are also tremendous possibilities in urban fringe areas and properly managed suburban areas for re-establishing functional ecosystems by changing the kind of development that's allowed there.

It will involve a complete change in the thinking about what constitutes acceptable building practices, as well as a large reduction in paved areas. Which means that the automobile and its resulting sprawl will have to reverse its expansionary course. This produces completely different planning and building models, based upon passive principles and the blending of structure directly into nature and enhancing its processes. This is known as biomimicry, and has started to emerge as a design and planning principle that goes way beyond "green" into a rather radical regenerative strategy.

This is necessarily the way of the future, to live within nature rather than to obliterate it.

Equitable Kingdom

This is about an important article in Miller-McCune this last May/June, describing the impact of diminishing biodiversity due to human impact.

It's the idea of true stewardship by humanity using a different vision of the nature of life on earth. Not the idealized "Peaceable Kingdom" of religious belief and our way of rendering places ideally habitable and subsuming nature, or the wild kingdom that flourished thousands of years ago .The Earth is undergoing the sixth major mass extinction of life in its long history, because of human encroachment. As the average number of species found declines, its biomass diminishes, its systemic inertia disappears and its contribution to a stable, life-supporting biosphere will become far less able to counter the human activity that is devouring its systems.
The article has an excellent discussion of how biomimicry and reverse engineering of systems can teach us the critical lessons we need to understand.
The geochemistry of earth depends upon biological processes. The ecological impact of diminishing biomass in the natural environments due to fossil fuels, agriculture, land development and other things humanity has done to shift the patterns of life on this planet are immense. Our planetary systems rely upon diversity to absorb the carbon dioxide, in balance with its natural production. It's been found that more biodiversity in ecosystems leads to greater absorption of carbon dioxide. This concept is key to ecological coexistence, examples of which can be found in various places around the globe.
This need for conservation and preservation of wild lands is critical to the balance of our ecosphere, and there's been some mapping of resource areas that must be preserved and enhanced, lest we lose the very thing that provides us with the things the earth's life system depends upon.
The online article has some excellent graphics, Last of the Wild and Human Influence Index maps. It closes with this:
But the Equitable Kingdom is not just a new form of environmental activism; it is a new way of ordering the world, one that reveals the extraordinary significance of our species — a significance we always believed we had but couldn’t envision clearly. We saw ourselves as the paragon species in Eden and the Peaceable Kingdom as a matter of divine ordination, but such beliefs are not scientifically tenable and swayed only those who subscribed to the faiths that promoted them. To become the paragon of species in an Equitable Kingdom — a kingdom in which biodiversity serves as the foundation for environmental sustainability — is not only an achievable goal but a critical one if humans are to reform and in many ways dismantle a Domesticated Kingdom that has no inherent ability to ensure environmental equanimity. The biosphere lacked any central organizing force, leadership or stewards. By assuming the responsibilities of the paragon position it has always yearned for as a species, humanity can become the steward the Earth has never had.

Justice?

A lot of what makes human societies work is the way in which things are balanced against each other, in a democratic process. This concept is central to our Declaration of Independence and the amendments to the first Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We've celebrated this on the Fourth of July for over 235 years, now.

It's hard for us to remember some of these fundamental things in these days of corporate takeover of the United States government and its states, not to mention its local and regional governments. The most recent example of this is the ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of the limits on campaign financing by corporations. It's now essentially unlimited in its influence on politics.

How do these corporate structures impact local governments in California? This control is exerted via the regional organizations through their connections in Sacramento. In order to goose development in Southern California, regardless of the lack of demand or the limits of resources, the regional agencies are railroading a housing requirement in order to capture funding via AB 32 and SB 375. This is the RHNA formula, which local cities are not allowed to contest in any kind of legal forum. It forces development into cities that can sometimes exceed 150% of the supportable city resources, essentially an unfunded mandate for development, dictated by specious "population projections". This creates a burden for the local cities that drains their resources for infrastructure and public services (Police and Fire), and obliterates local planning that addresses the needs of the residents. It's a State takeover for profits for developers and more revenue under the Proposition 13 formula that exempts established businesses from fair-share property taxes. It also generates the greatest impact of greenhouse gasses from construction development, while trying to sell a reduction in vehicle miles traveled as the greenwash in all of this.

