Fragments

“We found that the more breathable the materials we used, the happier the trees were,” adds Embrén.

Proponents say the method has a number of benefits, including the fact that pits can be installed around existing trees, they can bear the weight of heavy-vehicle traffic, they require little topsoil — a resource that is becoming scarce — and they need less watering than traditionally-planted trees.

This approach, which allows tree roots to thrive beneath hard surfacing, ergo allowing healthy trees to grow within the modern built environment, is particularly relevant as cities attempt to re-green and reforest in the face of climate change.

According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, urban forests can help “future-proof” cities, which are responsible for about 75 percent of global CO2 emissions. Sustainable urban forestry, it says, can bring multiple benefits, such as lowering temperatures, improving public health, creating habitats for biodiversity, sequestering carbon, generating green jobs, and mitigating risks of floods and landslides.

“It’s more important now than ever before,” says Ryan Klein, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Horticulture at the University of Florida. “We have these massive populations in urban areas. And we’re seeing more extreme weather like hurricanes, wildfires and prolonged droughts. Trees can help to offset some of these negative effects.”

However, amid the rush to rapidly reforest cities, experts like Klein warn that due to ineffective methods and techniques being used, it’s common to see urban trees in poor health, and trees planted in cities often have very high mortality rates.

“We have the understanding of how to grow healthier, more sustainable and resilient forests,” says Klein. “The research backs it. Unfortunately, we don’t always invest the time, money or internal know-how on implementing this.”

A review of 16 scientific studies on urban tree mortality, published in 2019, found that in the first five years after planting, 6.6 to 7 percent of trees died annually.

“Urban soils are not very tree-friendly currently,” says Rik De Vreese, leader of the Urban Forestry Team at the European Forestry Institute. “It’s quite a serious threat.”

When trees aren’t properly anchored, De Vreese adds, it can also lead to other issues, such as trunks falling over and causing damage or roots warping sidewalks.

However, the Stockholm Tree Pit method — and the way that it’s been implemented in Sweden — is helping urban forests genuinely take root.

One of the first locations where Embrén introduced a tree pit was Erik Dahlbergsallén street in Stockholm, not far from the popular Swedish Museum of Natural History.

There, according to research by the municipality, the circumference of a selection of those planted trees increased from 30 to 35 centimeters to 70 to 83 centimeters between 2004 and 2013, even surpassing that of trees without the tree pits that have been there for more than 80 years. The latest figures from 2024 saw them reach between 100 and 136 centimeters.

“It’s easy to see how effective the pits have been,” says Embrén.

The municipality estimates that 2.3 million liters of rainwater are managed by the trees per year, and consequently, 4,600 square meters of roofs and sidewalks have been disconnected from the sewage system, reducing the burden on water treatment services.

This technique has proven so successful that it has become the standard for all other development projects in the public spaces of Stockholm. Embrén says he has been directly involved in constructing more than 3,000 tree pits, and while he has since retired, there are now three “tree officers” who have taken on the expanding role. 

Britt-Marie Alvem, one of the current tree officers, estimates that the city now builds between 500 and 1,000 tree pits a year.

These days, the tree pits are also in almost every Swedish city — with a few variations.

“Some have copied and changed a little bit, like adding pumice to the stone mix,” says Embrén.

Stockholm’s tree pits are now spreading across Europe, too. In Budapest, Hungary’s capital, the tree pits can be found all over Bartók Béla Boulevard and Arany János Street. Embrén says the Spanish city of Madrid has implemented the method using local materials. And it’s become increasingly popular in the U.K.

Ben Rose, the principal arboricultural consultant at U.K. tree service Bosky Trees and the founder of Stockholm Tree Pits, a U.K.-based company that produces the equipment required to make tree pits, says that he has planted about 500 trees using the Stockholm model in the U.K. since he began in 2019, mostly as part of small-scale pilot projects.

“The approach is very suitable for use in urban situations, particularly in car parks, in plazas, and beside walkways or cycle paths,” says Rose.

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Yet there are some drawbacks to the system. Installation costs can be high, the pits can require a large amount of space to install, and it is impossible to reuse existing soil. In addition, for now there is a relative dearth of professionals who know how to construct tree pits.

“Our main concern is the price,” says De Vreese, whose team is currently studying the importance of “structural soils” like those deployed by the tree pits. “Excavating the soil surrounding the tree and refilling it is no small job.”

And while Professor Klein praises the Stockholm Tree Pit’s use of structural soil and how effective it’s proven to be, he notes that the long-term success of urban forestry also relies on other factors such as the supply of high quality nursery stock and proactive tree management such as routine pruning by municipalities.

“If we don’t have these we are setting ourselves up for failure,” he says. “Some cities do the bare minimum. In the U.S.A., it’s the wild west. But others, like Stockholm, are proactive, and they have public officials seriously behind it. That’s what we need.”

From Arthur Holquin

The Mandate They Would Not Read

I am grateful to my friend Mike Lewis of Where Peter Is, whose prompt translation of the decree I commend to you below. Rome was rightly swift. In 1988, the Holy See declared the automatic excommunications within hours of Archbishop Lefebvre’s act, and Saint John Paul II followed two days later with the motu proprio Ecclesia Dei. This time the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued its formal decree the very day after the consecrations. There is a kairos in such promptness: a fiction long indulged has finally been named, and named without equivocation.

