If you suppose that there is a spectrum of ways that we adapt ourselves to our environment, then “architecture” might be at one end, and “cyborg” (whether psychotropic or technological) could be at the other.  In between, there would be “clothing”.  And if you really want to confuse the three and scramble your simplistic understanding of that spectrum, you talk about wearable architecture.

So I couldn’t let Cyborg Month pass without mentioning Mary Mattingly’s absolutely fantastic “Wearable Homes”.  I got in touch with Tim Maly and we ended up co-writing a post for Quiet Babylon, “Wearable Ethics”:

…“Wearable Homes” is a project – part architecture, part photography, part design fiction, part clothing (fashion is not quite the right word here) – which sits at that confused junction between cyborgs and architecture.

Anyways, the post is (thanks to Tim) about a good bit more than just Wearable Homes, so read it.  And if you want more Wearable Homes, you might enjoy this old Pruned post, and Mattingly’s website.

[Powerline pruning, photographed by flickr user Justin Berger]

In the seventh chapter of The Infrastructural City, “Landscape: Tree Huggers”, architect Warren Techentin discusses “landscape as a foundational infrastructure” in Los Angeles.  (By landscape, it’s worth noting, Techentin means specifically ‘plants’, usually ‘trees’, and quite often ‘cultivated trees’, though “accidentally imported” plants make the occasional appearance, as well.)

Techentin begins by describing the initial entanglements of Los Angeles with trees: the council tree near which the Gabrielino Indians built the village of Yangna, Los Angeles’ immediate predecessor; the orange groves, which brought both economic vitality and the ever-increasing demand for imported water to the basin; and, most recently, imported ornamental trees.

The most iconic of these imported trees, the palm, was particularly vital in constructing the image of Los Angeles.  Real estate developers — such as Venice Beach’s Abbot Kinney — planted rows of them to demarcate plots, botanical markers of future urbanisms.  The palm was particularly valued for its exotic effect, which suggested to the prospective resident that Los Angeles was not just a place of economic opportunity, but a paradise of tropical (or, at the very least, Mediterranean) leisure.

LANDSCAPING

[Landscaping, idealized and extreme; photographed by flickr user Anna Verlet]

The palm, though, is only one early tool in the kit of plants used to alter the image of the city, a kit which has been refined and expanded as Los Angeles developed its extensive and signature car culture.

“After people moved in, so did businesses, and trees and plants were again used to raise the value of commercial properties.  The front doors of many businesses in Los Angeles are accessed through parking lots so the effective use of landscaping to provide relief from the acres of asphalt is important for business.  In a city built around cars, new forms of landscaping comprised of edging, hedging, containment, concealment, signage, embankment, topiary, and decor emerged simultaneously with the developing car culture.  When the pedestrian space of the sidewalk disappeared amidst the spaces of strip malls and parking lots emerged between the street and the building, landscape again helped to soften the deleterious effects of the quickly erected, often bland commercial architecture.  Particularly at fast food restaurants, new concepts of landscape were deployed exuberantly, often monstrously, to enhance the meal.  Images of the pastoral suburban landscape of the Garden City, the exotic landscapes of Eden, and the topiary gardens of France and Japan were marshalled to screen the growing proliferation of urban artifacts: trash cans, electrical transformers, water meters, building edges, air conditioning condensers, and the sidewalk or roadway itself.  All of these objects disappear through carefully selected plantings, thus allowing patrons to enjoy an authentic indoor-outdoor eating experience a few feet away from their automobiles.  At any drive-through of a fast food restaurant, a country road is evoked as drivers circle their way between the speaker and pick-up window amidst plants that beautify the wait for food with a pleasing, planted environment that has grown over the stains, graffiti, garbage, insects, and dust of the city”

Landscaping — distinguished from other cultivated landscapes and gardens by its ubiquitous presence and banal qualities — is landscape as a real estate amenity.  This is the landscaped iteration of the ‘equity urbanism’ that we described in our essay, “The Shelter Category”, that was published in MONU #12:

“…ownership culture [and 'equity urbanism' are] ultimately not founded on the rationales of personal responsibility, security, or stability, but upon the notion that the home is an asset for the cultivation of personal wealth. Architecturally, this is a strange notion —the home as a wealth generator, not shelter – but it does a great deal to explain the dominance of the primary architectural forms of contemporary America, the cheaply built urban condo and the even more cheaply built suburban home. The notable thing about both these architectural forms is how un-engaged architects are with them: both in that most critical discourse is unconcerned with mass-produced housing and in that mass-produced housing is produced with very little input from architects.”

