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| Terra Metropolis; The Future of Urban Sprawl | |
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| Topic Started: Jan 1 2016, 10:22 PM (12,956 Views) | |
| Sheather | Jan 1 2016, 10:22 PM Post #1 |
 
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 ~~~ The year is 2600. At present, after several centuries' of rise and then gradual fall, there are almost 8 billion people on our Earth, as society has spread to cover the Earth from pole to pole on every continent over the last few tens of thousands of years out from their ancestral Africa through Europe and Asia, to the Americas, and across the sea to Australia and countless islands. Antarctica came last, its true settlement only made possible in the last two centuries, when the formerly ice-bound southernmost continent was finally left habitable by a warming climate thanks to the enormous carbon emissions of the industrial age. This world, once temperate, is today predominately as warm and tropical as it's yet been since the Eocene, yet there are are no virgin rainforests left to show for it - at least of of any significance. Over the last six centuries, we have gone through the sixth major mass extinction in our planet's long history. We saw the seas emptied of life to fill our dinner plates and the jungle cleared for lumber, the casual destruction of thousands of species indirectly and hundreds more extinguished with calculated slaughter. We'd bring some back, at least in some variation, and realizing our grave errors too late, engineer superficial copies of the rest - even, once we had the technology, organisms that vanished before we set foot upon this Earth - but for most life would never be as it was before the dawn of man. It would still be centuries again before the world as a whole was ready to make the efforts needed to try and rebuild some semblance of the wilderness of the planet we'd scraped dry for our selfish needs, to give the majority anything more than an artificial captivity to call home, and change would only come after the darkest of days. War, famine, and societal collapse took many lives, but from the ashes we rebuilt again. In the end, we could never restore it to its former identity; too much was lost, unable to survive in the new world we built around theirs - or the opposite may have been true, ecosystems so altered by introduced organisms for so long that they adapted and become dependent upon the lifeforms that once threatened their existence. Our world is now a new one, far from perfect, but no longer one set upon a seemingly unstoppable path towards its utter obliteration. We are a species that, for all our faults, is here to stay - but that no longer means we can't share our world in a sustainable way. Through a combination of nature's timeless resilience to adversity and our newfound power to modify the very foundations of life as we know it to help it along, Terra Metropolis is the future of us all. The experimental colonies aside, we as a species are all bound to this little blue marble - Earth, our home - but one which we've only recently learned as a species requires as much attention going in as resources being pulled out to ever hope to be sustainable in the long run. As man and nature both learn to live side by side and with mutual give and take, not with a parasitic relationship neatly divided and single-sided, a new and promising chapter in the book of life begins today. Table of Contents
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 The Gaiaverse | Eden | Terra Metropolis | Life of the Sylvan Islands | Other Spec Evo | Sheatheria | Serina | The Last Dinosaur A Wholesome and Good Thing | Sam | | |
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| Beetleboy | Jan 16 2016, 11:02 AM Post #46 |
neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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That was incredible . . . |
| ~ The Age of Forests ~ | |
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| Sheather | Jan 16 2016, 11:08 AM Post #47 |
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I was referring to all of the urban megafauna which tends to be a little neotenic (smaller than average, a bit less wary and less aggressive) as a result of artificial selection. Animals which were more aggressive to people would not be tolerated in close proximity to them in urban environments; less aggressive animals would be selected for, which means animals which don't mature quite as fully as their counterparts in wilder habitats. Habituated, semi-domesticated wild animals basically. |
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The Gaiaverse | Eden | Terra Metropolis | Life of the Sylvan Islands | Other Spec Evo | Sheatheria | Serina | The Last Dinosaur A Wholesome and Good Thing | Sam | | |
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| Steampunk FireFinch | Jan 16 2016, 11:17 AM Post #48 |
Shitposter
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What are "dragon hens" and what adaptations did the pigeons "obtain" to become resistant to pollution and carcinogens? How much food would a small bird or rodent eat in Terra Metropolis? Many, yet small portions throughout the day? (These animals have very high metabolisms you know. I know you know that.) Did they "slow down" their metabolism, wouldn't that mean that they would take longer to mature and live longer (In the rodents case, but what about the birds? Birds have really high metabolisms and live longer than any mammal of the same size, as you still know)? How did the carps adapt to such dirty waters? What do people eat? What changed to make peoples eating habits healthier and have less of a carbon foot-print? |
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| Sheather | Jan 16 2016, 11:53 AM Post #49 |
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Dragon-hens are domesticated dinosaurs. Pigeons living in very dirty urban environments exhibit larger hearts and lungs and produce more sticky mucous in their respiratory tracts to capture harmful airborne pollutants. They have gradually adapted over many generations towards a very high tolerance of heavy metals and other toxic agents in their environment, not through any single adaptation but simply by merit of those individuals who could harmlessly diffuse these chemicals from their bodies or store them harmlessly in their subcutaneous body fat without leaching them into their vital organs surviving the longest to breed in highly polluted environments. Partially because they lack significant predators and partially because the same genes that remove pigment tend to also be expressed in birds which are the best at processing toxic chemicals, the vast majority of "smog pigeons" are white. In modern cities, it also tends to be white birds which are most resilient to environmental contaminants though I don't know if any studies have actually been done to determine why this is so.
