Your tax dollars at work…
Guest essay by Eric Worrall h/t JoNova – Did you know that you can email every single tree in the City of Melbourne, Australia – and they’ll write back?
According to Broadsheet Melbourne:
“Some said we were wasting money, but the trees were always going to have individual ID numbers anyway. So it was only logical we’d assign the ID numbers to an email which connects these trees to the community,” says Melbourne city councillor, Arron Wood.
So far the messages have ranged from piss takes to genuine expressions of devotion. So, if you’ve ever used a tree to prop yourself up with on a night out, the world’s most liveable city is now giving you the chance to apologise the morning after.
http://www.broadsheet.com.au/melbourne/entertainment/article/trees-return-your-emails
The trees apparently often tell sad stories if they are asked about their future – experts estimate that 30,000 trees in the Melbourne area will die in the next few decades due to old age, coupled with the effects of worsening droughts caused by climate change.
Critics of tree communication might suggest that the money spent helping the trees to answer their correspondence could be better spent on drought mitigation measures – more irrigation, maybe some silica pellets to help with soil moisture retention. But perhaps it does the trees good to talk through their problems.
As a former resident of Melbourne, there is more than one tree to which I probably owe an apology, thanks to the lamentable lack of after hours facilities in some parts of the city. But I don’t think I will ever get drunk enough to write an email to a tree.
(Anthony) See also:
Melbourne’s trees bombarded with emailed love letters
Guardian Australia emailed a ginkgo maidenhair tree in Fitzroy Gardens, a park near Melbourne’s city centre, which responded: “Dear Oliver, Thank you for your lovely words. I am very well. Enjoy your day. Yours sincerely, Tree 1441724.”
A nearby ficus was also contacted for comment on the scheme but has yet to reply.
This government funded lunacy reminds me of the epic video showing crying and wailing over trees:
“You get paid to do what?!”
I’m not sure how I’d tailor my resume to get a job pretending I was a tree. What do I list under the Previous Experience section?
Maybe, “I was considered deadwood at all my previous jobs so that’s why I was cut?”
I found these folks barking up the wrong tree. Anyway, they still can’t use email.
Jimbo,
Plants communicate more than most folks realize. Anyone who has seen an Ohio buckeye tree drop its buckeyes knows this. Within about 30 seconds all the buckeyes drop. They come down like rain.
How does one branch know what the branch on the other side of the tree, 30 feet away, is doing? I don’t know, but the communication from one side to the other, and from top to bottom is practically instantaneous.
Plants do have long-range [chemical] signals that reach the whole plant, but they are slow. When a large plant reacts quickly it is as far as I always triggered by some external cue that affects the whole tree.
I would guess in the case You cite that a chemical signal goes out that says essentially “attention: get ready to drop on cue” and then when the cue (whatever it is) comes, the buckeyes drop.
Yes, I have seen acres of oak trees simultaneously drop their leaves 24 hours in advance of an oncoming hurricane. It was a bit erie and noisy too!
I have trees that drop their small, olive-like seeds in similar bursts–but over the course of a few minutes. No wind involved.
Magic mushrooms?
Must be getting jaded, this report is not surprising.
I wonder what the pay grade is for senior wood whisperer in Oz. Perhaps that would be a way to provide employment here in the states for all our new neighbors.
Our hero:
http://img.yle.fi/uutiset/keski-suomi/article6788059.ece/ALTERNATES/w960/pentti+linkola+mörkökorpi.jpg
The Australian civil service is deep in it.
Excellent choice dbstealey. That’s Pentti Linkola. He’d jazz up the replies to a completely new dimension.
Thanks for the video. xD
I, like the trees, gag and choke and wish to run away at the smell of patchouli and cannabis. Even a photograph can cause the reaction.
But I am grateful not to have to haul firewood and stack it, as I did when I was young. In fact, where I grew up, everyone had a wood stove. There was also a permanent cloud of cannabis over the town, and there still is. But with hydro and coal, the trees remain standing, and not much coal is needed at that if you use a bread machine, slow cooker, and a microwave (8 min to cook potato vs 45 min to bake it). It really is the good life. (:
PS, I think the ID numbers for trees is a slippery slope. In Portland, the city has passed laws that make it illegal to cut a tree on one’s own property. It also makes wooden heads out of children who are told to write emails to trees in public schools.
I bet his wife is Theresa. (Give it time – you’ll get there)
Her maiden name was Theresa Green.
And they have 2 x 4 children.
Chips off the old block really.