Like architects who are essentially un-engaged with mass-produced housing, landscape architects are essentially un-engaged with car culture landscapes, even though, as many critics have noted, landscape is the primary medium constituting the automotive city.  (We, at least in my experience, tend to shrink from the suggestion that there is any connection between what a ‘landscaper’ does and what a ‘landscape architect’ does.)

Techentin notes, though, that the palms are dying — many of old age, some of fungal and other diseases.  The city, eager to replace these exotic trees with native species, has no plans to import replacements, indicating, to Techentin, that the era of landscape as image in Los Angeles is ending (though, it should be said, there is no apparent end in sight for landscaping as a mass amenity, and part of the reason that the city is not replacing palms is that their use in luxury developments in Florida and the southwest has driven up prices).

PERFORMATIVE URBAN FORESTS

[Mullein -- Verbascum thapsussm -- via Peter del Tredici]

The question we are left with, then, is: what are future urban natures like?  Techentin argues that, as the palms die out — and, with them, perhaps also the idea that the landscape exists primarily to create an image — urban forests will become performative:

“While the city may be in the process of abandoning the palm as its foremost icon, trees continue to be enlisted as supplements to urban life…  This relationship has become more symbiotic as we have come to an understanding of the importance of trees in the urban ecosystem.  Taken in conjunction with plant life everywhere, trees collectively function like a giant machine — an enormous oxygen-producing and pollutant filtering infrastructure for the city.  Urban forests generate oxygen, absorb airborne and ground toxins, beautify, shade, create privacy, reduce water run-off into storm systems, stabilize soil to prevent erosion, mitigate reflected heat off roads and sidewalks, produce “curb appeal” thereby increasing real estate values, provide wind control, animal habitat, and a source of food and flowers.”

“If, however, trees in the city have traditionally been appreciated because they were useless — removed from their non-urban cousins, which exist to provide us with lumber and fuel — they are increasingly becoming machines, bits of living infrastructure.  The fall of the palm — that vapid, high-maintenance Hollywood starlet — is tied to this idea of trees moving from being merely ornamental to more performative organic machines — walling us in, generating the air we breath, shading our cities.”

One possible way in which forests might become performative, suggested by Techentin, is that they may be “hybrid mechanic-organic systems”:

“With the Frankenpine [cell phone towers which mimic tree forms] thriving, it is possible to speculate on an urban future in which thousands of artificial trees might be deployed throughout the city: on streets, in malls, and in our office landscapes.  In the next generation of office or mall equipment, we may see new tree-machines proliferating amongst this landscape–providing wireless communication, video monitoring, air filtration, security, and space for storage, digital or otherwise.  One can imagine a whole forest of imitative, performative, and embedded artificial “trees” deployed amongst real trees or, for that matter, prosthetic systems that would augment living trees, providing necessary features that we otherwise would find disagreeable to look at, some of which may provide a solution for some of today’s urban ills such as the reintroduction of animal habitats, methane gas venting, hazmat, and security monitoring systems, and so on.”

This, I suppose, might seem far-fetched and a stretching of the ‘tree’ metaphor until it becomes very thin indeed, but I’m not so sure that it is entirely ridiculous.  What are these carbon storage structures, if not cybernetic trees (the engineers even refer to them as “artificial trees” configured in a “forest”), and what are the Voltrees (elaborated upon here by Pruned), if not prosthetic trees?

