"The arrows indicate wind trajectories, while color indicates wind height. The length of a line equates to wind speed (stronger winds get longer lines). Black arrows trace the low-altitude winds that carry moisture, the winds most relevant to the 1988 drought and 1993 floods. These winds are about 1,500 meters (4,900 feet, 850 millibars) above the surface. White arrows are winds at 5,400 meters (18,000 ft, 500 mb), and blue arrows are high-altitude winds at about 9.2 kilometers (30,000 ft, 300 mb)."]

[For comparison, winds from the same period (the beginning of May to the end of July) in 1988, a year of drought that also devastated the Midwest, but in opposite fashion.  Note that in 1993, the high-pressure, low-altitude winds (black arrows) flow freely up from the Gulf of Mexico, bringing moisture-laden air to the Midwest, while in the 1988, a high-pressure system hovered over the Midwest, pushing air south and blocking movement of moist air from the Gulf of Mexico.  To really appreciate the difference, you'll want to watch the animated versions -- 1988 here and 1993 here.  (Note those links are to download sizable video files.)]

Having (I think, I’m not bothering to track down the location at the moment) before posited that landscape architecture, like architecture, possesses some strong disciplinary aptitude for something(s) like “spatial intelligence” (we landscape architects might call our version “geospatial intelligence”) which make the discipline at least as valuable when it is understood as a way of thinking as when it is understood as a professional body of techniques, and also believing that the capacity to interpret and represent spatial patterns within landscape is a particularly important manifestation of spatial intelligence within the discipline, I find examples like this extremely encouraging, because they indicate that there is some validity to that argument.

[Link via Damian Holmes (@landreader).]

Exactly what common ground do the modular megastructure of Plug-In City and the instrumentalized cityscapes of Civilization share? Both of these frameworks propose that urban growth is an algorithmic or procedural operation whereby “the city” (rather than a singular edifice) embodies the essence of Le Corbusier’s technophilic proclamations that architecture should function as a “machine for living”. These examples encapsulate systemic thinking in paper architecture and game design by suggesting the possibility of an instrumentalized, “plug and play” urbanism founded on the notion of homogeneous citizenry and the possibility of infinite expansion. These reductionist approaches to reading the city are equal parts utopian and monomaniacal – one need only look as far as McKenzie Wark for some sage advice regarding such totalizing thought: “The delusion of God games is that the gamer is in control when at the controller … But it is the game that plays the gamer … the gamer who is an avatar, in the sense of being the incarnation of an abstract principle.” While Wark is levying this warning at the players of strategy games it could well be heeded by urban planning firms who find themselves enmeshed in the market forces and legalities that dictate the scope of most city-scale projects.

If you enjoy the essay, note that Greg has posted a handful of additional thoughts here.

[Readers of mammoth will recall that this -- particularly the parallel between the god-like control assumed by the gamer and the fetishization of control in modernist urbanism --  is a topic which we have occasionally discussed.]

Alabama’s approach is perhaps a bit extreme in metaphor, but it is representative of the typical way in which invasive species are approached: as unwelcome interlopers disturbing peaceful ecosystems, evidence of the folly of simplistic and domineering early twentieth-century attitudes towards the human re-deployment of flora. But that attitude, too, may itself be simplistic. A recent article at Slate, Are invasive species really that bad for the environment?, summarizes scientific push-back against the making of binary distinctions between ‘native’ and ‘invasive’ plants:

…A growing contingent of scientists is advocating a more neutral attitude. Certainly, they say, non-native plants and critters can be terribly destructive—the tree-killing gypsy moth comes to mind. Yet natives such as the Southern Pine Beetle can cause similar harm. The effects of exotics on biodiversity are mixed. Their entry into a region may reduce indigenous populations, but they’re not likely to cause any extinctions (at least on continents and in oceans—lakes and islands are more vulnerable). Since the arrival of Europeans in the New World, hundreds of imports have flourished in their new environments. Common wildflowers such as Queen Anne’s lace and certain kinds of daisies are “naturalized” aliens. The storied apple tree originally hailed from Asia…

There’s an argument that even the dichotomy between “native” and “non-native” is ultimately meaningless. Species have always migrated; to identify one as native is to draw an arbitrary line in time. Davis favors a continuum, using labels such as “long-term resident” and “recently arrived”—the idea being that these terms are both more accurate and less loaded.

