The Great Green Wall

sus

sus

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Keeping back the great Sahara with a buffer of vegetation.

Herbert was inspired to write Dune after visiting coastal ecology sites where they were trying to reclaim dunes through planting European seagrass.

Something very archetypal/mythological about keeping the sand back. The sands of time. Fixing the soil down with rooted plants, so it doesn't blow away in dustbowl and sandstorm.
 
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sus

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www.smithsonianmag.com

The “Great Green Wall” Didn’t Stop Desertification, but it Evolved Into Something That Might

The multibillion-dollar effort to plant a 4,000-mile-long wall of trees hit some snags along the way, but there's still hope
www.smithsonianmag.com www.smithsonianmag.com

This Smithsonian article goes into detail on how the original Green Wall plans in the 70s, which just involved top-down planting a shitton of trees, failed. And how instead, this crescent-moon hole-digging by farmers, bottom-up, has been so successful.
 
sus

sus

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Echoes of...

camp-greenlake-seems-to-be-cursed-with-an-eternal-summer-photo-u1


holeslizard6.jpg


Very archetypal film. Digging in the desert for treasure. Poisonous reptiles. But the treasure is your true inheritance, not your overseers'.
 
sus

sus

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Also, this is a very fascinating paper—one of the foundational texts of ecology as a field—and a lot of insight into how dunes move across landscapes, how plants fasten down dunes, how dunes cover over plants, what sorts of plants can survive in sand: https://www.valpo.edu/environmental-science/files/2021/04/cowles_ecology.pdf

"Pioneer species" is what they call plants that are able to survive in harsh and unwelcoming soils, and whose presence gradually makes the soil more hospitable (e.g. by breaking up rock-hard sunbaked soil, or by fixing nutrients, or by preventing erosion)
 
sus

sus

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Glanton's gang: Glanton's orphan girl fiance kidnapped, tomahawked, and scalped by the Lipan tribe, beginning a lifelong retaliatory quest (least cording to legend). "barbarous trophies, smoke-dried" they were; a "mule-load" he had. A diverse multiracial group, "Sonorans, Cherokee and Delaware Indians, French Canadians, Texans, Irishmen, a Negro and a full-blooded Comanche" doing the hunting, their several-dozen scalps obtained under heavy casualties, so that they were lured off by rumors of El Dorado and headed toward New Mexico. After one fight, the scalpers drew straws to execute their wounded who could not ride. Glanton killed by a Yumas attack, but Judge Holden and Sam Chamberlain, our unreliable narrator, fleeing to Los Angeles in 1850, Chamberlain returning to Boston for a repsectable married life, Holden's fate unknown.
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sus

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The usual examples cited here are apocryphal, such as the famous Cobra Effect, but we need not delve into myth and legend to illustrate the basic dynamics of these games.

A recent Houston gun buy-back saw some five-dozen "ghost guns" returned by a single owner for nearly ten thousand dollars. The most likely explanation being that the guns were manufactured solely for the purpose of being turned in. The artist Tom Sachs manufactured zip gunns in the 90s and sold them as part of New York's buyback program at up to $300 a pop. New York's attorney general was forced to change the state program's rules after one seller made $21,000 on his printed weapons, receiving premiums for their lack of serial numbers ("ghost guns") and the inclusion of auto sears, which can convert the guns to automatic weapons. Buyback personnel were also empowered with more discretion in the allocation of funds.

Or Glanton's gang, famously depicted in Blood Meridian: What happens when you put bounties on Indian scalps, as the Chihuahua government did in 1835? At first, villages near Chihuahuan urban centers are raided—barbaric, yes, but barbarically fulfilling the basic spirit of the directive, which is the protection of settlers through the eradication of indigenous populations near settlements. Next, gangs begin roaming far and wide for scalps, traveling far outside Chihuaha and hunting down peaceful, remote indigenous groups in other states. Finally, groups like Glanton's gang seize on the fact that government officials providing the scalp bounties cannot differentiate between indigenous and non-indigenous scalps, and begin hunting for scalps indiscriminately.
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version

version

Well-known member
sus said:
Something very archetypal/mythological about keeping the sand back. The sands of time. Fixing the soil down with rooted plants, so it doesn't blow away in dustbowl and sandstorm.
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One of my favourite bits in V. is the bit about the man in the desert:

No. The desert moves in. It happens, nothing else. No djinn in the boy, no treachery in the wall, no hostility in the desert. Nothing...

[...]

Soon, nothing. Soon only desert. The two goats must choke on sand, nuzzling down to find the white clover. He, never to taste their soured milk again. The melons die beneath the sand. Never more can you give comfort in the summer, cool abdelawi, shaped like the angel's trumpet! The maize dies and there is no bread. The wife, the children grow sick and short-tempered. The man, he runs one night out to where the wall was, begins to lift and toss imaginary rocks about, curses Allah, then begs forgiveness from the Prophet, then urinates on the desert, hoping to insult what cannot be insulted.

They find him in the morning a mile from the house, skin blued, shivering in a sleep which is almost death, tears turned to frost on the sand.
 
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Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
sus said:
Glanton's gang: Glanton's orphan girl fiance kidnapped, tomahawked, and scalped by the Lipan tribe, beginning a lifelong retaliatory quest (least cording to legend). "barbarous trophies, smoke-dried" they were; a "mule-load" he had. A diverse multiracial group, "Sonorans, Cherokee and Delaware Indians, French Canadians, Texans, Irishmen, a Negro and a full-blooded Comanche" doing the hunting, their several-dozen scalps obtained under heavy casualties, so that they were lured off by rumors of El Dorado and headed toward New Mexico. After one fight, the scalpers drew straws to execute their wounded who could not ride. Glanton killed by a Yumas attack, but Judge Holden and Sam Chamberlain, our unreliable narrator, fleeing to Los Angeles in 1850, Chamberlain returning to Boston for a repsectable married life, Holden's fate unknown.
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the bit about holes being backfilled and any evidence of their existence being occluded by archons
 
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version said:
One of my favourite bits in V. is the bit about the man in the desert:
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Reminds me of Dick on kipple in Androids

"Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more... No one can win against kipple," he said, "except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization."
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Which is basically a surrogate for entropy, so it makes sense (since Pynchon explores entropy so thoroughly in CoL49)
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
sus said:



Keeping back the great Sahara with a buffer of vegetation.

Herbert was inspired to write Dune after visiting coastal ecology sites where they were trying to reclaim dunes through planting European seagrass.

Something very archetypal/mythological about keeping the sand back. The sands of time. Fixing the soil down with rooted plants, so it doesn't blow away in dustbowl and sandstorm.
Click to expand...

Interesting synchronicity here. I'm on holiday near a great beach on the north Devon coast, and there's a great dune ecosystem here that I explored with the lad yesterday, full of cool living things (including mushrooms growing in sand, which even I hadn't expected). But in one place there's a load of Christmas trees that have been planted (so a sign says) to reduce erosion. They're all dead, because Christmas trees are obviously not well adapted to growing in a dune environment, but I guess even the dead trees are still performing the role they were planted to perform.

It was pretty cool having the chance to teach my son about important things to do with the natural world, such as "Walk without rhythm, so as to avoid attracting Shai-hulud."
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
sus said:
@Mr. TeaHow do the mushrooms work?
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The mycelium must be buried deep in a permanently moist stratum of the sand (one mushroom I picked had a 'root' going down about three times the height that was above the surface), feeding on plant roots nearby, although whether as a parasite or a mutualistic partner I couldn't say.

sus said:
How old's the lad?
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Four and two thirds.
 
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