Sylvan Day in The Future Starts Here at the V&A Museum London
To write about the future or the present, I almost always turn to the past. Here it’s Arbor Day and Earth Day, snow in April on Islington High Street, colonization, and all the ideals we saddle trees with... One of them now is to end the War on Terror (and truthfully I don't think that’s too crazy). But, this was how I wrote about plans to end desertification for the Victoria & Albert Museum's exhibition catalogue The Future Starts Here...
You can read the start of the essay below:
In the United States in the nineteenth century people believed if you farmed unsuitable land – dry land – rain would come as if by divine right: ‘Rain follows the plow’. Throughout history we see similar folkloric ideas; water, it seems, can stem from the strangest things. Agriculture and supplications to a divinity might bring it, and notions linking rain to war are even older. They started with Plutarch, writing in ancient Greece that ‘extraordinary rains generally follow great battles’, and the ideas resurfaced in the US after the American Civil War (which was muddy indeed), where experiments abounded with guns and explosives, dynamite and balloons, all trying to produce precipitation.[1] The rains never came, though the US has been ever hopeful about manifesting them. After the Second World War, General Electric tested seeding clouds with silver iodide to make rain. Developed as a Cold War weapon, the storms caused by such cloud-seeding techniques reigned down (and rained down) during the Vietnam War, extending the monsoon season in the late 1960s. Now we get rain and war again; or, water and war and the hopes that the former might stop the latter. The process is subtler than sending up explosives and more peaceable. Now it is transpiration. Plants take up water through their roots and give it off almost like condensation, like breathing it into the air through their leaves. At least that is the idea: millions of trees will breathe water and return it to the ground, and the water will stop wars and the other disasters to come with climate change in the parts of Africa suffering from water scarcity. I hope the trees can do it.
