The burning African tulip tree

One morning last week, I woke up to find the sky outside my apartment balcony blanketed in thick smoke. Instead of closing my windows, considering my weird respiratory system, I decided to go peek through my bedroom window. There was a smoking hole in the ground outside of the apartment opposite mine. It’s where an African tulip once grew, several years back, and where its tall tree stump provided homes to a woodpecker and some parrots for the past few years.

The last of the tree stump was burned to the ground, leaving behind an ugly, gaping, ember-laden wound.

When I moved into my current apartment, this tree was in the process of being razed down to a stump. Its roots were messing with the foundations or pipes of the house behind. Every few months, the tree would put out new shoots and try to grow branches. It was like Calvin (Life) - life trying to find a way - but the tree didn't stand a chance. The grandfather of the house went to the terrace regularly with a long stick that had a hook-end, much like what we used in my childhood to pluck guavas, and he poked and prodded at the new growths till they fell out.?But the tree was still strong enough for some birds to nest in its trunk.

These folks who burned the tree down seem like decent people. They are quiet, polite, they don’t litter. You know those people, who while they come across as being irresponsible are really just ignorant? This is like that, I think. Imagine this - a young woman who lives there walks out every morning, helmet on, gets on her two wheeler parked outside the gate, and just takes off, like a seasoned skateboarder going down a launch ramp. She doesn’t look to the side of the road or what’s behind her or even really to the front. She’s blinkered, you’d think.

The day after the tree was burnt down and I saw her do this, I felt annoyed. Young children play on this street. It seemed like a general reckless disregard for everything around, not stemming from true malice, but a certain ignorant callousness. I’m willing to bet they didn’t check if it was possible to get root barriers for this tree, after they razed it down and stunted its growth, to give it maybe another shot. And especially when this is a tree that's commonly used for reforestation and erosion control. Also, it's really popular among the birds because of its cup-shaped flowers that can hold raindrops and dew. Now this tree was not on private property, I want to imagine they got the right permits to do what they did, but the authorities here seem too overwhelmed to care much.?

Some of this is obviously because we are still a fairly poor country and people have more pressing, survival-related problems. For instance, building something along the lines of Pear Tree House in London, where a family built a home around a pear tree that was over 130 years old, on land contaminated with arsenic - that's probably not as easy here.

Though I have seen homes in India where they’ve tried to be mindful of the trees that were already there before them.

Countries like the UK have well-funded research programs to empower decision making about future treescapes like the Future of UK TreeScapes program that has a budget of ￡ 15.6 million. Also, they declared a “climate emergency” in 2019, and even as they’re falling short of their national tree planting target of reaching 90-120 million trees per year, they’re making steady gains year on year.?

But apart from the developing country problem, some of it is just humans being the way they are, I guess.

“Too little, too late. Sad story of the species”, said Chrisjen Avasarala, from the Expanse. If?you haven’t heard of it, it’s a TV series a friend spoke to me about. It's about Earth colonising Mars because well, Earth is nearly dead. And there is this faction called?the belters who are like indentured slaves, and they rise up in revolt. Chrisjen is referring to how humans did too little, too late for the belters.?Basically, the premise is something along the lines of humans being the catalysts for an accelerated trajectory to the solar system imploding.?

Too close to home for me.?

My apartment is swelteringly hot this year.?There’s just a few trees left in the neighbourhood. Even fewer birds. And I can see way more of an open sky than I want to because the canopy is all but gone.

In this context of urban treescapes, government policy actions in India have mostly been limited to compensatory reforestation, and tree transplantation, both of which are widely seen as poor solutions to the loss of urban trees. Also, these don’t even materialize very often because of paucity of land and water, not to mention money. Transplanted trees have gone missing in the nation’s capital, while enroute to being transplanted. Many socio-ecological parameters are just not a mandatory part of urban development today here. And all this doesn’t change much largely because of a lack of good, actionable data. There’s a tree census in Bangalore that the Karnataka High Court ordered in 2019 which still hasn’t gone further than?two pilots. So well, yeah.?

But what a lot of concerned people have been doing is tree-mapping and surveys. And filing petitions to stop the felling of trees, and asking for inclusion in decision making about urban deforestation.?

Fundamentally, there’s two key parts to tackling further loss of forests and urban treescapes - observe and defend. Scientists can observe and gather data using satellite imagery, which when used with algorithmic models can track the quality of the green cover, changes in it, effects of deforestation on land. These can be faster, more accurate and cheaper than before because of the ability of AI to automate. An interesting NLP-based tool here is MANA Vox AI, built by a French non-profit with IBM, that observes and compiles?data about individual corporations’ involvement in local ecological controversies, based on real-time social media inputs, and then cross checks and verifies credibility, much faster than humans can.?

By publishing this information, various entities including conservation bodies, financial institutions and the corporations themselves can act on those insights preventing further damage.

With observed data, policy makers and conservationists can defend treescapes from threats - poachers, urban encroachment, wildfires - using predictive algorithms to identify vulnerabilities and their magnitude. For instance, PrevisIA is a tool built by IMAZON, a Brazilian non-profit, with Microsoft to find areas in the Amazon that are susceptible to deforestation. It looks at topography, infrastructure, socioeconomic data and more to identify at-threat areas.

Reforestation, including that of urban treescapes, is a whole other beast on its own. Identifying current tree cover, figuring out what to plant and where, tracking government projects around reforestation and providing inclusion and visibility to citizens, building awareness around the magnitude and depth of the impact of ecologically ignorant, irresponsible decisions apartments and individuals take, the list goes on. Ultimately it boils down to commitment and taking action, that has to be people. But AI can really speed things along.

Here’s a fun tidbit - Google has a specialised tree-detection AI that builds a realistic view of a city’s current tree canopy coverage with the help of aerial imagery collected from planes, and?it can identify future tree-planting projects. Anybody can use it and gain insights - imagine being able to find out what percentage of your neighborhood has leafy cover, the area’s population density, what areas are vulnerable to extreme heat, and which neighborhood bodies can help get new roots in the ground.

The very cool Tree Canopy Lab was piloted in Los Angeles.

And on that note, here’s a picture of a toddler who hugs trees every time she sees them.

Looks like she knows something a lot of us don’t.

#aiforgood #aiforsustainability