AN AMAZON LOVE STORY—CONNECTING TO THE INNERNET

AN AMAZON LOVE STORY—CONNECTING TO THE INNERNET

This was total immersion, in an incomprehensibly complex ecosystem that is no less than a massive collective intelligence. A massive distributed brain. We were tapping into the Innernet.

When you’re in rainforest territory, being aware of real life surroundings and being present are of top importance. Instinctively, you want to know which creatures are where at every moment, and whether they’re friend or foe. All around, life in billions of forms—teaming, thrumming, humming, crawling, fluttering and flapping. Trillions of plants and trees of every imaginable form and shade of green. For millennia, this place has thrived like a single super-organism, regenerating in an endless cycle of interconnectedness and interdependence.

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THE MAJESTIC GHETTO PALM, A.K.A. TREE OF HEAVEN

THE MAJESTIC GHETTO PALM, A.K.A. TREE OF HEAVEN

There are trees busting through the nature-squelching asphalt of my neighbor's courtyard. When I walk to work, I see one growing right out of a sewer grate where one week prior there wasn’t even the faintest sign of life. They're everywhere in NYC, and seem to come from nowhere. They're all the same type of impossibly tough tree: the Tree of Heaven, a.k.a. ghetto palm, or as botany nerds would tell us, Ailanthus altissima.

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