Note first how far the decree reaches. In 1988 the sentence fell upon Lefebvre, his co-consecrator, and the four men he consecrated — six prelates. What has been decreed now is far more sweeping. It names the two consecrating bishops and the four newly consecrated, yes; but it goes further and declares the priests of the Society schismatic and therefore excommunicated, and it warns the lay faithful who formally adhere to the Society that they too incur the same sentence.

The Church has extended her gravest sanction not to a handful of bishops but to an entire body — bishops, priests, and adherents alike. This is a decisiveness we have not seen before.

Here is the point the faithful in the pews must grasp, for it touches their souls directly. The faculties that Pope Francis, in his mercy, had conceded to the Society — the faculty to absolve validly in the sacrament of penance, granted in the Jubilee of 2015 and afterward extended, and the faculty to assist validly at marriages — have been rescinded. The consequence is grave and concrete: absolutions given by these priests are now invalid, and the marriages at which they preside are invalid. Those who have looked to Society chapels for the sacraments are not, in these two sacraments, receiving what they believe themselves to be receiving. Mercy was offered; it has been refused; and the refusal falls hardest upon the simplest of the faithful.

I watched a portion of yesterday’s rite — not the whole of it. I would draw your attention to a single moment. In the traditional Pontifical, which the Society employs, there comes the point at which the principal consecrator must ask whether there is an apostolic mandate — “Habetis mandatum apostolicum?” — and the mandate of the Holy See is to be read aloud before the consecration may lawfully proceed. It is precisely there, at the hinge of the rite where communion with Peter is meant to be spoken, that the Society disclosed what it has become. In place of the mandate, an instruction was read in French declaring that because Holy Mother Church had, at the Second Vatican Council, fallen into heresy and become the source of no end of evil and falsehood, they were constrained by the necessity of the care of souls to proceed. Consider what was arrogated in that moment. They made themselves the sole arbiters of the Church’s fidelity — judging the Council, judging the Magisterium, judging the See of Peter herself — and upon the strength of their own private judgment they turned their backs upon the Mother who bore them and abandoned her.

I have argued for some months now that this crisis was never, at its heart, a quarrel over the pre-reformed rite. The liturgy is the pretext; the substance is ecclesiological. A body that presumes to declare the Church herself heretical has ceased to receive the faith as ecclesia discens and installed itself as ecclesia docens over against the living Magisterium — which is to say it has ceased to be Catholic in the one sense that finally matters, “cum Petro et sub Petro.” The disingenuousness lay open for all to see: in the very rite of defiance, the oath professed the new bishops “obedient to the Apostle Peter, the Holy Roman Church, and Pope Leo XIV” — words emptied of their meaning in the instant of their pronouncement. One does not swear fidelity to Peter while consecrating against his express and pleading command.

There is no triumph in any of this. Pope Leo XIV begged them, in words I shall not soon forget, not to tear the seamless garment of Christ. They tore it. We are left to pray — for the brothers now formally separated from our communion, and for the many faithful souls caught in a rupture they did not choose and may scarcely understand, that the door the Church always holds open may yet be walked back through.

The decree follows, in Mike Lewis’s translation.

Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L.

The firm that NG has apparently engaged for online reputation management (ORM), called edendale, was once paid for their professional testimony in an unrelated slander lawsuit, which was delivered in the form of a report (2) outlining the strategy ORM firms use and (2) just how ludicrously expensive those professional services cost. (Credit to horrornobody77 for digging up the report.) We’re talking hundred of thousands of dollars for a small potatoes case, where NG’s could easily get into the millions for ORM and associated legal fees.

It’s not that long of a read, but to summarize the key action items you can take:

📆 -ORMs wait for the discourse to die down, because active discourse is much more expensive to counter. Wanna cost NG money? Talk about the accusations over time. Set a quarterly calendar event in your phone to remind yourself to post (and otherwise engage on other people’s posts) about the Vulture article. This needs to happens for years, so that NG has to pay for more comprehensive ORM and for longer.

✅-Make discourse that is Google-friendly. Use the words edendale will find concerning (they’re already running fluff pieces with the terms Neil Gaiman Uncovered to try and bury the similarly named subreddit.) If you just post a link without much comment, it’s not gonna be prioritized by search engines. Similarly, if you make a low effort post and then no one else engages with it—it’s not going to make it to the top ten search results. Engage with each other, for heaven’s sake!

🦾-Don’t let the fluff sit unaddressed. If you see random bot posts sharing NG quotes captioning random fantasy art (possibly AI or misattributed /stolen) with the comments turned on? Respond! Make it hard for the bots to understand your comment but easy for humans. “Nice quote! Mega bummer about what NG did, I used to really like him,” is hard for a bot to auto-delete. “Fuck NG,” is practically doing the bot’s autodelete command for it.

✍️ -If/when you post fan works for properties strongly related to Neil Gaiman, leave a lil callout in the author’s notes. Nothing that will get you sued, just a few words like: “I would definitely personally choose to not ever meet Neil Gaiman at a comic con.” Maybe throw in a link to your fav tumblr summary.

Anyway, to the person being paid hundreds or thousands of dollars per hour by Neil Gaiman for professional services—you’re welcome for the extra billable hours 😘