A prime example of how this is manipulated at the local level is laid out here at the Sierra Madre Tattler. It gets pretty ugly.

Control of local governance paves the way to the takeover of the General Plan and regional planning by these County and regional agencies in order to generate development revenue out of monies available from State and Federal Government funding sources. Regardless of need, regardless of the lack of capacity to supply the needed infrastructure and water, regardless of the environmental decimation that this creates.

This goes hand in hand with the undermining of CEQA being proposed by both parties, under the leadership of Schwarzenegger and Senate President Pro Tem leader Darrell Steinberg, author of SB 375. Developers and corporations in the driver's seat as usual. Can Justice prevail?

The Trees on the Hill

The Panch Rathas at Mamallapuram in the state of Tamil Nadu are monolithic cut-rock shrines from the 7th century. These incredible stones were carved on site to resemble wooden temples and structures that later became influential in South Indian style temple design. The name is from the sanskrit epic Mahabharata, naming the five Pandava brothers and their queen Draupadi.

This epic, supposedly recorded by Ganesha - a deity resembling an elephant, known as a "Remover of Obstacles" - is a rich tapestry of stories and legend that informs Hindu culture. It is also one of the great philosophical tracts of all time, with part of its material comprising the Bhagavad Gita, its verses encompassing Hindu theology. The great value of Hindu philosophy is that life is manifest as a web of energies that interact on material and spiritual levels. This is distinctly different from the western view of things as isolated entities that have only material properties.

This world view is one that has enabled the spiritual leader Sadhguru, acting through his Isha Foundation, to counteract the desertification of Tamil Nadu by claiming land decimated by illegal forest logging and then planting trees. Millions of trees. By the inhabitants of Tamil Nadu that barely touch the land in the way they live. They regenerated their land by returning trees to the hill.

Tree planting and urban forestry are becoming the way to bring nature back, in the face of climate change. It is a regenerative strategy that requires people to make individual efforts to plant trees and conserve water that have a huge aggregate effect on the local climate. So it takes people working with the planet. Many organizations across the globe are putting this strategy into place as the simplest and most effective way for local action to restore bioclimatic cycles and structures. Tree planting and watershed restoration efforts are going on all over the world as alternatives to resource depletion, human habitat expansion and the ecological damage wrought by large dams. It's a strategy that mimics the action of natural processes and networks by linking actions as a "hub" system. The very small seed that becomes exponential growth; once again the metaphor of the mustard seed, exponential growth of all life processes, the mathematics of fractals and the geometries of the spiral.

So this view that life is a web, and that it is possible to repair it exponentially with efforts from all people, is an idea whose time has come. It's not the brute force of machines and the concrete and the industry and the oil and the coal that deplete resources and ultimately come to a dead end. It's a transformative view that can inform the way humans inhabit the earth and enhance its resources.

Lunar Concepts Come to Earth

There's a program on BBC tonight, part of their "costing the earth" series. This one's about Masdar, a proposed city in Abu Dhabi's nearly moonscape desert. Look at it as kind of a terraforming exercise. The project, by Foster and Partners, is being constructed for the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is paying for it. It's actually a venture capital enterprise, consisting of an entire city initially funded by oil capital. "Global city for the future of energy" is the tagline.

Masdar is an energy company with venture capital backing that manages the Masdar Clean Tech Funds, a series of diversified venture capital investment vehicles focused on building portfolios of direct investments in some of the world’s most promising and pioneering technologies in clean tech and renewable energy. The concept video is here. It's a bit like living inside of a corporate industrial megalith of some kind, and I would imagine the social structure would be very different from that which is found in most older urban cities. Particularly since this is an Arab country under Muslim laws, and the entire city is privately owned and controlled. Render porn is by Foster, voice over by a Utopian fantasist. Is this how Brasilia got started?

The Masdar City site is here, being marketed at the world's first carbon-neutral, zero-waste city. A discussion, photos and information about Masdar City is also here at the Skyscrapercity site.

Jumping into real "space" is also part of Foster's portfolio, the Spaceport America in New Mexico. It's a fascinating structure with a look to future industry in low earth orbit.