India's Meghalaya 'living root bridges' get stronger as the trees grow
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
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.
Hell, I'd love a living bridge in my backyard that I could have grown in a summer or two.
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.
*edit: I should add that the entry fee is usually dirt cheap, even free for some places
Why cant the Police enforce the rules and charge a fine for littering?
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.
The problem is you will just point fingers and not do anything about it.
How do you know I will not do anything? Do you know me personally? I can do something and still point fingers at the tourists.
My original point was about whether you can blame tourists or not. I see your point that the inhabitants also need to take care of their land, but you seem to have strayed from that discussion into something else.
Just out of curiosity, have you done anything to tackle this issue?
The behaviour of tourists is what you get when you get tourism. If you don't like it, don't have tourists - if you do have tourists, make them follow the rules that you want to see.
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).
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.
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.
What? No. In cities a living root bridge would be destroyed within a year.
They are made from an available and suitable plant into a shape of a bridge, but not with a specific intention of being suitable for a couple of hundred villagers only.
They might as well be suitable for a good deal more, we weren't even given any measurements, crossections etc. in the article to even begin to guess.
The mere fact that Western Society can't or hasn't done something doesn't imply that it's impossible. It's a reasonably well known fact that the indigenous people of america had almost no encounters with any sort of plague or disease like that of the black plague, measles, or smallpox, something that would seem impossible without the knowledge of the structures of their cities and their relationship with cattle.
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.
A plant bridge is nice and dandy until it falls on your head
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!
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.
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.
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.