they say you don't look 'cause it'll disappear

““The Great Pacific Garbage Patch can now be cleaned,” announced Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat, the wonderkid inventor who’s spent a decade inventing systems for waterborne litter collection.

Recent tests on his Ocean Cleanup rig called System 002, invented to tackle the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic pollution, were a success, leading Slat to predict that most of the oceanic garbage patches could be removed by 2040.

Intersections of ocean currents have created the massive floating islands of plastic trash—five slow-moving whirlpools that pull litter from thousands of miles away into a single radius.

The largest one sits between California and Hawaii, and 27-year-old Slat has been designing and testing his systems out there, launching from San Francisco since 2013.

GNN has reported on his original design for the floating device, but his engineering team improved upon it. System 002, nicknamed “Jenny,” successfully netted 9,000 kilograms, or around 20,000 pounds in its first trial.

It’s carbon-neutral, able to capture microplastics as small as 1 millimeter in diameter, and was designed to pose absolutely no threat to wildlife thanks to its wide capture area, slow motion, alerts, and camera monitors that allow operators to spy any overly-curious marine life…

And he’s just been refining it and making it better and better? Amazing news!

If I’m doing this exercise, I want 7-10 questions to get the character feeling real in my head. So I thought I’d share the ones that get me (and my students) good results: 

What is the character’s go-to drink order? (this one gets into how do they like to be publicly perceived, because there is always some level of theatricality to ordering drinks at a bar/resturant)

What is their grooming routine? (how do they treat themselves in private)

What was their most expensive purchase/where does their disposable income go? (Gets you thinking about socio-economic class, values, and how they spend their leisure time)

Do they have any scars or tattoos? (good way to get into literal backstory) 

What was the last time they cried, and under what circumstances? (Good way to get some *emotional* backstory in.) 

Are they an oldest, middle, youngest or only child? (This one might be a me thing, because I LOVE writing/reading about family dynamics, but knowing what kinds of things were ‘normal’ for them growing up is important.)

Describe the shoes they’re wearing. (This is a big catch all, gets into money, taste, practicality, level of wear, level of repair, literally what kind of shoes they require to live their life.)

Describe the place where they sleep. (ie what does their safe space look like. How much (or how little) care / decoration / personal touch goes into it.)

What is their favorite holiday? (How do they relate to their culture/outside world. Also fun is least favorite holiday.) 

In the Eastern USA, only tiny remnants of old-growth forest remain; all the rest, over 99%, was clear-cut within the last 100-150 years.

Most tree species here have a lifespan of 300-500 years—likely longer, since extant examples of truly old trees are so rare, there is limited ability to study them. In a suburban environment, almost all of the trees you see around you are mere saplings. A 50 year old oak tree is a youth only beginning its life.

The forest where I work is 100 years old; it was clear cut around 1920. It is still so young.

When I dig into the ground there, there is a layer about an inch thick of rich, plush, moist, fragrant topsoil, packed with mycelium and light and soft as a foam mattress. Underneath that the ground becomes hard and chalky in color, with a mineral odor.

It takes 100 years to build an inch of topsoil.

That topsoil, that marvelous, rich, living substance, took 100 years to build.

I am sorry your textbooks lied to you. Do you remember pictures in diagrams of soil layers, with a six-inch topsoil layer and a few feet of subsoil above bedrock?

That's not true anymore. If you are not an "outdoorsy" person that hikes off trail in forests regularly, it is likely that you have never touched true topsoil. The soil underlying lawns is depleted, compacted garbage with hardly any life in it. It seems more similar to rocks than soil to me now.

You see, tilling the soil and repeatedly disturbing it for agriculture destroys the topsoil layer, and there is no healthy plant community to regenerate it.

The North American prairies used to hold layers of topsoil more than eight or nine feet deep. That was a huge carbon sink, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it underground.

Then European colonists settled the prairie and tried to drive the bison to extinction as part of the plan to drive Native Americans to extinction, and plowed up that topsoil...and the results were devastating. You might recall being taught about the Dust Bowl. Disrupting that incredible topsoil layer held in place by 12-foot-tall prairie grasses and over 100 different wildflower species caused the nation to be engulfed in horrific dirt storms that turned the sky black and had people hundreds of miles away coughing up clods of mud and sweeping thick drifts of dirt out of their homes.

But plowing is fundamental to agricultural civilizations at their very origins! you might say.

Where did those early civilizations live? River valleys.

Why river valleys? They're fertile because of seasonal flooding that deposits rich silt that can then be planted in.

And where does that silt come from?

Well, a huge river is created by smaller rivers coming together, which is created by smaller creeks coming together, which have their origins in the mountains and uplands, which are no good for farming but often covered in rich, dense forests.

The forests create the rich soil that makes agriculture possible. An ancient forest is so powerful, it brings life to civilizations and communities hundreds of miles away.

You may have heard that cattle farming is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. A huge chunk of that is just the conversion of an existing forest or grassland to pasture land. Robust plant communities like forests, wetlands, and grasslands are carbon sinks, storing carbon and removing it from the atmosphere. The destruction of these environments is a direct source of carbon emissions.

All is not lost. Nature knows how to regenerate herself after devastating events; she's done so countless times before, and forests are not static places anyway. They are in a constant state of regrowth and change. Human caretakers have been able to manage ancient forests for thousands of years. It is colonialism and the ideology of profit and greed that is so destructive, not human presence.

It understands minecradf so perfectly and doesn't treat it as childishly as the other stories in it did.

And all that within 10 pages and no word spoken.