Cryptoforestry with the luftwaffe

London Garden in bomb crater 1943

"Many city children of my generation got their first experience of nature courtesy of the Luftwaffe, when bombed-out houses were transformed into little wildernesses of thistle, teasel, willowherb and loosestrife. Redstarts and other birds nested in crannies in the ruins, among staircases leading to nowhere, peeling wallpaper and upper-storey fireplaces, still with ashes in the grate, now open to the sky. The bomb sites, where I yearned in vain to be allowed to play, appeared to me to be immemorial landscape features, full of character and mystery, and one of the major attractions of family visits to London, Liverpool and Birkenhead in the late 1940s and early 1950s." - Jonathan Raban (source, earlier, wikipedia)

A cryptoforest more beautiful than the Samothrace

Here is a tiny little cryptoforest that I first went out to take pictures of at the day I also did the car park. Most of the photos were blurry so I returned today and the pics below are taken on these two visits. 

This is a triangular wooded area at the back of the student flats that opens the Overvecht ensemble of high rises. It's next to a basketball court, a carpark and the rail track is only a fence and a blackberry thicket away.

What strikes me most is the uncouthness of this cryptoforest. It must have started out as a lawn with a few planted trees. When the willows took over the municipal mowers became ineffective. At first they tried to manage the willows (there is ample evidence of removed branches) but eventually they just gave up. The startling amount of litter added to the sense of abandonment.

I know I say this everytime but I found this cryptoforest to be a very special place, with unique elements and with a unique feel to it. I wish I could live here. 

Enigmatic for this cryptoforest.

A Christmas tree.

Hard to see: but it's a holly.

Look at the symmetry of that!

The cryptoforest with the strange hut

In the first chapter of his 1968 best selling book 'Desert Solitaire' Edward Abbey's describes the first time he woke up in the Utah desert: "this monstrous and inhuman spectacle of rock and cloud and sky and space, I feel a ridiculous greed and possessiveness come over me. I want to know it all, possess it all, embrace the entire scene intimately, deeply, totally, as a man desires a beautiful woman. An insane wish? Perhaps not-at least there’s nothing else, no one human, to dispute possession with me.” 

This strikes me because it is completely different from the way I experience my own feral forested pockets of crypto-wilderness. The cryptoforest does not inspire any grandiose feelings. Never did I feel the need or the desire to possess the forest, platonic or otherwise. I am seeking for inhuman spectacles but what attracts me to these places is the way the human influence asserts itself even at places that most normal choose to ignore. Cryptoforests are mysterious places but not always in a good way: the lack of humans itself is reason enough to be used by people who prefer to remain anonymous. At least two murder victims have been at the kind of places I visit in the last year alone. I stumble across tents that are in use and waste that is new. I have never met the people who lived in those tents but they may not be friendly. It doesn't scare me but I am aware of the full spectrum of possibilities. Small town blues: my biggest fear is that while I am hidden from view someone steals my bike.

Last weekend I explored a forest that lines the outer elbow of double barrelled traffic system regulating the flow of traffic in and out of the North-East of Utrecht. It's a pool of open space against its crowded outlying surroundings. From whatever you direction you enter it you find that your horizon is suddenly shifting into the distance and for this reason I had wanted to look at it with a bit more patience for years. Inside this oval shaped space, bordered by a bicycle and foot paths, rail tracks and the backside pond of an allotment garden stands a forest of mature trees (poplars?) densely clustered and with bushes preventing a good view from the outside to the inside of the forest. I dare not estimate the size of it but it did seem larger from the inside than from the outside: an ever recurring visual phenomena that informs the differences between the psychogeography of the forest and of the plains. 

The pictures I took all came out badly and this indicates the uncertainty I felt about how to understand what I was seeing and my inability to find a way to relating to it. It wasn't monstrous, it was more anthropomorphic than that, it was like being trapped at a party where you fail to understand the social norms while your clothing is revealing you as a uninteresting outsider. I was an intruder and one without a good reason or story to tell when asked for credentials. This is a feeling I encounter often but never as strongly as here. The pattern escaped me, the trees just seemed to grow tall and the underbrush proliferated, a lone fern had spread like an umbrella and they all had turned their back on me at the moment I walked in. There was no question of me wanting to embrace it, instead it was embracing me, without love, just matter of factly like a disinterested nurse washing a patient. I found a shallow ditch that I couldn't explain at first but which was maybe carved out by excess water of the pond at the back when it rains. I saw frogs, a rabbit hole, heard crows... but no sense and no order, not even chaos. No sign of "Memory and desire, stirring" (after TS Elliot), just a void that wanted to be closed.     

