Artificial natural: deforestation and re-forestation, (the human paradox).

The human being have been looking to improve their quality of life and commodities through destroying their surrounded natural ecosystems, and it has been even more improved during the last century and in the current one. The sea, the rivers and forests have been exploded until their exhaustion, to satisfy the “progress” needs or requirements. We didn’t planned or researching the consequences of the impact of our presence enough before we decided to intervene into those natural environments and the consequences have been devastating.
Half of the earth surface was covered by forests 10.000 years ago, but each week disappear a forest surface equivalent to a 320.000 football fields because the human action.
Those forests as the other ecosystems, are very rich as a field to research in several fields of knowledge, to learn about nature, to observe and analyze about the different animal species and their peculiarities, about the vegetation, which means a potential field to find inspiration to improve our own lives, to discover new remedies for our diseases and new materials to be used in designing new technologies, which at the end are going to improve our lives through new commodities.
But looks like humans are learning about their mistakes and they are creating “green lungs” or big green spaces to make up for the damage they created when they decided to start cultivating the land and building huge cities and industrial areas.
There is in Mexico D.F, one of the most populated cities in the world with around 25 million citizen and which has less than 1.8 metres of green space per inhabitant, a natural reserve called Xochimilco Park, which through the building of floating gardens called “chinampas” has been designed to repair the water resources and adequate storm water drainage and absorption, which was seriously damaged since the deforestation and over exploitation of the soil during the last century which with the pollution have degraded severely the environment. This park has as well a tree nursery that produces 30 million trees every year that are planed to place throughout the city.
This project is an example of an artificial ecosystem created by humans to make up for their power of destruction. This project makes the environment artificially more sustainable and it should be a reference to make humans reflect about a better planning of the cities before build them, and about the consequences of destroying the environment that at the end introduce humans in a vice circle in which our artificial technology supplied by our questionable “ethical progress” repairs the damage we did before, but may be one day can be too late.

Resources

- Design and Landscape for people, new approaches to renewal.
- http://www.cienciapopular.com/n/Ecologia/Deforestacion_Mundial/Deforestacion_Mundial.php