<story><title>When you give a tree an email address</title><url>http://www.citylab.com/tech/2015/07/when-you-give-a-tree-an-email-address/398219/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jmduke</author><text>This is beautiful and moving to me in a way that is hard to express easily.  Part of it is probably the sheer tweeness (not using that term disparagingly) of writing a love letter to a tree. I&amp;#x27;m sure the samples in the article were pretty much the top of the barrel -- and I pray for the poor oaks which inevitably received a bunch of obscenities [^1].  But still, people are taking time out of their day to &lt;i&gt;email the trees in their city&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m sitting here thinking about how this could be generalized into a mechanism of engaging with the world around us, which is possibly defeating the point; this is great more for the &lt;i&gt;emergent gameplay&lt;/i&gt; of it (to steal a metaphor) than anything, and I think some weird startup that let you tweet your river would kind of rob the whole exercise of its innocence.&lt;p&gt;The Internet (or maybe technology in general, as if the two have a meaningful difference at this point) is so overwhelmingly used as a vehicle to accelerate maturity, to make us more jaded and cynical and disconnected.  There&amp;#x27;s something great about this doing the opposite -- a glorified SMTP server letting us be more childlike, more honest and engaged in the world around us.&lt;p&gt;[^1]: There&amp;#x27;s, like, a 30% chance that there now exists someone in this world who has sent a dick pic to a tree.</text></comment>
<story><title>When you give a tree an email address</title><url>http://www.citylab.com/tech/2015/07/when-you-give-a-tree-an-email-address/398219/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sleepychu</author><text>Easily the best part of this article is that the interviewee is called Councillor Wood.</text></comment>