DESIGN FICTION: Plant Directory

DESIGN FICTION: PLANT DIRECTORY

Boulder, 2078

The internet-of-plants was a silly idea.

Each generation since the Industrial Revolution has sought to understand the world through the dominant technology of the day. We are metaphor-making animals after all.

We are animals who use our environment to reason. So to think of the vast networks of root systems under-pinning the old-growth forests as an internet of sorts was predictable enough. Still though, to shoehorn the majesty of the biosphere into such a cheap metaphor was a bit much. Obscene really.

Obscenity is an art in itself. And what is art but the ability to make humans think. To make humans reflect. To make humans consider more than the canvas itself. And so the internet-of-plants, an obvious metaphor got our human minds thinking. And sparked the greatest change to the biosphere since the Mesozoic. The single biggest intervention of the Anthropocene.

It started with Suzanne Simard's research into forest pheromones and entangled root systems that allow interspecies communication between trees. This was sacred stuff. But it got the engineers minds racing. What are the trees saying?

Can we listen? Can we eavesdrop?

We could, and we did.

The trees were warning each other of disease and environmental changes. We learned to listen to these rhizome whispers. For a while. And used the chatter to warn us of changes in the weather. And occasionally to give advanced warning of pollution and toxin-spread.

Can we talk back?

Well, that proved a little more difficult. But the beautiful relentlessness of technological progress meant: yes, we could talk to trees. Human-Forest Interfaces began in earnest by dropping wafer-thin wires into the soil to send and receive biochemical signals. It worked and we learned tree logic. And to ask the trees questions, of a kind.

To speak with an Ancient Oak was an old practice. Humans were doing this for tens of thousands of years in the Paleolithic right into the Middle Ages in Celtic lands.

To converse with the oak in its own language, and to provably hear its response was something else altogether. It was a threshold moment for the Gaian spiritualists. It spawned a crowd of druidic cults. The Celtic druids thought it was against Nature. The neo-Druids built a new religion firmly around tree-talk.

Some neo-Druids were more fervent than others and sought to drive Human-Forest Interfaces to their absolute limit. They wished to remove the layer of logic that was used to ask the forests questions and speak with the forest directly.

Fiona Finn, a young neo-Druid from Portland, Oregon was the first to have a neural implant inserted that would allow her this ability. To send and receive biochemical signals with the forest. In effect, simply by thinking, she could communicate directly with the woodland itself.

The Lady of the Forest drew a global and awed following. From neo-Druids and normies alike. Soon, however, she showed the markings of true madness. She wept uncontrollably and wandered out to die amongst the Redwoods.

The neo-Druids tell the story that Fiona, Lady of the Forest, heard the cries of the trees and that drove her to despair. She could not bear the pain of the forest in the face of catastrophic climate change.

In a post-mortem carried out by a team of postdoctoral students and gaia-engineers at Berkeley, it was discovered that something far less romantic was at play. The Lady of the Forests neural interface allowed her to communicate with too many individual trees at once. Her mind was filled with a cacophony of voices that she could not escape. That explained the madness.

But the madness was not for nothing.

Amazingly, that same team at Berkeley found that they could isolate individual trees. They could unpick individual voices from the cacophony. They could tell who was doing the talking and so with enough sensors, we could ID every tree on the planet. Identify each tree by its biochemical fingerprint.

In doing so, we could easily keep a record of the health and communication of each tree in existence. This really was an internet-of-trees.

From there, the story didn't stop. It accelerated.

The rise of the Tree-talkers and the sad case of the Lady of the Forest was not enough to deter the team of gaia-engineers. They had a vision, a desperate one. To use this web of biochemical submersibles globally to persuade (read: manipulate) the tree-network to increase its carbon capture.

Incredibly, this worked.

But manipulation is rarely a simple thing.

By signalling extreme opportunity to increase their carbon capture, the trees were tricked into going all out on reproduction. In effect, they the trees had been asked to reproduce and grow at ten times their usual rate.

A sudden spike in fertility rates would quadruple the spread and growth of our declining forests. The Engineers were helping Trees to help themselves.

And so they did.

For a little while at least.