LAA Book Corner: Welcome to the world of ULTRAWILD
Ultrawild: An Audacious Plan to Rewild Every City on Earth (Allen & Unwin, 2023)
“Rewilding may be more powerful
than any of us can possibly imagine”
(A book review by guest writer Stephen Olsen)
The playfully wondrous repurposing of city landscapes and infrastructure posited in Ultrawild reminded me of sponge cities on steroids.
It’s a book made for building hope that the challenges of combating climate change and boosting biodiversity aren’t insurmountable.
Every one of the 80+ pages of the large format* book that is Wellingtonian Steve Mushin’s Ultrawild, is an entry point to a fast-moving stream of extreme rewilding interventions, painstakingly drawn on a Wacom Cintiq1 tablet using Sketchbook Pro over thousands of hours.
The physical Ultrawild book was seven years in gestation, has been translated into German for release next month, and will have editions available for audiences in China and the USA next year.
Already in 2024 it has collected two awards: Best Designed Children's Non-Fiction book in the Australian Book Design Awards and the Elsie Locke Award For Nonfiction (NZ).
At the same time as achieving his dream of a book that you can dip into and out of, Ultrawild absolutely affirms Mushin’s premise that “ludicrous ideas are bootcamp for brains”.
AN EDUCATIVE BOOK
To say Ultrawild is also absolutely educative would be a gross understatement.
In the pursuit of demonstrating what rehabilitation of our trashed planet will take, Mushin consistently deploys two units of measure in Ultrawild: quantums of Mt Everest as a proxy for carbon dioxide pollution, and Amazon rainforests for carbon sequestration.
Heavily planted with evidentionary science and factoids, there is an abundancy of concept-building at work in Ultrawild.
And ‘flights of fancy’ that are actually grounded in current-century tech such as Festo’s bionically inspired robotic birds (see HY-TEK Bio too) or antecedental bicycle ornithopters.
Ultrawild’s visioning of cities where we farm upwards and turn streets from one-car carnage to places where no animals are barred is, well, visionary.
Who needs superpowers when you could have ‘super-pooers’ like the megafauna who once roamed the planet as landscape turbochargers?
Megafauna that, if re-invented with biocomposite inputs, could do so again - issuing Giza Pyramid-sized loads of manure and turning over the soil just like four legged tractors.
And, following that lead, why have roads when we could have massive city forests, mangrove swamps, savannahs, alpine tussock, grasslands in their place? (Note: I didn’t know there was such a thing as a snottygobble tree – aka Persoonia longifolia I do now, and I won’t forget it).
At its two-thirds mark Ultrawild does ring an alarm bell about the steep barriers ahead, and then embarks on six vertical page spreads of reprised thought experiments inspired by the natural genius of termite mounds and beehives.
From its early accolades** it seems certain that Ultrawild’s open invitation for readers to get busy designing their own ludicrous ideas will provide an enduring allure for children and parents, young people and thinking adults alike.
As well as an undergrowth of humorous and homage-laden nods to popular culture, I loved that it has an index, a selected bibliography of 19 references and a glossary of 39 terms. All backed up on www.ultrawild.org with access to detailed notes and calculations.
It also contains numerous signifiers in the text and beautiful illustrations of its ties to Aotearoa and Australia. Such as the featuring of indigenous flora and fauna (the Kauri, the Moa) and the resonant whakataukī at the foot of page 18: Toitū te marae a Tāne, Toitū te marae a Tangaroa, Toitū te tangata.
Steve Mushin, along with a cadre of friends and supporters, admits to always having just one more thing on his mind, so there are bound to be more books in the pipeline. As he writes in Ultrawild:
“We can’t imagine the new ideas that will come from the new ideas that will come from the new ideas we’re working on now”.
* 28 by 33.5 cm
** Ultrawild made various best book lists for 2023 including the Guardian and The Spinoff. On the Guardian it was described as a “brain-meltingly intricate and inspiring compendium” of gigantic ideas. On The Spinoff Claire Mabey wrote: “This visionary, intricate, outrageous road map for integrated thinking could go in the adult list too … it’s a melding of engineering, hi-tech, botany, zoology and pure creative thinking. Required reading for everyone, most especially political leaders and those feeling like we’ve run out of ideas: this book proves we really haven’t”. See also: Radio New Zealand | Read NZ | Poetry Box | The Sapling | Read Plus | The Book Trust
Further children’s literature recommendations
Finn Mackesy, educator and a member of the team at Resilio Studio, has put together an impressive ‘living list’ of reading for, and with, children and young people on the Dark Green Aotearoa website The list is structured under headings for: Earth - Nature - Spirit connection; Rewilding; Narratives about the living world, humanity and entanglement; Trans-species narratives / More than human protagonists; Earth science and deep time; Earth stewardship and homesteading; Community, transition culture and post-carbon futures; Ecology, the environment and sustainability; Resilience and emotional literacy; Aotearoa New Zealand ecology and history and culture. Ultrawild is destined to appear on the list soon.