[Fall Panicum grows in pavement, via Peter del Tredici]

But, I would add (and this seems much more important to me): the rise of the performative tree will also be seen in the acceptance and valuation of “crypto-forests”, “cosmopolitan” plant communities, and invasive species.  Techentin says: “Wild nature, or what may be left of it, seems all but removed from collective experience.” Despite this collective remove, though, there is wild nature in the city, only it is invasive and post-human, growing in legal and physical spaces of abandonment: a fence on property line, a sliver of land between two properties deemed to have no value as real-estate, the concrete bed of a channelized river.

I’m reminded of the fantastic new field guide, Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast, which is written by Peter del Tredici, who is both a botanist and researcher at the Arnold Arboretum and a lecturer for Harvard’s landscape program.  Wild Urban Plants, though it is first and foremost a guide to the identification and characteristics of what del Tredici calls “cosmopolitan plants” — those plants which are adapted to the contaminated soils, frequent disturbance regimes, and harsh growing conditions which characterize urban ecologies, and so are able to survive and even thrive without maintenance or care in cities — is also an opportunity for del Tredici to make the argument that we ought to begin to value these plants (many of whom are often lumped together under the derogatory rubric of “invasives”) and the communities that they form, because they provide ecological services at a uniquely low cost.

Quoting at length from del Tredici’s recent article in Natural History (PDF):

“The ecology of the city is defined not only by the cultivated plants that require maintenance and the protected remnants of natural landscapes, but also by the spontaneous vegetation that dominates the neglected interstices. Greenery fills the vacant spaces between our roads, homes, and businesses; lines ditches and chain-link fences; sprouts in sidewalk cracks and atop neglected rooftops. Some of those plants, such as box elder, quaking aspen, and riverside grape, are native species present before humans drastically altered the land. Others were brought in intentionally or unintentionally by people, including chicory, Norway spruce, and Japanese knotweed. And still others, among them common ragweed, path rush ( Juncus tenuis), and tufted lovegrass (Eragrostis pectinacea), arrived on their own, dispersed by wind, water, or wild animals. Such species grow and reproduce in many American cities, especially cities with faltering economies, without being planted or cared for. They can provide important social and ecological services at very little cost to taxpayers, and if left undisturbed long enough they may even develop into woodlands.

There is no denying that most people consider many such plants to be “weeds.” From a utilitarian perspective, a weed is any plant that grows on its own where people do not want it to grow. From the biological perspective, weeds are opportunistic plants that are adapted to disturbance in all its myriad forms, from bulldozers to acid rain. Their pervasiveness in the urban environment is simply a reflection of the continual disruption that characterizes that habitat—they are not its cause. [Emphasis mine.] …

In general, the successful urban plant needs to be flexible in all aspects of its life history, from seed germination through flowering and fruiting; opportunistic in its ability to take advantage of locally abundant resources that may be available for only a short time; and tolerant of the stressful growing conditions caused by an abundance of pavement and a paucity of soil. The plants that grow in our cities are a cosmopolitan array of species that somehow managed to survive the transition from one land use to another as cities developed. The sequence starts with native species adapted to ecological conditions before the city was built. Those are followed, more or less in sequence, by species adapted to agriculture and pasturage, to pavement and compacted soil, to lawns and landscapes, to infrastructure edges and environmental pollution—and ultimately to vacant lots and rubble…

Based on the extensive literature on the ecosystem services provided by native and cultivated plants, one can easily generate an impressive list of the ways spontaneous vegetation makes cities more habitable for people as well as animals: temperature reduction, food and habitat for wildlife, erosion control on slopes, stream and riverbank stabilization, excess nutrient absorption in wetlands, soil building on degraded land, improved air quality, noise reduction, and, of course, carbon sequestration.”

LANDSCAPING AS INFRASTRUCTURE

[CMG Landscape Architecture's "Crack Garden" -- unfortunately planted rather than spontaneous, but you get the idea.]

Each of these possibilities involves a common element: the expansion of the agency of the landscape architect.  (Expansion, though, should not be an egotistical moment, but an opportunity to engage in new forms of collaboration.)

