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- Can We Replace a Tree?
Last week, a tweet went viral on a new type of liquid tree scientists created and installed in Belgrade, Serbia. Recently, humans have thrown things off a bit by getting rid of lots of trees and digging up a lot more carbon. While great efforts are underway to replenish the world’s tree stocks, Belgrade has gone in a different direction, creating artificial “liquid trees” to capture carbon dioxide instead.
The liquid tree is a tank full of water and micro-algae that could be an alternative to trees in urban areas. It is an innovative tool for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving air quality.
The microalgae is effective enough to replace two 10-year-old trees for improving air quality. It is 10 to 50 times more efficient than trees for cleaning air. The tech has potential to be much better over the years and will be able to clean the air in the city. They also work in winter. Even when the trees have shed their leaves and go dormant, these boxes of algae are still working. That’s important because Belgrade hosts two very large coal power plants that create pollution.
The company who created this project said this should not replace trees, it should only be used if trees cannot be planted. But why can’t this city just plant trees instead? Because planting new trees is expensive.
Trees require careful installation and long-term maintenance. Planting them must avoid damage to roads, sidewalks, and property. New York City spends around $72 million on tree replacement annually. It costs $4,351.12 to plant one tree in LA. It’s no surprise that the more trees in an urban location, the more expensive the property is. The greatest difference between low- and high-income blocks was found in urbanized areas in the Northeast of the United States, where low-income blocks in some urbanized areas have 30% less tree cover.
Liquid trees may clean the air but trees have other benefits like reducing rain water runoff. Trees also provide shade during summers. The city of Miami Beach plans to focus more on planting shade trees than palm trees from now on.
Trees also have one other function. They reduce stress in people. The shape of the tree is not coincidental. The shape is fractal
Fractals are found in nature and act as a biological stress reducer. Ever walk around in a city without trees? I’ve been to Orleans in France. A beautiful, beautiful place with wonderful architecture. But it did feel like something was off a little bit.
Fractals and Doormen
In this Newsletter I will discuss:
1) Fractal Fluency: Where fractals are found in nature. The aesthetic experience of viewing nature’s fractals is good for health. Nature provides these benefits for free, but we increasingly find ourselves surrounded by urban landscapes devoid of fractals. Where are some places you see fractal architecture still preserved? Holy places. Places like Hindu Temples, Persian Mosques and Churches.
2) Rory Sutherland’s Doorman Fallacy: When you obsess about cost-saving and efficiency but ignore other considerations. For example, first you define a hotel doorman’s role as ‘opening the door’, then you replace his role with an automatic door-opening mechanism. The problem arises because opening the door is only the notional role of the doorman; his other, less, defineable sources of value lie in a multiplicity of other functions, in addition to door-opening: taxi-hailing, security, vagrant discouragement, customer recognition as well as signalling the status of the hotel. When every function of a business is looked at from the same narrow economic standpoint.
Adding liquid trees but not real trees is cost effective, it cleans the air but ignores the other characteristics that make trees valuable. The same thing will happen with AI and jobs. AI will only replace jobs where the job has no other other characteristics.