this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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Step back a little. Why are there places in cities where trees "can't grow"? What's the problem - water, land, sunlight? And why not fix whatever is keeping trees from growing, and then grow trees, instead of dropping in a tub of algae? And if these tanks are 50 times more "efficient" than a normal tree, how much more expensive is manufacturing and maintaining them than planting and watering a tree is?
This feels like carbon capture technology to me - a technological patch on a social and ecological problem, meant not to help the environment but to funnel tax money to venture capitalists and tech companies in the name of environmentalism.
Land.
50 trees take a lot of space. The idea is to put these boxes where trees can't fit.
Note that these algae are not taking the room of 50 trees, that's really not the way to look at it. We want more trees inside cities, and whether or not this happens is totally decorrelated to whether or not we see these algae boxes or advertisement in the bus stops.
I don't think it is hard to imagine that a box of algae takes less maintenance than a tree inside a city. Typically you don't plant a seed in a city to grow a tree. You grow very specific resistant species in a tree farm and then transplant them once they are tall enough in a city. This is a long and expensive progress. Trees require maintenance: they need to be trimmed, healed, they may have fallen leaves that need cleaning, they may need watering when it is too dry, they need removal if they are too damage.
I think a tree has probably a similar level of need than these boxes, so 50 trees will largely exceed that.
I woild guess because that would require you to completely tear up the bitumen and anything underneath it like pipes and wires in order to make room for the roots. Trees are pretty big things y'know and it's not just what's above the surface that matters. You could put a tank like this in say, a train station platform that's raised well above the ground or on a building
Also a tub of algae isn't going to become a health hazard if it gets sick or infested and won't take decades to establish itself
Hmm. These are valid concerns. I would personally rather have 50 trees instead of one of these. In any current cities do you know how to get 50 trees planted on a city block?
Remove space devoted to cars... like 1 side of the street... Which I guess isnt seen as an option yet.
Convert the streets to bike + walking paths, and have trees lining the center along all the streets. Use subway for longer distance, train stations for intercity.
Yes ideal would be to remove cars completely from cities and use bikes + grassy trams to get around. And have every street lined with trees. In places where that hasn't been implemented yet, there may be a place for an algae tank.
That's without mentioning the resources invested into building those oxigen farms. The fact that this is done on a rich country already tells a lot. Solar panels aren't made with love and care, but minerals extracted from the earth.
Also, our problem isn't lack of O2 or excessive CO2. Our problem is a series of ideas and decisions we make about how we treat the world we're a part of. One of those ideas, is precisely efficiency above all other things. It's the same idea that makes market speculators fall in love with "line goes up". She even makes a point of saying how much more efficient than trees those are.
Sure, those are efficient in making the air safer for humans, but do they help with other local biodiversity? Do they help fixing the soil? Do they help the global ecosystem as a whole?
@stabby_cicada @MonkCanatella Lots of ideas for both algae and traditional trees in Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming: Ecology as the Basis of Design by Nancy and John Todd, both of whom are still around.
Years of links to urban and advanced agriculture at http://cityag.blogspot.com
which is also a listserv
Good looking out with city ag. Adding to my RSS reader, thanks!_Going to have to check out that book sometime, just from the title alone it sounds right up my alley
@MonkCanatella
Review of A Safe and Sustainable World: The Promise of Ecological Design by Nancy Jack Todd
https://solarray.blogspot.com/2005/05/gaian-design-of-ecological-alchemy.html
Review of Healing Earth: An Ecologist’s Journey of Innovation and Environmental Stewardship by John Todd
https://solarray.blogspot.com/2019/03/healing-earth-through-waters.html
Other resources on geotherapy (not geoengineering please) at
http://solarray.blogspot.com/2021/04/geotherapy-not-geoengineering-please.html
Carbon capture is something we need. Except for real. Which will probably involve algae tanks orders of magnitude larger than this, and then tossing harvested algae down a mineshaft, never to be seen again.
As for these tanks, nah. As public art, they're not great, and their stated benefits are limited.