Those two primary possibilities (the rise of the performative urban forest and the engagement of landscape architects in the design of ‘banal’ landscaping) might even merge, not in landscape infrastructures, but in landscaping as infrastructure.  To borrow the terminology of Stephen’s previous post: landscaping is currently culturally and financially performative, but it could become ecologically and infrastructurally performative.  (To do so, though, may involve difficult re-framings of the cultural expectations it performs for.)  This, I think, begins with prosaic shifts like the introduction of curb-side rain gardens or front lawns that are variously xeriscaped and edible, but I don’t think it can end there.

I also suspect that, if landscape architects are involved in such a change, it will require assuming a somewhat different set of roles and design methodologies than those we have traditionally employed: there may be some amount of employment to be found in designing edible estates and cosmopolitan succession regimes for a mass market, but first that mass market must be persuaded of the value of such landscapes.

The need for such persuasion — a change in what might be termed vernacular landscape norms — reminds me of an article in the April issue of Metropolis, which described the recent work of Build Change, a non-profit organization that works in areas affected by earthquakes to help locals build in ways that are more seismically sound. “Careful seismic engineering”, author Karrie Jacobs notes, “can be broken down into simple rules that can be followed at relatively low cost”.  In Haiti, Build Change designed sample housing plans and built a pilot house that meet those criteria using local materials and building techniques, but — most interestingly for our discussion of landscaping norms — “also distilled their design into ‘six simple rules’, which appeared on posters as dos and don’ts”:

“… at least 6,000 homes in Indonesia and China [which Build Change worked in after earlier earthquakes]… have been built following the rules developed… What [Build Change] does is exactly the opposite of an architectural competition.  It’s not about coming up with a signature solution but disseminating a set of rules that if truly effective, disappear into the venacular.”

The posters that Jacobs describes are a fascinating architectural act.  Architecture, here, is not a building, but a viral meme, infecting the genetic code of a country’s building practices.  This, obviously, is relatively necessary and efficacious after a disaster, when the traditional practices of architecture may be ineffective, too expensive, and too slow, but it also suggests something about how landscape architects might look to induce a shift towards ecologically and infrastructurally performative landscaping.  The employment of such alternative practices — I’m thinking of a landscape-centered design advocacy organization, for instance, akin to the Center for Urban Pedagogy, publishing pamphlets of landscape tactics akin CUP’s Making Policy Public series — may yet offer the opportunity to influence the future forests of the infrastructural city.

[The lower reaches of the Los Angeles River, via google maps]

Like Barry Lehrman’s chapter on Owens Lake, the second chapter of The Infrastructural City, “Flood Control Freakology” deals with a water-bearing infrastructure.  Unlike the aqueduct and the damaged playa the aqueduct produced, though, which exist to bring water to the city, this second hydrological infrastructure, the heavily-channelized Los Angeles River, has been re-constructed to remove water from the city.  The chapter’s author is David Fletcher, a Californian landscape architect and one of the contributors to the recent Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan.  Fletcher describes the Los Angeles River not just through the dominant “narrative of loss”, which focuses on the destructive qualities of its transformation from a perennial “meshwork of meandering rivers, streams, arroyos, and washes” to a “fully-engineered flood-control system”, but also as what Fletcher terms a “freakology”, or hybrid system composed of both infrastructural and natural parts, which supports “a vibrant mix of varied ecologies”:

“The present river ecology is a churning soup of exotic and native vegetative communities that have been introduced since the nineteenth century, some by design, others by accident.  Tourism, shipping, rail, industry, agriculture, and ornamental vegetation have brought humans, animals, insects, and seeds, from around the globe to colonize the river’s naturalized reaches.  These reaches have established a curious equilibrium with their ecologies, depending on nutrient-rich flows from sewage treatment and urban runoff…”

Fletcher’s description of “freakology” continues on for pages, reading like a whirlwind tour of ignored urban landscapes whose conductor is madly in love with what others would see as malignancies and degeneracies: “thousands of multicolored bags — known as ‘Los Angeles moss’ — hang from trees”; human encampments line the concrete channels, “smoke emanating from well-furnished stormdrain apartments”; “thriving parrot colonies” are composed of “ragtag teams of birds that escaped private homes as well as from the old Busch Gardens amusement park, closed in the early 1980s”; “bridges house bat colonies and swallow nests”, which are “critical to urban disease vector control”.

