In the Weeds

William Bryant Logan’s book Sproutlands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees opens the door to a little known history, in which people all over the world, from Norway to Japan to pre-colonial California, managed trees in a way that was beneficial to trees and humans alike. Logan stumbled upon this history after taking on a job for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for which he was given the task of pollarding trees. Pollarding is an ancient technique for pruning trees that, along with coppicing, was used for millennia to cull woodlands without having to destroy the forest. These techniques were an integral part of managed woodlands, in which people kept livestock, harvested different kind of food and cut wood that was used for everything from energy to building ships and houses to creating floating walkways. This managed cultivation was not only productive for humans; it also allowed trees to live longer and created more biodiversity than existed in unmanaged woods. All of this, as Logan explains to us, was possible because of the remarkable regenerative property of trees, which allows many species of trees to resprout in the most unlikely situations and in the most unlikely ways. In theory, at least, Logan tell us, trees can live indefinitely and, in some unusual cases, they seem to do just that.

William Bryant Logan is the author of Sproutlands, Oak, Air and Dirt, the last of which was made into an award-winning documentary. He is a long-time faculty member of the New York Botanical Garden where he teaches pruning. He is a certified arborist and the founder and president of Urban Arborists, Inc., a Brooklyn-based tree company. He has also been a regular garden writer for the New York Times and was a contributing editor to House Beautiful, House and Garden and Garden Design magazines.

Susannah Sayler and Ed Morris have been working at the intersection of art and climate activism for the last fifteen years. They are co-founders of the Canary Project, started in 2006 and inspired by a series of articles that Elizabeth Kolbert published in The New Yorker that eventually became her book Field Notes from a Catastrophe.
Adapting Kolbert’s investigative strategy, Ed and Susannah initially set out to photograph places around the world being impacted by climate change - in order to call out a warning, as the name Canary Project suggests. (Though the photographs themselves or the installations that ensued were subsequently renamed History of the Future.)
Since then, Susannah and Ed have worked on numerous projects, from Green Patriot Posters to the more recent Toolshed, and helped coordinate works of fellow artists tackling climate change. They also both teach in the Dept. of Film and Media Arts at Syracuse University.

As a former student of the arts (more the literary kind than the visual kind, but who’s quibbling), I was curious about the ability of art to engage in climate activism. What can the artist achieve that the scientist and the journalist cannot, I wondered? And, conversely, what are art’s limitations?

To see the photos and other images we discuss, go to in-the-weeds.net

To check out Susannah and Ed’s latests project go to https://tool-shed.org

In a series of short episodes, I check in with previous guests to see what they are up to under stay-at-home orders and to find out what they have to say about the pandemic.
In the first of these "socially distanced" chats, I talk to entomologist Doug Tallamy who tells us that the biologists saw this coming due to the problems of overpopulation and crowding in cities. Look at what happens when you have too many caterpillars in a container, he tells me.
We also talk about the possible benefits of more time at home, including, in Tallamy's case, catching up on gardening and tuning into the natural world. He also recommends the use of apps such as iNaturalist and Bug Guide which can help you identify creatures you find on walks or in your own garden.

When we think of major innovations in human history, what comes to mind are inert technologies - from the wheel to the computer - but one of the most significant developments occurred as the result of the relationship between humans and another animal, horses. The domestication of horses brought about a major sea-change in human society, as we became much more mobile. It affected everything from agriculture to warfare to the dissemination of language and culture. To discuss the domestication of horses and the impact of this relationship, I spoke with William Taylor, Assistant Professor and Curator of Archeology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. As Taylor explains, our understanding of this history continues to evolve thanks to new scientific tools, such as new types of genomic sequencing, but also due the work of anthropologists who observe present-day horse culture in Mongolia, contemporary Ukraine and other parts of the Eurasian steppes where the domestication of horses first took place.

Using heat-sensitive cameras and radio collars, Gotham Coyote Project tracks coyotes, as they make a life for themselves in the Bronx, in parks and a golf course and, occasionally, show up in Central Park or trotting along the West Side Highway. This amazingly resilient animal challenges our understanding where “nature” resides and gives us a blueprint for how we might welcome wilderness into our suburbs and our cities.