The thing that really spelled out the implied message of this cryptoforest was a human artefact that I don't know how to explain and which turned out unobliging towards my attempts to make pictures of it. I was trying to record it in its environment but the trees prevented a good view. Instead I only have details. What it is? A deep hole filled with water and infested with mosquitoes, a wooden structure with a plastic sheeting and chicken wire fallen into it, and above it tree trunks interlocked as if to create a roof. All this surrounded by nettles and sapling trees, indicators of disturbed soil. As if someone illegally kept chickens here. But why would you?

This cryptoforest with the strange hut refused to speak to me but I know it has a story to tell. I will go back and coax it out. 

 

Time Landscape [fence=frame]

Just because Jane Jacobsen supported it does not mean it is a good idea. 

"Time Landscape" (1978) is a prominently located land art piece by Alan Sonfist recreating a pre-Columbian Manhattan forest. Or as Michael Pollen describes it:

A Pedestrian standing at the corner of Houston Street and La Guardia Place in Manhattan might think that the wilderness had reclaimed a tiny corner of the city’s grid here. Ten years ago, an environmental artist persuaded the city to allow him to create on this site a “Time Landscape” showing New Yorkers what Manhattan looked like before the white man arrived. On a small hummock he planted oak, hickory, maples, junipers, and sassafras, and they’ve grown up to form a nearly impenetrable tangle, which is protected from New Yorkers by a steel fence now thickly embroidered with vines. It’s exactly the sort of “garden” of which Emerson and Thoreau would have approved—for the very reason that it’s not a garden. 

A project like the Time Landscape is not so much of interest for itself but for what people make of it over time. A garden, even an anti-garden, is just a place to be in, a forest, even a cryptoforest, is a state of mind, a psychological condition that attracts shrinks and social health workers and the rest of the Cuckoo Club.

The Village Voice website has a 2007 article on a volunteer mass clean-up that sought to eradicate invasive (non-native) species as well as the creation of sight-lines to prevent people from hiding in the bushes.

"Although a chain-link fence encloses the area and entrance is by key, there is a hole in the fence and it is possible to climb over the waist-high barrier." 

The fence is not to frame the art but to keep art lovers outside of it.

Nonnative plants and weeds have spread to the garden, and the sight of morning glories clinging to the fence troubled many.


“The concept was to have native species,” said Tobi Bergman, chairperson of the C.B. 2 Parks Committee, in a phone interview before the cleanup. “But there is a reason we call them invasive species: They have no natural enemies.”


Sonfist dismissed these criticisms.


“This is an open lab, not an enclosed landscape,” he said. “The intention was never to keep out all nonnative species, but rather to see how they come into the space with time.”

The Time Landscape is a hegemonic plant community that refuses to interact, like a silent Indian who is the last of his tribe and who refuses to engage with his own feelings or those of outsiders and instead just waits and waits and waits.

In terms of PR the fence is the problem: in contrast with the Ramble it doesn't allow visitors who in turn cannot become participants as they create a bond with the landscape.

As a challenge to the peasant obsession with productivity, order and plow-schedules the problem with Time Landscape is that the fence is not high enough. It functions as a screen on which urban sub-conscious fears and phobias are projected: 500 year after Robin Hood the outlaws are still hiding in the forest.

Google streetview on Time Landscape.

Marching through the cryptoforest in single file

Yesterday afternoon I had an interesting winter cryptoforest expedition with 25+ employees of RWS: so, a walk though the weedy underbrush in their own backgarden. Normally I would't want to take such a large group but it was a wonderful opportunity to see that, even with winter having removed 99% of obstacles, the self-organized form of a group wilderness hike is the single file column theory would predict.  

When all else is dead or dormant the blackberry continues to proliferate. 

Pictures from a recent cryptoforest expedition

These are pics taken by various people during the 3 hour exploration through the cryptoforests of Westraven. This walk was part of the Casco program 'future park'.

The n'th landscape

...collecting nettles and quickleaf from the wasteland for the first infosoup

The edible city movement, if that is what it is, with their g-map applications and obscure herb recipes, gives us much to think about. At the moment I can think of only one attempt to create a theory for the edible city effort.