[A point of transition between concrete-bottom (at right) and dirt-bottom (at left), photographed by the awesome FOVICKS, or Friends of Vast Industrial Kafka-esque Sturctures, for a photoessay on the Los Angeles River]

The purpose of this cataloging, though, is not merely to assemble a wunderkammer of landscape curiosities, but also aimed at describing, through the creation of “new narratives and vocabularies”, a more realistic direction for the future of the river.  Recent efforts to transform the river are rooted in bucolic aesthetic expectations, demanding a return to — or at least a simulation of — the pre-urban condition of the river, typically understood to mean restored flood plains, daylighted streams, un-channelized river banks, and re-established populations of native flora and fauna.  Fletcher suggests, though, that these expectations are not grounded in an honest evaluation of the ecological potential of the system, constrained as it is by the limited quantities of water available to Los Angeles:

“The future of the river and its infrastructural ecologies depends on water availability and flood-control policy.  With prolonged drought conditions and growing pressure on water supplies in the American West, Los Angeles will have to become more self-reliant, turning to conservation and greywater reuse as major sources of water savings…  As the city grows rapidly over the next decades — primarily through sprawl and infill densification — and as wastewater is re-appropriated for that growth, the city forecasts that the amount of water reaching the river will drastically decrease.  Decreased water supplies due to climate change and increasing water demand for recycled water means that soon there will not be enough water to sustain the river’s ecologies and landscapes…”

This stance, and the provocative suggestion that “restoration” is, whether desirable or not, simply not an option, aggressively counters the received orthodoxy in landscape planning, which tends to see distinctions like “soft infrastructure” versus “hard infrastructure” as not only having functional distinctions, but also as existing in a Manichean moral environment: a river bed encased in concrete is always bad, and a naturalized flood plain is always good.

[The Los Angeles River slips under "the" 105, via google maps]

If we can accept for the moment, as Fletcher asks us to, that “freakology” is, at least at times, the unavoidable result of the interaction of infrastructural and natural systems, then we are left with an important and fascinating question: what is a landscape architecture with freakish rather than bucolic characteristics like¹?

[Life in the upper concrete reaches of the Los Angeles River, via FOVICKS]

It obviously involves an alteration of aesthetic priorities and models.  The bucolic traditions relies most deeply on Arcadian ideals handed down from the classical and Romantic landscapes of Western Europe, peripherally on the garden traditions of East Asia, and more recently upon the elaborate simulation or re-arrangement of previous local ecologies, a la Jens Jensen and Piet Oudolf.  A quick browse through the ASLA’s yearly residental award winners evidences the degree to which these traditions have been assimilated into a single bucolic vernacular favored by wealthy clients and their designers.  In comparison to these traditions, a gardened infrastructure may be jarring, prone to odd bursts of coloration and seemingly disorganized, but that does not mean that it will not have a beauty — and an organization — of its own.  That organization may be more emergent than it is planned, and that beauty as removed from the bucolic tradition as the favela is from Haussmann’s Paris, but that does not mean that we cannot train ourselves to see it.

Curating these ecologies may be accomplished less through the traditional tools of landscape design — the bulldozer, the front-end loader, the nursery-grown plant, the concrete pour — and more through the controlled alteration of and experimentation on the processes which input into infrastructural ecologies.  This is demonstrated particularly well by two qualities of the SCAPE Studio team’s contribution to the recently opened Rising Currents exhibition at MoMA, “Oyster-tecture”.  For that exhibition, each of the five invited teams was given a particular portion of the New York City regional waterfront to respond to.  SCAPE’s team was assigned a portion which includes Red Hook, the Buttermilk Channel, and the Gowanus Canal.  The Gowanus Canal, which has recently been designated an EPA Superfund site, is an obviously freakish landscape, containing waters so contaminated that their toxicity may actually be of use in researching cancer-resistant and naturally-antibiotic micro-organisms.

