I wrote the coolest tree hugger in popular culture

Tree huggers and digital minds

Hello, fellow voyagers🖖! In today’s edition we’ll talk about trees & digital minds.

Photo by Jeroen den Otter on Unsplash

I grew up in the ‘80s in a small town in Eastern Europe. Our family of four, my parents, my younger brother and I, shared a tiny two-room apartment in a Soviet-era apartment block. The working-class neighborhood looked very homogenous with its five-storied communist buildings or, as a quick Google search informs me, krushchyovka as the architectural style is formally known. In front of our ground-floor apartment building were two ancient linden trees I loved as a little girl. Perhaps my mother made us linden tea from their flowers. I’m not quite sure. One memory, however, pierces through the veil of time.

One summer day after my fourth birthday, I woke up to the deafening noise of a chainsaw. By the end of the morning, the two giants growing in front of my bedroom window were lying on the ground, defeated. I cried the whole day and remember waking up the next morning and looking out the window. Where my beloved linden trees once stood, there was a gap, like a child’s missing front teeth. Except no new trees would be growing on the freshly asphalted street.

Sometimes, I wonder about the little girl’s kinship with those trees. Is this connection spontaneous for humans? Is it ingrained in our psyche? Our DNA? Many years have passed since that summer morning, and soon, I’ll turn 44. But this story stayed with me all these years, and last year, it inspired a short story titled The Cooperatives.

Today, I want to write about tree huggers and digital minds, the leitmotivs of my short story.

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The last forest

When I read The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, I was fascinated to learn that climate change might transform Siberia into a future-day California. Research suggests there’s an optimal temperature for human productivity—19°C. Silicon Valley is perfectly placed within that range, but as the planet warms, such zones will shift. Siberia will become the goldilocks zone for human productivity and this is where I placed the richest and most important European colony around the year 2550ÆV¹. However, the Siberia of the future will not draw its wealth from manufacturing silicon chips but from something far more valuable.

As the planet gets hotter, the tree line will begin to migrate north in search of cooler climates. But natural succession—the process by which forest ecosystems adapt following disturbances such as climate change—happens far too slowly. Most forests won’t survive. The boreal forest is an exception, and will be the last standing forest. I learned about the last forest in Ben Rawlence’s book ‘The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth’ and was captivated by the Siberian indigenous people and their connection with the cold and the land.

There’s a scene in my story where a character enjoys a bountiful meal—‘a plate with long icy strips of fish—kyspyt, the local delicacy—and small bowls of mustard, salt and chilly powder’—that was directly inspired by the book. Having access to nature and food will be a privilege few people will enjoy in a world transformed by the abrupt, catastrophic consequences of climate change.

‘The larger public still thinks that climate change will be gradual. They are not alive to the fact that it will be abrupt and what that means in terms of climate disasters and the suffering of their children.’—Ko van Huissteden

A defrosted Siberia will bring both peril and opportunity. It will disrupt our fragile climate and ecological systems, and it will shift power to a new dominant region, benefiting from favorable climate conditions, access to a resilient forest, and fresh land as the treeline and the people migrate northwards.

‘There is twice as much greenhouse gas—carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous gas—stored in the permafrost as currently is in the atmosphere, enough to accelerate global warming exponentially and effectively end life on earth as we know if it were all released at once. Yet most climate models discount permafrost because of the lack of data even though 40 percent of permafrost is projected to be gone by the end of the century.’—Ben Rawlence

Tree-huggers in popular culture

Writing ‘The Cooperatives’ was challenging because protecting trees as a story trope has often been ridiculed in popular culture. I’m sure you’ve seen at least one rainbow-beanie-wearing, hippie-dippie tree hugger on screen. No matter how noble these characters are, tree huggers are often portrayed as losers. This perception traces back to the first historical tree huggers.

In 1730, a woman named Amrita Devi stood against the Maharaja of Jodphur who sent his army to cut Khejri trees—the sacred trees of her Bishnoi faith—for the construction of his new palace. Amrita Devi hugged a tree to prevent it from being cut and was decapitated for her defiance. The incident sparked the Khejarly Massacre, in which 363 Bishnois were killed during a peaceful protest to protect their sacred tree grove. Two and half centuries later, their sacrifice inspired the Chipko Movement in 1970—all over the country, Indian people started to hug trees to protest against indiscriminate deforestation by the government.

