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India's Meghalaya 'living root bridges' get stronger as the trees grow
- anon_cow1111 7y agoA general jumping-off point for this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_shaping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_shaping It's a very cool concept, similar to sculpting bonsai trees with copper wire, just on a bigger scale. However unless it can reliably conform to civil engineering specs, it's useless outside of an artisan project.
- mandelbrotwurst 7y agoUnless you, you know, decide not to care about that set of specs.
- hinkley 7y agoI saw a documentary on this but I would have sworn it was filmed in SE Asia but I could be wrong. There they were using a related tree also known as the Strangler Fig. What floored me was a segment where a man was building a new bridge, and almost as a throwaway line the narrator stated that this bridge would be usable by the time his son was old enough to teach his son. That's patience. But the alternative is dealing with serious flooding and erosion pressures, which these trees have already solved.
- dgemm 7y agoThis part of India is basically SE Asia so maybe you are both right.
- paggle 7y agoI’m sure the living root bridge concept doesn’t stay within political boundaries, but also yes OP could have seen the faces of the people and not realized that people that look like that live in parts of India.
- Jagat 7y agoAre you talking about 'The Story of Us' on Netflix?
- Jyaif 7y ago"could help our cities adapt to rising temperatures associated with the climate crisis" What? No. In cities a living root bridge would be destroyed within a year.
- theli0nheart 7y agoI had the same thought. What a strange conclusion to draw from this.
- taberiand 7y agoI think it can be rephrased as "we're desperate for any possibly glimmer of hope in the face of this existential climate crisis, and fantastical solutions let us imagine the possibility of surviving - no matter how impractical (in fact, the more impossible, the better)"
- theli0nheart 7y agoWe don’t need impractical solutions that make no sense. We need solutions that will actually help us solve problems. Growing trees in skyscrapers to make bridges that take decades to create to maybe make the sidewalk cooler is 1) impractical and 2) not solving a real problem.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoYeah, I was also annoyed to see that stupid comment. These tree root bridges are amazing, especially because they can take so long to complete, so the person who starts building one know he may long be dead (or at least old) before it's really usable. So putting in that comment about cities and climate change was basically just a chance to add some buzzwords, even if it's a total non sequitur.
- fao_ 7y agoDo you have a citation for this?
- 7y ago
- duxup 7y ago"Ludwig says the techniques used to build the living root bridges could be deployed in cities to green and shade urban areas -- a much-needed strategy to cope with rising temperatures." Or they could just, plant trees. I'm not really sure the root bridge concept here helps much more than just planting trees would if we're talking about creating shade.
- gus_massa 7y agoI'm not sure about this specific tree, but the problem with similar trees is that the roots grow too much under the sidewalk and raise and destroy it. They are even forbidden to be planted in the sidewalk in some places. Also, the trunks and the aerial roots form a big messy block that is 6 foots wide and make the sidewalk unusable.
- redisman 7y agoJust wait until the Instagram influencers discover and destroy it.
- dm3730 7y agoalready happening
- guramarx11 7y agodamn human your scary
- northern-lights 7y agoIts protected somewhat by the ~3000 steps that you need to climb down to reach it (and then climb up, most likely the same day as there is not enough space for a lot of people to stay the night at the bottom).
- HaloZero 7y agoI've been here before. They're pretty sturdy to walk on and there were quite a few in the area going into town. One thing that I found interesting was the only bridge that had trouble was it's parent tree on one side of the bridge was hit by the monsoons in the area. The area has one of the highest amount of rainfall in the world. The area is pretty remote still. I was there 3 years ago and as I was walking on my path I realized the road I was walking on had been built the week before.
- allovernow 7y agoStartup idea: GMO trees for rapid, green architecture, like bridges, fencing, simple structural supports. Some species of Bamboo can grow at a rate of up to 1.6in/hour so it may be practical to engineer a wood with the right material properties to grow into trained structural shapes in a span of months, as opposed to decades in the OP. Hell, I'd love a living bridge in my backyard that I could have grown in a summer or two.
- applecrazy 7y agoBonus feature: the bridge absorbs CO2.
- jonnydubowsky 7y agoHe's really are beautiful and inspiring structures. The challenge for commercializing these methods is that they are very hard to get certified and brought up to building codes. When I lived on the big island of Hawaii I have a lot of friends who were building really cool stuff with bamboo but found that when they went to actually get the building permits there were only a few types of joinery which were allowed for actual legal residential or commercial buildings.
- toomanybeersies 7y agoSounds like a fantastic way to create more invasive species of plants that will displace native species. They introduced gorse to New Zealand as it was good for creating hedges on farms. It's an horrifically invasive plant that's incredibly difficult to get rid of. It's fast growing, with hardy seeds that can lie dormant for 50 years. You clear it out and it just keeps growing back. It covers 5% of the country, growing practically everywhere outside alpine conditions, and strangles out other species, especially in areas cleared of native forestry. Animals won't eat it because it's spiky, so it needs to be either burned, bulldozed, or cleared with herbicide.
- wodenokoto 7y agoWhat happens when the tree dies? While some trees have lived for a very long time, my impression is that 100 years is a very long time for a tree, and if a bridge takes "decades" to build, then 100 years might not be relatively that long. A typical modern bridge might take 5 years to build 7-8km and will last as long as people care to use and maintain it. A 20 metres living bridge will takes at least 2-30 years (less wouldn't count as decades, plural) and would live for how long? Above pessimism aside, I would love to cross the river thames on a living bridge!