[Image from "Oyster-tecture, by SCAPE Studio; via Change Observer]

The first quality of “Oyster-tecture” which seems particularly applicable to designing for “freakologies” is its open-ended-ness.  Each of the other four exhibiting teams provides what amounts to a master plan, proscribing particular and desirable potential end states for their sites, though often quite clever in program and form.  The SCAPE team, however, proposes to insert a series of programmed architectural objects — an armature for the growth of an oyster-based ecology and economy, whose primary parts are the adoption of the Gowanus canal as an oyster nursery and the provision of a kit of parts on which young spats can grow into a harvest-ready mature reef — into interaction with the existing urban ecologies, both natural and human.  While the farming and cultivation of oysters would have a series of anticipated positive effects — biofiltration of contaminated waters, protection against storm surge through accumulation into reefs, cultural and economic revitalization prompted by biological revitalization — and so undoubtedly affect the evolution of both the city and its adjacent waters, the team does not seek to delineate or define exactly what form that evolution will take.  This humility (a quality not often ascribed to architectural designers, who have worshipped for decades the cult of the singularly brilliant ego) is entirely appropriate not only for working in the infrastructural city (which, as Varnelis is quick to point out in the introduction, has developed a systemic immune response to the construction of new infrastructures), but also for experimenting with the ecological balance of the “freakologies” our infrastructures have spawned.

[Image from "Oyster-tecture", via Heroes and Charlatans]

The second quality is captured well by a comment left by Michael Horodniceanu on Mimi Zeiger’s review of Rising Currents for Places:

“SCAPE’s approach to the tide rising is grounded in a sustainable way of adressing environmental changes along New York’s shore line. It allows one to preserve our environment by instituting subtle physical changes along the shore line with the ultimate outcome of reducing the heavy reliance on mega infrastructure investments for protecting our waterfront. While the other solution are imaginative, they rely heavily in a massive infussion of money into infrastructre thus making them less likely to be implemented in the relatively near future. SCAPE provides contemporary, simple yet titilating solutions to protect our environment while pointing towards the implementation of inexpensive and sustainable ways.”

“Oyster-tecture” is, in other words, what FASLANYC has called a “lo-fi landscape”, quickly augmenting an existing ecology at minimal expense, but containing the potentially transformative seeds of a future harbor.  Unlike the “mega infrastructure investments” Horodniceanu refers to, which are typically constructed in an interdependent fashion, lo-fi interventions are relatively independent, even potentially experimental in a scientific sense.  If we accept that, as Fletcher suggests, the removal of the hard-engineered infrastructural components of “freakologies” is not a reasonable option, then we need effective but flexible ways to hack “freakologies”, and lo-fi interventions offer exactly that.

Finally, objective and scientific measurements, particularly those derived from the field of ecology, are of great utility in approaching “freakologies”, because those instruments can help us shed the cultural baggage which teaches us to consider bucolic qualities indicators of a landscape’s ‘health’ and “freakish” qualities indicators of a diseased state.  One useful alternative, drawn from ecology, is the measurement of productivity, which can often occur in surprising places — such as the sewage-rich Lower Los Angeles River.  Quoting Fletcher:

“…[running] six miles to the tidal estuary zone, [it] is perhaps one of the most interesting ecologies [along the river].  In this reach, the increased nutrient-rich waters spill out of the low-flow channel, a 1-foot-deep by 20-feet-wide channel running through most of the river.  This channel was originally designed to concentrate and conduct silt-laden water out to sea and to allow Steelhead Trout up the river to spawn.  But the original design  did not anticipate the increased flows from the sewage treatment plants.  This effluent-enriched water spreads out across the concrete sills, forming a thriving and vast algal zone, the “Sludge Mat”.  Invertebrates have extensively colonized this zone, creating the most biologically productive stopover for migrating shorebirds in Southern California.  It has the largest concentration of black-necked stilts in the United States.”

Such assessments, though, must occur at multiple scales simultaneously.  It is not enough to know that the “Sludge Mat” is productive and rich, without considering how it affects productivity (and, of course, a host of other measurements, such as diversity) upstream and downstream, and in other ecosystems touched upon by those migrating shorebirds, and so on.  This sort of massively interconnected, multi-scalar investigation requires the opposite approach from the lo-fi and experimental models, demanding instead the complex integration and processing of diverse knowledge and data-sets, suggesting that designing for “freakologies” may require a sort of disciplinary bi-polarity, accommodating both radically independent (open-ended, lo-fi) and radically interdependent (ecologically complex, scientifically-tested) working methodologies within the same physical and legal terrain².

