Planting Our World by Stefano Mancuso (Author) and Gregory Conti (Translator)
There is something fascinating about the combination of natural history and city planning. When done right—as was the case for Buenos Aires, a century ago, with the aid of French landscaper Charles Thays—the result is a pleasant place to live, and since much of humanity now dwells in cities, it is essential for us to be able to have a say in the way cities are planned.
Stefano Mancuso is a brilliant botanist who can express his love for plants and plant history in an eloquent manner. This nonfiction book has a way of grabbing your attention, with lively anecdotes (the map of revolutionary trees in France, the case of the banana peel, the red spruce that gave Stradivarius the wood for his fourteen violins, the interconnected root system of the Kauri tree stump…) as well as some stark facts.
The facts are that all animals account for only 0.3% of the planet’s biomass, while plants add up to 85%. And that in itself should serve as a warning because—surprise, surprise—we didn’t consider this when we built our cities.
As humans increasingly concentrate in urban areas, these cities mean that our ecological footprint is affecting the entire world.
With climate change as another challenge, the risk of higher infection for our species (down already from a global pandemic), dangerous living conditions, and the depletion of our food sources due to our inefficiency in producing them, the combination of factors can and will mean the extinction of the human race.
Mancuso tells us that our dream of a megalopolis that resembles Trantor (Isaac Asimov’s planet covered in metal) is just not feasible.
The utopian city MUST have more plants in it, can be planned with them in mind, and the result will be clean air, clean water, space to breathe and walk, and places where you can enjoy being alive. The bleak dystopian cities like the ones portrayed in Blade Runner are not, in fact, sustainable in time, and would be disastrous for humanity.
As every tree in a forest is linked to all the others by an underground network of roots, uniting them to form a superorganism, so plants constitute the nervous system, the plan that is the “greenprint” of our world. To ignore the existence of this plan is one of the most serious threats to the survival of our species.
–Stefano Marcuso
It is possible to dream of better, cleaner cities, we can indeed plant our worlds and change them for the better, and what is at stake is the survival of the human race.
Planting Our World is available on April 18, 2022
Publish Date: April 18, 2023
Pages: 224
Type: Hardcover
EAN/UPC: 9781635422566
BISAC Categories: Plants – General Life Sciences – Botany Natural History
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