The debate is ultimately rooted in deeper and more fundamental arguments about the relationship between human culture, natural culture, and wilderness. As the idea of “nature” as something distinct from ourselves is in and of itself necessarily a social construct (there can be no idea of nature without a society to formulate it), so too the notions of the native plant (good) and the invasive plant (bad) are social constructs, though saying that something is a social construct is often misunderstood as an attack on the independent existence of the thing-in-itself, when it is more properly a way of re-examining our (human) relationship to a thing we misunderstand as existing wholly independently of ourselves.

One obvious implication of a more nuanced understanding of our relationship to nativeness and invasiveness is that, as Edible Geography notes, we can begin to think of species range and distribution as things to be cultivated:

It’s a radical idea: the scientists at Chicago Botanical Garden have determined that preserving the prairie ecology includes working out how to relocate it somewhere else altogether. Pati Vitt, a Conservation Scientist at the garden and one of the paper’s co-authers, told the Times reporter that, “I won’t be around in 100 years, but if the research isn’t there, we won’t know how to do it on that scale. That’s why the seed bank is so important.”

As Nijhuis points out, the implications of assisted migration directly contravene “the traditional conservation notion – call it an illusion, if you like – of a place to get back to.”… Their co-authored paper, “Assisted migration of plants: Changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes,” calls for globally agreed seed-banking and future-habitat-matching protocols. With a vision that rivals the space mirrors and artificial clouds of geo-engineering for sheer speculative wonder, Dr. Havens, Dr. Vitt, and their colleagues propose that plant conservationists around the world should be working as all-inclusive real estate agents, hunting down the next home for their clients before helping them pack up and move in.

I’m reminded of a studio project I once did (the particulars of which are not really worth sharing), in which one of the tangential approaches I developed involved using the Forest Service’s fantastic (in content, though not presentation) Climate Change Tree Atlas — it’s a literal atlas of the future (see, for instance, Kentucky Coffeetree evacuate Kentucy in favor of upstate New York and Minnesota, or Longleaf Pine slipping into the forests of Tennessee and New Jersey) — to anticipate what tree species might want to march through Virginia’s Prince William Forest Park in the coming century, and then proposed seeding those species along existing lines of disturbance (transmission lines, etc.) in the park. Which is not nearly so grand as Havens and Vitt’s call for a worldwide redistribution of species, but it does suggest that thinking of species range as something to cultivate (or hack!) opens up a fascinating territory for the landscape architect.

[Sensors lining the coast of Monterrey Bay, measuring surface currents]

A NYTimes article reports on the increasing interest of scientists in “Lagrangian coherent structures”, physical constructs within liquid and gaseous flows which are essentially invisible to unaided eye, but revealed and mapped with the aid of networks of sensors and pattern-discerning algorithms:

The concept of the structures grew out of dynamical systems theory, a branch of mathematics used to understand complicated phenomena that change over time. The discovery of the structures in a wide range of real-world cases has shown that they play a key role in complex and chaotic fluid flows in the atmosphere and ocean.

The structures are invisible because they often exist only as dividing lines between parts of a flow that are moving at different speeds and in different directions. In the ocean, the path of a drop of water on one side of such a structure might diverge from the path of a drop of water on the other side; they will drift farther apart as time passes.

One potential application is an overlay for airplane pilots which projects a visual representation of the mathematical tendencies of moving air masses, enabling them to avoid turbulence and conserve fuel; another is more directly infrastructural — a pollutant holding tank whose release is cybernetically with optimum moments in these patterns:

The scientists studying Monterey Bay found a Lagrangian coherent structure that acts as a moving ridge, separating a region of the bay that spreads pollutants out to sea and a region that recirculates them in the bay. They watched this ridge drift and change over 22 days and found that if computed in real time, it could be used to predict one-day windows when pollutants could do less damage to the bay environment.

The scientists proposed building a holding tank for the fertilizers and pesticides that wash from farmland into the neighboring watershed that could release pollutants only at times when they would quickly drift into the ocean, where they would be so diluted they would pose less harm to marine life.