An industrial designer, illustrator and inventor, Steve Mushin spent seven years developing Ultrawild. Ostensibly a children’s books where STEM – science, technology, engineering and maths – meets art, it brings together a whole lot of “design ridiculousness” to highlight inventions which might seem whacky but are scientifically plausible and could rewild cities.
Rewilding cities for humans and all species as fast as technologically and biologically possible is known as “ultrawilding”. While habitat-printing robot birds and water-filtering sewer submarines might be amusing, this book is also about hope, with a serious plan to transform urban space into “carbon-sucking mega-habitats for all species, and as fast as possible”.
Here, he shares three things you’ll learn from reading Ultrawild, as well as one thing creating the book taught him.
The first ultrawild thing:
Flying bicycles powered only by your legs are completely possible. Soon we’ll all be riding them. But first we’ll need ultrathermals – massive glass chimneys that collect waste heat from buildings – to launch ourselves. Nine city blocks of New York city would give us enough waste heat to launch flying bikes up to 4km into the sky. And from that height, you could glide for 40km.
Flying bikes would mean many fewer cars and so fewer roads and car parking spaces. They’d mean fewer bike paths too – so even grumpy people would be happy. Along with shared autonomous electric vehicles and other transport innovations, flying bikes could help us massively reduce the number of roads. This is why flying bikes are an important part of the plan to rewild – allowing nature to return and thrive by itself in every last city on Earth.
Rewilding cities will provide habitat for millions of other species. And it will suck down massive amounts of carbon. Once we quit fossil fuels, rewilding will be one of the greatest tools we have to reverse climate change. And it’s heaps of fun too – who wouldn’t want to live in a jungle?
The second ultrawild thing:
The world’s 2.5 billion lamp posts, power poles, traffic lights, street signs are “nearly trees” – they’re perfect for 3D printing into armoured luxury habitats for native animals. We’ll need to 3D print these as fast as possible to house the billions of animals and insects we need to welcome back to help with ultrawilding – for pollination, seed dispersal and soil fertilising. And to do that we’ll need a trillion or so 3D printer birds.
3D printer birds are flying tree-printing robots. They 3D scan trees – with all their hollows and other animal habitat features included. Then they 3D print lamp posts and other “nearly trees” into fake trees that are perfect animal homes. 3D printer birds print using recycled plastic which they melt by concentrating heat from the sun using mirrors on their wings. They can also 3D print copies of themselves, or self-replicate. It would take roughly 10 months for 3D printer birds to multiply to one trillion if we started with just one self-replicating 3D printer bird today. And it would take 1000 kererū-sized 3D printer birds roughly one month to 3D print a Wellington lamp post into a kōwhai tree.
The third ultrawild thing:
According to experts, chickens have dreams, do basic maths and can solve simple problems by anticipating future events. They’re also the perfect soil-making engineers to help us transform the world’s roughly two billion roofs into vertical gardens. Even better, according to the latest science, chicken poo is perfect for growing algae, which can be used to make algae-based bioplastics for 3D printing almost anything – like rooftop gardens with chicken castles.
The idea is obvious: humans should collaborate with the world’s 33 billion chickens to transform buildings into vertical jungles. All we need to do is give chickens their freedom, sovereignty over the world’s roofs and all of our food scraps (launched up to them using compostapults), and they could technically transform the world’s roofs into jungles in just a few years (with the help of chicken poo-collecting robot beetles, algae-plastic-making bioreactors and building-modifying 3D printer chickens).
Finally…
It’s probably as difficult for us to imagine how quickly humans could repair the planet as it would have been for our ancestors to have imagined how quickly humans would trash it.
While working on Ultrawild – talking to scientists and researching engineering innovations from around the world – I was constantly amazed by the incredible potential of so many new technologies to rapidly transform our world for the better.
Think about shared autonomous vehicles. Cities are 30-60% covered with roads and carparks. But if, as some transport engineers predict is possible, shared autonomous cars could reduce total cars by 80%, and remove most parking, we could double the amount of space an average city has for people, and turbocharge ultrawilding.
Consider the possibilities of algae bioplastics. These future super materials can be mixed with natural fibres for carbon-fibre-like strength – perfect for 3D printing flying bikes, luxury animal habitats and skyscraper gardens. They’re biodegradable too. And they could be made almost anywhere in the world to replace today’s petrochemical plastics. Even better, their production sucks down, or sequesters, vast amounts of carbon from the air.
Then there’s microbial-based foods which have the potential to completely transform global food production. Solar Foods in Finland has developed a bacteria-based protein that can be produced using 20,000 times less land than regular farming, while requiring only air, water and solar electricity as inputs. It can be made into super-realistic fake meats, eggs, milk and more – potentially freeing up much of the world’s farmland for rewilding.
I’m ultra excited about the potential for radical innovation to help us quit fossil fuels super fast, transform cities for all species, and begin reversing climate change and biodiversity loss now. We just need the courage to imagine the possibilities.
Ultrawild – An Audacious Plan for Rewilding Every City on Earth by Steve Mushin (Allen & Unwin NZ, $37.99) is out now.
Book takes is a new exclusive Listener online column where authors share the top three things readers will learn from their books, as well as an insight into what they learned during the researching and writing.
