
When you give a tree an email address - mef
http://www.citylab.com/tech/2015/07/when-you-give-a-tree-an-email-address/398219/
======
jmduke
This is beautiful and moving to me in a way that is hard to express easily.
Part of it is probably the sheer tweeness (not using that term disparagingly)
of writing a love letter to a tree. I'm sure the samples in the article were
pretty much the top of the barrel -- and I pray for the poor oaks which
inevitably received a bunch of obscenities [^1]. But still, people are taking
time out of their day to _email the trees in their city_.

I'm sitting here thinking about how this could be generalized into a mechanism
of engaging with the world around us, which is possibly defeating the point;
this is great more for the _emergent gameplay_ of it (to steal a metaphor)
than anything, and I think some weird startup that let you tweet your river
would kind of rob the whole exercise of its innocence.

The Internet (or maybe technology in general, as if the two have a meaningful
difference at this point) is so overwhelmingly used as a vehicle to accelerate
maturity, to make us more jaded and cynical and disconnected. There's
something great about this doing the opposite -- a glorified SMTP server
letting us be more childlike, more honest and engaged in the world around us.

[^1]: There's, like, a 30% chance that there now exists someone in this world
who has sent a dick pic to a tree.

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moioci
How can it be that no one has referred to this as "treemail"?

~~~
barkingnet
Must be barking up the wrong tree! But don't worry, I will get to the root of
it. Leaving no leaf unturned!

~~~
workerIbe
Way to pick the low hanging fruit...

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sleepychu
Easily the best part of this article is that the interviewee is called
Councillor Wood.

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yourlocalcousin
I wish a boy would write me a love letter! It's awesome that trees now get get
more love than many women in NYC but if I had the chance I would also write to
my favorite tree in Central Park

~~~
rokhayakebe
"For how could I fall in love with a Moon, When having set my sight on the Sun
first."

Dugg into every manuscript written,

Every prose ever composed,

Yet I cannot find an instance of men describing.

Describing the sentiment in my heart when I think of you, YourLocalCousin.

And every moment, that is.

I am now sadly forced to believe,

"Man" has never felt it.

Ineffable, it is.

Elyvate is the name I give it.

My pen is my witness and will testify

That I am left with only one desire

That is: in your heart to Reside"

 _A boy_

~~~
ntoronto
This is one of the sweetest things I've ever seen on the Internet.

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quaz3l
Where would you find these email addresses? Were they on the tree? Or some
website that would need to be looked up?

~~~
Mithaldu
Seems you gotta find it through this map:
[http://melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au/](http://melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au/)

~~~
tim333
Cool, although disappointingly the trees don't actually seem to have their own
email addresses. I clicked on one and the address was
"melbourneurbanforest@melbourne.vic.gov.au" and the email subject had the tree
id "Information about a London Plane, Tree ID 1024530"

~~~
logicallee
yeah man, it's like being a teenager in the last century all over again, when
you would call someone's house and have to speak to their parent or whoever
picks up first!

It's 2015. Can't I just email a tree!

------
nissehulth
Dear Mr/Mrs Birch.

Please STOP this pollen nonsense immediately.

~~~
lingben
I suppose 'Dear Mr and Mrs Birch' since they have both male and female
flowers?

~~~
shiggerino
Sounds like perfect Tumblr material.

“I'm birch-kin and my pronouns are xe, xir, xir, xirs, xirself”

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datapolitical
What happens if you give them bitcoin addresses?

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SigmundA
For some reason this immediately reminded me of Larry Nivens Draco Travern:
"The Slow Ones". Were a race of aliens had a much slower metabolism than ours,
they looked like rocks that slowly over decades where moving toward the tavern
across the field to visit. You could communicate with them through email get
replies back after a couple of months, to the aliens it was basically instant
messaging.

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jschwartzi
We should do this in Seattle. There are lots of great trees here that I wish I
could write to.

~~~
proactivesvcs
Then make yourself the Postmaster General! Who knows, the idea might catch on
:-)

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guard-of-terra
You may also have twitter of a rock lying in some forest:

[https://twitter.com/kamen_v_lesu](https://twitter.com/kamen_v_lesu)

It's "Today nothing happened" if you're curious.

~~~
djloche
Perhaps it is a warrant canary / dead man's switch. If it posts something
other than 'today nothing happened' you know the account has been compromised.
if it doesn't post 'today nothing happened' you know the silent switch has
been flipped and any further signals cannot be trusted.

~~~
guard-of-terra
It could be, but it's not. It's an example of twitter art.

~~~
billpg
Maybe that's what they want you to think.

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twic
I wonder if people would have been this kind and thoughtful if the trees were
on Twitter, or Reddit _(topical!)_. How would we interact with trees here on
HN?

~~~
dikaiosune
Oxygen considered harmful, remove all leaves from your current projects if you
want to avoid the oncoming tidal wave of hyperventilation problems.

------
rsuelzer
Washington DC keeps a dataset of all of their trees. I wonder if I should
build some sort of application for interacting with the trees, or just
learning or posting more information about them.

data set: [http://caseytrees.org/resources/maps/dc-street-
trees/](http://caseytrees.org/resources/maps/dc-street-trees/)

------
shoo
There's a lot of positive pro-tree stuff happening in the city of Melbourne,
this is one of the more whimsical aspects of it.

On the less whimsical side of things, a lot of Melbourne's trees are in
decline / are dying, because the city decided to stop watering them during a
drought. But, positively, lessons have been learned from that mistake.

Some further reading :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9411658](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9411658)

------
Fiahil
But, why trees do not respond?

~~~
noonespecial
_You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in
Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to
say._

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clockwerx
Opentrees.org ftw

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walterbell
From [http://twentythree.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-168-do-
object...](http://twentythree.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-168-do-objects-
dream-of-an-internet-of-things/)

 _".. Something strange happens however when objects acquire connectivity,
semantic depth, and the powers of computation and memory – they immediately
and drastically transgress the ontological borders assigned to them..

.. spimes actively enfold space and time because they have the capacity to
carry around their entire existence as a semantic layer..

.. anthropomorphic metaphors are a way for humans to bridge the chasm between
ourselves and objects. They create affective resonance between a human and a
thing, thereby bringing us onto the same ontological plane."_

~~~
electrograv
I'm starting to think one of the trees was equipped with a Markov chain
sentence generator that scanned a lot of philosophy papers and just spit out a
lot of pretentious gibberish. To philosophers though, I'm not sure it would
matter because nobody could tell the difference anyway.

~~~
walterbell
Many modern laws were influenced by philosophers. While the language of
computer scientists and philosophers may appear to be gibberish, they often
influence laws with side effects on humans who may not understand the source
jargon. When the laws for Internet of Things (including but not limited to
huggable trees) are written, hopefully there will be diverse philosophies at
the table, including classics like liberty, speech and privacy.

~~~
cbd1984
> diverse philosophies at the table, including classics like liberty, speech
> and privacy.

'Speech' is hardly a philosophy, 'liberty' is deeply contested down to its
core, and 'privacy' is, again, something you have or you don't, like speech.

~~~
frandroid
I recall that Facebook allows a great granularity for my privacy!

