Tag: Ecology

Bookmarked Planting trees isn’t enough. Here’s why we need tiny man-made forests by Tara Yarlagadda (Inverse)

A mini-forest is a small ecologically robust forest that can be planted by communities in parks and cities, in schoolyards and churchyards, and beside busy roads. It’s flipped traditional landscaping on its head. You get more biodiversity and a different appearance. It’s a dense band of multi-layer trees as opposed to the elegant but less ecologically useful line of single species down the side of the street.

Tara Yarlagadda interviews Hannah Lewis about her book Mini-Forest Revolution which explores the use of the Miyawaki method to rewild the world.

I am always fascinated about the idea of ‘rewilding’. It is intriguing to think what difference it would make to turn fields of grass that fill many of the city parks in Melbourne with thick forests of native trees? Although I am not sure I want apex preditors with such rewilding. This all has me thinking a bit differently about just planting trees to hold back a desert.

ᔥ “Clive Thompson” in “Mini Forests”, Wooden Lego, and Poets Responding To The News | by Clive Thompson | Jun, 2022 | Medium ()

Replied to EdTech is killing us all: facing up to the environmental consequences of digital education by Neil Selwyn (EduResearchMatters)

All these technologies uses offer some recompense, but they in no way offset the hugely detrimental life-cycles of the digital products and processes that education is now reliant on. Instead, the end-to-end environmental consequences of any form of digital technology use quickly eclipse any hopes of digital education somehow being a green option. As such, every use of digital technology contributes to the degradation of our planet in ways that education urgently needs to face up to.

Although the obvious issue seems to be devices in the classroom, I think another challenge is in administration where schools are collecting more and more data. It feels like the world is becoming more and more clerical. I wonder if there is a ceiling to this and what this might look like in the future?

Syndicated at Read Write Collect
Bookmarked Do Trees Talk to Each Other? (Smithsonian)

A revolution has been taking place in the scientific understanding of trees, and Wohlleben is the first writer to convey its amazements to a general audience. The latest scientific studies, conducted at well-respected universities in Germany and around the world, confirm what he has long suspected from close observation in this forest: Trees are far more alert, social, sophisticated—and even intelligent—than we thought.

From Beech Trees in Germany to Douglas Firs in Canada to Acacia Trees in Sub-Saharan Africa, this post documents a change in the way that we appreciate trees and the connections to their environment.

“Some are calling it the ‘wood-wide web,’” says Peter Wohlleben in German-accented English. “All the trees here, and in every forest that is not too damaged, are connected to each other through underground fungal networks. Trees share water and nutrients through the networks, and also use them to communicate. They send distress signals about drought and disease, for example, or insect attacks, and other trees alter their behavior when they receive these messages.”

via Clive Thompson