- chrisweekly 7y ago100 years is the blink of an eye for a tree. Trees will astound you if you learn more about them. Many species can live for tens of thousands of years; beneath the surface, some apparent "groves" are in fact interconnected appendages of a single living organism which can survive for hundreds of thousands of years.
- newnewpdro 7y ago> 100 years is the blink of an eye for a tree That's a very slow blink. Being generous and for easy math, let's say the tree lives 100,000 years. 100 years is 1/1000th of the lifetime, .001. Generally the blink of an eye is in reference to human time scales. Again, let's be generous and say a blink takes an entire second, and a human lives 72 years. 1 / (72 * 365 * 24 * 60 * 60) = .0000000004 Many orders of magnitude off from the blink of an eye.
- PhasmaFelis 7y agohttps://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/in+the+blink+of+an+eye https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/in+the+blink+of+an+eye
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago> While some trees have lived for a very long time, my impression is that 100 years is a very long time for a tree These trees are ficus elastica, which are pretty short-lived as trees go, lasting only about 200 years in their natural habitat. Most of the trees you see every day will live for centuries.
- whyenot 7y agoThe tree mentioned in the article, Ficus elastica is actually a plant that you may already know: it's the fig that is grown indoors as a houseplant, commonly called a rubber tree or a rubber plant. In general tropical figs are rapid growing but not particularly long-lived plants. A tree may live 80 years, but not much longer than that (this is unpublished data that Charles Handley of the Smithsonian Institution shared with me; he studied cohorts of fig trees for many decades, well into his 80's; possibly the only person who has ever done such a long term study on figs).
- arthurofbabylon 7y agoI accidentally traveled here when I had a spare month between obligations. I don’t think the public can quite imagine how cool these bridges are, and how wild the surrounding region is. The Root Bridges: For most of them, two people could easily walk hand-in-hand across the bridge (these are substantive, comfortable bridges). To build a bridge requires a multi-generational perspective - oftentimes, the architect won’t even live to see the “completed” creation, despite all of the nuanced care. (Of course, a structure like this only evolves, it never “completes.”) It should be noted that the locals are masters at building structures of wood. 20m tall towers made exclusively of bamboo (even the twine was bamboo), a 20-30m bridge arching over a river made entirely of bamboo and - at the beginning and end - stronger logs. The Adventure: I probably encountered 2-3 other white/euro/American/foreigner people here. At one city en route to Meghalaya, I got trapped by a transportation strike, and was told that I was the second white person to spend the night since the British occupation (or something like that). I stumbled into teenagers jamming 70’s rock at their school, and they made me play the bass before driving me around the city on their motorcycles. We’d be on pavement going 60km/hr, then suddenly be on dirt going through bamboo structures. They insisted I have dinner at everyone’s homes and I ate around 7 distinct meals of regional dishes that night. It was wild: difficult, diverse, different.
- GuiA 7y agoTravel that doesn’t scale is the best kind of travel.
- ssivark 7y agoI think that applies for many (most?) of the best things in life. Only the mediocre bits can scale.
- nickthemagicman 7y agoPlay bass or DIE. True rock and roll.
- Cherian 7y agoI noticed that you rock climb. Lead? Are you in the Bay Area? How do I contact you?
- aaron695 7y agoThis is an art piece, stop trying to pretend otherwise it belittles HN. Enjoy art like people have for a 100,000 of years. Stop trying to fucking pretend it has to have a direct use. It's like the anti-science brigade stopping science that seems to have no practical use. Work at just progressing things, art or science. Notes on the Kasia Hills, and People. By Lieut. H. Yule, Bengal Engineers, 1844 A traveller approaching the Kasia Hills from the south, must in spite of the tameness of their general profile, be struck by the singular feature of a high sandstone precipice, which runs like an artificial scarp for miles along their face, with its u........... https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/40125684#page/138/mode/1up https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/40125684#page/138/m...
- ubriewbaduk 7y agoI'm from Meghalaya and the thing that annoys me most is the irreverence that tourists have for these structures and their nearby surroundings. A lot of tourists would litter and step into places they're not supposed to, and make a living hell for the people who maintain these tourist sites. Almost all tourist sites in Meghalaya (especially outside of urban areas) are maintained by the 'shnong' (village) and although they do get some revenue from tourists, it's not necessarily their only source of income. Maybe they should make these places prohibitively expensive to enter so that people would hopefully care more. *edit: I should add that the entry fee is usually dirt cheap, even free for some places
- sumedh 7y ago> so that people would hopefully care more. Why cant the Police enforce the rules and charge a fine for littering?
- ubriewbaduk 7y agoAs I said, these places are maintained by the village, so it doesn't fall in the police's jurisdiction. Even if the police were to be involved, I would imagine they still wouldn't be effective because of corruption, apathy, etc.
- sumedh 7y ago> it doesn't fall in the police's jurisdiction. Is this some private land where the Police cant go? If you start talking about corruption then you cannot blame the tourists for littering, people will litter when they know there are not going to be any consequences.
- talonx 7y agoOne can still "blame" tourists for littering, irrespective of whether cops can enforce the rules or not, because it's a lack of civic sense, a lack of understanding of the importance of preserving such things. That sounds like a good enough reason to point fingers at these tourists.
- villgax 7y agoIt's 4000 steps down & up 2 hills to get there. You are going to have cramped out legs & also drenched with the sun out. But it was an amazing experience.
- maxerickson 7y agoAnother article: http://humanplanet.com/timothyallen/2011/03/living-root-bridges-bbc-human-planet/ http://humanplanet.com/timothyallen/2011/03/living-root-brid...
- yenwel 7y agoI had a similar idea about green roofs and how they could have a net positive effect on happiness, liveability and energy efficiency in cities.