Listen to Wietske Maas and Matteo Pasquinelli (The City Devouring Itself: Urbanibalism in Times Insurgent Communes and Biopolitical Sieges):

The scenario of war, more than a well-regulated city ecology, forces a recognition of the overlooked nature across the urban landscape. This space is what the gardener Gilles Clément refers to as the third landscape, a ‘residue’ full of biological potential that grows between the first landscape of nature and the second landscape of man. Clement never uses the term ‘ecology’ as he prefers to stress the autonomous power of the neglected and uncultivated spaces of the environment. Yet not even in a global megalopolis is the dominion of concrete absolute. A recent example of metropolitan resistance — guerrilla gardening and seed bombing — shows how cities are not an ecosystem apart but a terrain still permeable to ‘involuntary’ vegetation.

That is spot on, though, without wanting to sound like a total dick, given that this third landscape stands between the landscapes of nature and man, it is a misnomer. The one-and-a-half landscape, the 1.1 to 1.9 landscape, the 1.01 to 1.99 landscape, would all be a better names. 

Garden joke (Ha!Ha!) by Gilles Clement

The point however I think is not that the existence of these 'mezzanine landscape', to coin another name, had remained undetected, (go ask a gardener about weed) but that they are not longer regarded as something purely negative, as a blight to be destroyed. Suddenly the 1plus-2minus landscape has become a giving landscape. This brings us back to the earlier observation that for hunter-gatherers "the land around them is their spiritual home and the source of all good things. This view is the direct antithesis of the Western Judeo-Christian perspective on the natural environment as a "wilderness"." The western distinction between man and god is a stranger to the forager as well, they do not have gods but tricksters, beings who stand somewhere between being fully human and fully divine, a being who is cunning and sly and devious but at the same time someone who teaches and has a good sense of humour; consider the Curupira. 

It's a foraged dish but I would prefer it deep-fried. 

A g-search on 'third landscape' quickly leads into another term: drosscape coined by Michael Berger and which offers an typology based on earlier work by Lars Lerup (who I met once, his book I have sold to my 2nd hand dealer). Quoting Frieze Magazine:

Drosscape’s greatest contribution lies in its speculative taxonomy of the wasted and the wasteful. Berger classifies drosscape sites into

Landscapes of dwelling  (LODs – voids of land in housing developments), 

Landscapes of transition (LOTs – temporary storage facilities),

Landscapes of infrastructure (LINs – transportation rights of way), 

Landscapes of obsolescence (LOOs – junkyards and landfills), 

Landscapes of exchange (LEXs – abandoned malls) 

and

 Landscapes of contamination (LOCOs – military bases and other brown fields).   

Sounds ok to me, up to a point because of course ends up by thinking about this landscapes as problematic areas in need of a fix. Can I stress that the Cryptoforest is not another urban design typology but an ethical proposition and that the cryptoforest is fine as it is and that the cryptoforester does not want to DO, let alone IMPROVE, anything. 


We are the first generation that will be judged by its waste rather than by its art.

The pheasant is the icon of the cryptoforest

The above is the most typical view you are most likely to get from a pheasant: a slight faraway noise as it runs away or maybe flies away in that typical awkward style of theirs. Pheasants, I have never seen them anywhere in this city, is what first alerted me to the cryptoforests of Westraven, Utrecht. The past two years, autumns especially, I have often spotted 4/5/6 of them at a time but this year they have been rare. But as the Wikipedia notes: "they are always timid once they associate humans with danger, and will quickly retreat for safety after hearing the arrival of hunting parties in the area." I doubt they are hunted but they do seem more timid, and only occasionally you see one. They are however certainly there, because sometimes they wander onto the bicycle lane and when they see you, usually before you see them, they dash into the underbrush and disappear out of sight.   

Mosquitoes as the cryptoforest's 'eco-system engineer'

A recent article on the website of Nature magazine seems to argue (judged by the headline) that wiping out all mosquitoes would be an excellent idea without any unwanted side effects. The actual article is more nuanced, and such a project would probably only result in bugs that are even hardier.  What really struck me is the following comment left by a certain Gerardo Furtado:

I am Brazilian, and I've been in areas of the Amazonia where you cannot stay ten minutes in the jungle without going crazy because of the mosquitoes. If not for the mosquitoes, the forest would be more devastated than it already is (out of curiosity, there are several folk songs in the amazon where mosquitoes are celebrated as the defenders of the forest against humans).

That is a wonderful idea that allows us to think of the mosquito from the perspective of the ecosystem in which the mosquito is an ecosystem engineer with the extremely valuable contribution of keeping out the humans. Searching from here I discovered David Quammen's article 'Sympathy for the devil' in which he refines the point:

Clear the vegetation on the brink of a waterhole, move in with tents and cattle and jeeps, and Anopheles gambiae, not normally native there, wil arrive within a month, bringing malaria. Cut the tall timber from five acres of rainforest and, and species of infectious Aedes - which would otherwise live out their lives in the high forest canopy, passing yellow fever between monkeys - will literally fall on you, and begin biting before your chainsaw has cooled. Nurturing not only more species of snake and bird than anywhere else on earth, but also more disease causing microbe, and more mosquitoes to carry them, tropical forests are elaborately booby-trapped against disruption.