From a recent article in the Guardian:

Biological warfare is to be declared on an alien invader, Japanese knotweed, that swamps gardens and rivers, with the release of an insect to eat the virulent weed.

The decision by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is the first allowing one non-native species, a flying insect resembling a miniature moth, to control the seemingly unstoppable spread of an alien plant…

The wildlife minister, Huw Irranca-Davies, said the fast-growing Japanese knotweed was estimated to cost £150m a year to control, and was able to grow through buildings and roads.

[Knotweed] has also been blamed for flooding, by causing erosion to river banks and clogging up streams with dead plants.

The decision is not without controversy, though, as some environmentalists worry that introducing an exotic predator — the chosen Aphalara itadori, a “plant jumping lice” — is potentially as disastrous as the original introduction of knotweed.  Given the history of predator introduction (in which the introduced predator has occasionally proven more harmful than the prey it was introduced to control), that worry is not wholly absurd, despite assurances from the British government that the introduced insects will be studied in tightly controlled environments before wide release.  But it’s probably worth noting that humanity has already spent the past couple centuries engaging in an unprecedented experiment in cross-species conflict at a global scale…

[The aftermath of a knotweed clearning operation; Invasive plant images via Invasive.org]

[A Japanese knotweed infestation in Ohio]

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a horticulturist recently.  She noted that, due to the extreme pest pressures North American native species now face, some horticulturists now think that the appropriately far-sighted practice is to only plant invasive species¹.  This, of course, flies in the face of the prevailing dogmas of landscape and botanical disciplines, where the categories “native” and “invasive” are treated not as functional ecological descriptors, but as moral markers: to cultivate invasive plants is considered ecological violence, while planting and preserving natives is an indication of moral righteousness.

It is, of course, true that there are a number of good reasons to prefer native plants to exotics, and a corresponding number of good reasons to combat the spread of invasive plants, neither of which I have any intention of minimizing.

[A future forest of Norway Maple?]

[A future grove of Ailanthus altissima?]

But I’m still haunted (and not at all pleased, despite my fascination) by the thought that the decline of native species might be inevitable.  Native species may be adapted to climate and local ecology, but perhaps only invasives are adapted to free trade, and free trade’s attendant equalization of global pest regimes?² Are the Native Plant Societies destined to be horticultural equivalents of the Institute of Classical Architecture, propagating an aesthetic preference which has certain pleasant associations for many people, but which is no longer derived from any functional process?

Moreover: are these the future forests of the Eastern seaboard?  Not Oak-hickory-pine nor Maple-beech-birch, but Mulberry-Ailanthus-Norway Maple?  If so, these future forests would have been constructed by the aggregate effect of human economies spread across several centuries, so that we might have even been said to have unintentionally cultivated them with shipments of insect-bearing fruits, the massive growth of the globalized horticultural trade in the nineteenth century, ballast-loads of exotic aquatics, and ornamental gardens which lurked on the edges of our cities like botanical time-bombs (or, perhaps, the unknowing seeds of the preservation of some forest — if not quite our forest — as strange and unnatural as it might be).  Free trade as a form of monumental gardening, with the entire biosphere its terra fluxus.  Profit-seeking corporations and capitalist nation-states as unwitting gardeners, container ships their trowels.

[A small future stand of Paper mulberry?]

And this is to say nothing of more radical but entirely possible futures, such as that bioengineering our crops might, through cross-pollination, produce fields of genetically-enhanced “superweeds”; yet would forests of incredibly adaptable invasive hardwoods and savannahs of superweeds not be preferable to genetically-pure but frail, choking, and dying landscape-museums of natives?  At some point, presumably, we would admit the evolutionary superiority of kudzu, a plant which is adapted not just to soils, rainfall, and temperatures, but to us and the disturbances we produce.