It’s interesting that the eco-weenie council member being interviewed about this is named: Wood.
Not sure if this will work (not well-versed in inserting pics in comments), but in Stratford Upon Avon we have the ‘Remembering Tree’ – it doesn’t have an email, just lots of crocheted squares of wool:
http://www.gaga-uk.org/images/TU0A6801_website_edit.jpg
More about it here:http://www.gaga-uk.org/support-us/the-remembering-tree
Harry P,
Is the Whomping Willow in your area also?
It needs a sign: Pls burn mor koal an oyl (after the eat mor chikin ad).
Gag!
What a waste of good yarn when so many refugees in Iraq are freezing…
There used to be an old joke about Agriculture Canada. When asked about an employee sitting at his desk and crying, the manager responds, “oh, his farmer died”. Will the joke become about a distraught City of Melbourne employee whose tree died?
Someone down there is reading too much Dr. Seuss. They think they’re the Lorax, they speak for the trees…
This isn’t ‘lunacy.” They’re “Nuts!” (& cheap entertainment for me)
Hey, they may be onto something. Why stop with trees? How about emailing individual glaciers, for example? They could be given names like Wally, Sam, and Irene. They could be “sad” that parts of them have vanished, and be “worried” about the future.
How about “Icess”?
With over 170,000 glaciers worldwide, that would be an impressive undrtaking.
So the Greens are worried about 30,000 trees in Melbourne but are supportive of the insane plan to convert the Drax power station in the UK from coal to wood burning. This ‘green’ policy will require the felling of hundreds of thousands of trees which will be shipped 3500 miles across the Atlantic after being dried (using fossil fuels) and chopped into pellets.
Greenies are often surprised to learn that “biomass” means “chopped up trees”
And very reluctant to accept that renewable energy means chopped up birds
Yes, the idea is infantile and, to make it even worse, politicized by cretins.
But trees are cool to have around and why not have children learn to appreciate them early on. So I say, remove the simpletons but keep the email addresses.
The intent is to keep the wee kiddies and irrational adults from using rational thinking…. and keep them focused on emotional appeal. Emotions are far more effective tools for indoctrination, when data, science, and reason fail to support ‘the agenda’.
I think the intent is to introduce young’uns to puns. Too bad we can’t count or identify the ones who don’t ‘get it’
I picked a willow and wrote to it. I told it all about how CO2 makes it grow faster and stronger and makes it more drought tolerant and water efficient. How UHI makes cities like where it lives warmer and brings spring sooner and fall later. How that gives it a longer growing season than the country trees to use that CO2.
I also told it that the biggest thing it has to worry about is where man plants it. If it isn’t meant for the climate it has to rely on man to water it more, hard to do during a natural drought.
Come on guys, give the city of Melbourne a break. For $54.00 + S&H (custom), $109.95 + S&H (deluxe) or $154.95 + S&H (ultimate), the International Start Registry [http://www.starregistry.com/catalog/dspProduct.cfm?prod=starkit] will give a star the name of your choosing. I predict that in the near future the city of Melbourne will unveil its new “fund-raising plan”: For a fee of $100.00 (sickly tree), $200.00 (healthy but young tree), $300.00 (healthy and old tree), and $1,000.00 (healthy, old, and capable of emailing), the city of Melbourne will give a tree the name of your choice.
and $1,000,000 for a “Good Politician” tree.
(good politicians are extremely rare)
I can remember Spike Milligan singing:
‘I talk to the trees,
That’s why they put me away…’
A more useful idea would be for everyone to get off their fat A$$es and talk to the trees from as close as possible. The 4% CO2 we expire would be of far more benefit to the tree than an email, created on a device requiring electricity which is assisting in putting only .04% CO2 into the atmosphere.
Well if the world order luddites get their way, we will all be tagged with trackable number implants. We may also be obliged to answer their emails.
Hey, trees can apply and receive grants. If the tree is claimed by GreenPeace, then it’s probably in the Obama budget for DoE or EPA to fund it. They are the Rasputins of our time.
I wonder how the trees feel about that extra CO2 in the atmosphere…..
Were the trees hacked?
Not only that, the identities of the resident squirrels were stolen as well.
Anthony, surely Benji as a member of the Union of Concern Scientists will want to communicate with trees in his preferred fashion.
Does this mean that my two Pommeranians can now urinate on government employees?
Trees have vocabularies limited to the expressions like “I am Groot”**
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph_l7Pp_1mk&w=674&h=379%5D
** tree-like humanoid in the Sci-fi flick ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’.
John