Subject: Viridian Note 00050: Wired Urban Forests

Key concepts:  plant health monitors, computerized trees, 
gardening, urban agriculture, urban wildlife

Attention Conservation Notice:  It's about French people 
installing wiretapping devices inside the trees of Paris.  
Probably far *less* absurd than it sounds, however.

Links: http://www.bespoke.org/viridian
http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades

Entries in the Viridian Teakettle Design Contest:
http://www.stewarts.org/users/stewarts/teakettl.html
http://www.dnai.com/~catnhat/teapots.htm
http://www.interlog.com/~shamann/
The deadline for this contest has been extended.
This contest ends March 20, 01999.

From: SeJ@aol.com^^^^^^^^^^^^^^**** (Stefan Jones) 
Source: Reuters

"Welcome Bugs for Parisian Trees"

12:15 p.m.  3.Feb.99. PST

    "Ah, April in Paris. There's a song in your heart, 
love in the air ... and bugs in the trees.

    "These 'bugs' are there by design, though. Tree 
surgeons in the City of Light are embedding computer chips 
in all of the 90,000 trees lining the streets and 
boulevards in a monitoring operation of unprecedented 
scale.

    "'It takes less than 15 minutes to embed a 3-
centimeter long computer chip in the trunk and enter the 
data in a computer,' said Christian Mantaux, a tree 
surgeon for two decades. (...)

     "The chips contain an identification number which, 
when read by a mobile computer, gives a readout on the 
trees' location, age, and condition."

(((Stefan Jones remarks:  This will be *really* cool when 
the new internet addressing scheme is ready, and each tree 
can get its own net address and have its chip report local 
temperature, humidity, local ozone and CO2 and CO levels, 
etc. by wireless packet switching.)))

(((bruces remarks:  the indefatigable Stefan Jones has 
unearthed another gem here.  *Ninety thousand* trees?  
That's an entire urban forest!  An impressive start to 
what may become a 21st-century network saturation of the 
natural world.  Consider the number of Viridian principles 
that are gratified by this Parisian practice:  "Seek the 
Biomorphic and the Transorganic,"  "Datamine Nature," 
"Augment Reality: Aestheticize All Sensors" and even "Make 
the Invisible Visible."   I'm impressed by this news item, 
not least because wiretapped trees are a throwaway notion 
in my most recent science fiction novel.  That's yet 
another example of the common science-fictional practice 
of "predicting the present."  "The future is already here: 
it just isn't well distributed yet."

    (((The next question: when will this promising 
technology become a desktop app?  I've already killed more 
houseplants than I can count, but once I own my 30-centime 
Parisian plant-bugs, their little cries of distress will 
arrive via e-mail.)))

Stefan Jones (SeJ@aol.com^^^^^^^^^^^^^^****)