There is scientific research for this.

Anopheles gambiae are much more likely to survive in deforested landscapes than in intact, forested habitats (Tuno et al. 2005). Previous studies conducted in the Amazon indicated that malaria risk rose sharply during the late 1980s and 1990s (Aramburu Guarda et al. 1999). New evidence suggests that changes in forest cover, through effects on the distribution patterns of mosquito vectors, may have contributed to this upsurge in the disease. In particular, a recent project in the Peruvian Amazon examined the links between deforestation and the principle mosquito vector for malaria in South America, Anopheles darlingi (Vittor et al. 2006). This analysis suggests a direct relationship between the extent of deforested land and increasing biting rates of A darlingi. In fact, heavily deforested areas can see up to a 300-fold increase in the risk of malaria infection, compared to areas of intact forest, controlling for changes in human population density.

Rainforests may provide another valuable ecosystem service, moderating the risk of infectious disease by regulating the populations of disease organisms (viruses, bacteria, and other parasites), their animal hosts, or the intermediary disease vectors (most often insects or rodents). For example, the loss of forest cover may affect the abundance and behavior of mosquitoes – a common disease vector in the tropics – through changes in local habitat conditions. Individual mosquito species occupy unique ecological niches and can react rapidly to changes in habitat. For example, in Africa, the larvae of



Backpack aspirator

  A recent study on a deforested area in the Amazon has the most detailed statistics:

The report, which combines detailed information on the incidence of malaria in 54 Brazilian health districts and high-resolution satellite imagery of the extent of logging in the Amazon forest, shows that clearing tropical forest landscapes boosts the incidence of malaria by nearly 50 percent.

"It appears that deforestation is one of the initial ecological factors that can trigger a malaria epidemic," says Sarah Olson, the lead author of the new report and a postdoctoral fellow at the Nelson Institute, Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment.

The clearing of tropical forests, say Olson and senior author Jonathan Patz of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, creates conditions that favor malaria's primary carrier in the Amazon, the mosquito Anopheles darlingi, which transmits the malaria parasite if it draws its blood meals from infected humans.

"The deforested landscape, with more open spaces and partially sunlit pools of water, appears to provide ideal habitat for this mosquito," Olson says, noting that Anopheles darlingi has been shown to displace other types of mosquitoes that prefer forest and that are far less prone to transmit malaria.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has made the fight against malaria one of

their top prio's.

Malaria causes nearly 1 million deaths per year, and 85 percent of those who die are children under 5 years of age. Ninety percent of malaria deaths occur in Africa, where the financial cost of malaria is crippling economic development due to the high cost of medicines and reduced productivity.

In 2008 the Foundation pledged $200 million dollars to six projects in order to have a working vaccine by 2025. Their solutions to Malaria are however all technical; no mention is made of deforestation.

DIY bugcatcher

From my cryptoforest groupwalks I know that mosquito clouds are very convincing when it comes to sending us out. At one time someone refused to move any further because of the skeeters, we left him behind, the coward. From Wikipedia we learn that the cryptoforest might be especially eligable for healthy mosquito populations because of the edge-effect.

The Alaskian Tlingit have an interesting myth on the origin of mosquitoes that can be read in several ways (is one man-eating giant better than a swarm of mosquitoes? a danger destroyed can always return even more deadly? the inability to fully predict the consquences of your actions?) but that makes psychological sense:

Long time ago there was a giant who loved to kill humans, eat their flesh, and drink their blood. He was especially fond of human hearts. "Unless we can get rid of the giant," people said, "none of us will be left," and they called a council to discuss ways and means. One man said, "I think I know how to kill the monster," and he went to the place where the giant had last been seen. There he lay down and pretended to be dead.

...

"I'm about to make sure that you never eat anyone again." He cut the giant's body into pieces and burned each one in the fire. Then he took the ashes and threw them into the air for the winds to scatter. Instantly each of the particles turned into a mosquito. The cloud of ashes became a cloud of mosquitoes, and from their midst the man heard the giant's voice laughing, saying: "Yes, Ill eat you people until the end of time. "As the monster spoke, the man felt a sting, and a mosquito started sucking his blood, and then many mosquitoes stung him, and he began to scratch himself.