As a four-year-old girl, I felt the same compassion for the two linden trees. I burst out of our apartment crying, wanting to protect them with my little body. There’s a symbiosis between humans and trees. Humans reforested the planet after the last ice age, and trees have been our companions over millennia, offering us food and shelter.

‘Trees are sanctuaries. When we have learned to listen to trees… that is home. That is happiness.’—Hermann Hesse

Today, tree-hugging is starting to lose its stigma thanks to practices such as Japanese forest bathing or shinrin-yoku that promotes wellness through forest walks and global reforestation efforts to fight against climate change. Yet, I am still waiting for a positive portrayal of a tree hugger in popular culture.

You know what? I think I might’ve written that character myself!

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Digital minds

When I think about the future, I see two main forces that will change life as we knew it ever since Homo sapiens set foot on this planet. Climate change will transform our habitats, ecosystems, and weather conditions, pushing us to find new ways of surviving and cohabitating on this planet. Technology will transform humans beyond recognition. I am surprised we talk so little about transhumanism—‘the use of technology to modify and enhance human cognition and bodily function, expanding abilities and capacities beyond current biological constraints’ (P.D. Hopkins).

The Ghost—the main character of ‘The Cooperatives’—is an artificial intelligence inspired by recent advances in AI technology, human-computer interfaces and the long-term aspiration of digitizing human minds. A couple of years ago, I read the Architects of Intelligence: The truth about AI from the people building it by Martin Ford and learned a lot about the future of AI. During my screenwriting studies, I developed two projects exploring different aspects of AI and its impact on the future of humanity. I’m especially interested in human enhancement with AI and plan to dive into this more in future works.

When writing The Ghost, I had several AI characters from popular science fiction in mind. Data from ‘Star Trek’ is one of my favorites, and HAL from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is the most fascinating. I also enjoy Star War’s droids R2-D2 and the humanoid robot C-3PO who is a translator—a profession I studied myself. Another memorable AI character is Gigolo Joe from ‘A.I. Artificial Intelligence’. Among them, Gigolo Joe feels closest to ChatGPT with his verbosity and slightly insincere personality. There’s a human quality about him that’s rare among fictional AIs.

Recent AI developments have stripped away some of its magic, making the technology more prosaic than we might have imagined. For me, AI has lost its veneer of perfection. It’s imprecise, biased and verbose, like Gigolo Joe. We now understand that AI is governed by algorithms created by humans, powered by a corpus of human knowledge—much of it unfiltered internet content. Left unchecked, AI becomes a grotesque mirror of humanity, a mirror in which we’d rather not contemplate ourselves.

This realization has shaped the Ghost as a character in my novel. Unlike Data—an impartial, objective intelligence driven by noble intentions and with a childlike curiosity about humanity—the Ghost is deeply human, judgemental, with veiled intentions and uncertain loyalties. In the short story Wildfire, I reveal The Ghost’s human origins and connection with the last forest.

As I continue to research and learn more about transhumanism, my exploration of digital minds will deepen in future fiction works. I hope you’ll allow me to share this journey of discovery with you.

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Did you get a chance to read The Cooperatives?

A group of wonderful people read the mini-series over the holiday season.

This is what they had to say:

• The world needs more stories like this.—

  T K Hall

• This is haunting! Really great dialogue especially.—

  Kathleen Clare Waller

• A powerful ending! The depth of human emotions that the Ghost experiences on this part of the journey is captivating.—

  𝐂𝐁 𝐌𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧

• This was a bang-up ending to this series. What’s left of the world is alerted to a final bit of ecocide. Will the people rise up?—

  Larry Hogue

• My new favorite character on Substack: The Ghost!—

  Brian Wilcox

Thank you so much for your support! 💚

If you haven’t had a chance yet, the story is still FREE to read until March!

P.S. The fifth and final story in my mosaic novel, There Is Hope, will be published as a mini-series in March.

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As a writer, my goal is to inspire action through fiction. I write cli-fi and speculative stories on climate change, transhumanism, and our evolving relationship with nature and technology. Subscribe to get my stories directly in your inbox!

1. Æræ Vulgaris or Common Era