Yes. Their metabolisms are not changed, they literally just have to nibble constantly to survive since their stomachs can no longer hold more than a single meal at once. This is beneficial in an environment where food is permanently over-abundant, such as around city food stands or near dumpsters, but it restricts these animals to such artificial habitats, for their specializations have left them unable to survive anywhere else where food is not constantly dropped at their feet. Some Terra Metropolitan mice will starve to death, if suddenly deprived whilst in a healthy body condition, in less than 20 hours without food.
Fundamentally, the same way the birds have. Generations of natural selection, the hardiest individuals with the most resistence to environmental contaminants survive the longest to breed. Fish from polluted waterways exhibit gills more densely packed with blood vessels to extract as much oxygen as possible from stagnant water and have evolved to process extremely high levels of heavy metals relatively harmlessly in their livers and body tissues. The carp themselves may survive, but few other animals and certainly no humans can safely eat them without heavy metal poisoning.
Man's diet is actually fundamentally similar to that of his modern-day predecessor. He surely eats a great amount of sugary, greasy junk food, but a better-understood knowledge of different chemical's long-term effects on the body means his diet is a lot less processed than ours and cancer rates are much lower. The source of all ingredients which now go into commercial foods has also changed. Crops are almost always grown indoors in high-rise farming plantations sometimes known as "farmscrapers", where indoor cultivation means no pesticides need be used, meaning it is cleaner. Animal protein on a commercial level is virtually all produced through indoor tissue culture in sterile laboratory environments rather than from the farming of livestock, and because of this it requires no hormones or medications and is much healthier for the human body. Both plant and meat cultivation is now much less destructive to the environments, with no excess nutrient run-off poisoning waterways. While conventional outdoor agriculture, including the raising of living animals for their products, is no longer regularly done commercially, the practice has persisted on a local or individual level with small family farms very commonplace, harking back to the long ago age before agriculture became as commercial as it now is in the 21st century. Since these plants and animals are also usually raised without added hormones or chemicals their products too, when consumed, are generally much healthier than the vegetables and meat we consume today. |
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The Gaiaverse | Eden | Terra Metropolis | Life of the Sylvan Islands | Other Spec Evo | Sheatheria | Serina | The Last Dinosaur A Wholesome and Good Thing | Sam | | |
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| Steampunk FireFinch | Jan 16 2016, 12:45 PM Post #50 |
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Shitposter
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This is probably an un-important question, but is that red headed bird a red-headed parrot finch descendant or relative? Done with questions for now. |
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| Sheather | Jan 16 2016, 01:28 PM Post #51 |
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It is a bleeding-heart parrot finch, a native of the Sylvan Islands. Their closest relative would be the tri-colored parrot finch, so you are very close. |
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The Gaiaverse | Eden | Terra Metropolis | Life of the Sylvan Islands | Other Spec Evo | Sheatheria | Serina | The Last Dinosaur A Wholesome and Good Thing | Sam | | |
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| Steampunk FireFinch | Jan 16 2016, 03:04 PM Post #52 |
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Shitposter
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It's fabulous. I'm guessing the other one is an owl finch or zebra finch relative. Since it's in the Taeniopygia genus and there are only those 2 birds in that genus (for now).  Thanks for answering. Edited by Steampunk FireFinch, Jan 16 2016, 03:05 PM.
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| GlarnBoudin | Jan 16 2016, 03:16 PM Post #53 |
Disgusting Skin Fetishist
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"Hardy land races form the world wide as farmer's turn loose their stock" Huh? |
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Quotes Spoiler: click to toggle Co-creator/corporate minion for the Pop Culture Monster Apocalypse! My Projects Spoiler: click to toggle Coming Soon Spoiler: click to toggle My dA page. My Fanfiction.net page. | |
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| Sheather | Jan 16 2016, 03:25 PM Post #54 |
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I used an accidental, unnecessary apostrophe. I mean in that phrase that many farmers release their livestock into the wild as competition with more modern tissue culture farm operations run old-fashioned commercial farmers out of business, and that the subsequently-freed cattle, goats, and other animals naturalize in many environments, forming wild breeds known as land races. |
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The Gaiaverse | Eden | Terra Metropolis | Life of the Sylvan Islands | Other Spec Evo | Sheatheria | Serina | The Last Dinosaur A Wholesome and Good Thing | Sam | | |
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| Tartarus | Jan 16 2016, 07:40 PM Post #55 |
Prime Specimen
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I like the elevated wildlife zones. Sounds like a more futuristic version of something that goes on today, where people in some places have allowed vegetation to grow on the tops and sides of buildings, forming small artificial ecosystems. And I like how those creatures who were genetically engineered seem to have been generally created for logical reasons. e.g. the gliding cats being to help control rodent and pigeon populations, and genetically engineered insects being used to deal with plastic litter. |
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| Sheather | Jan 16 2016, 10:21 PM Post #56 |
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The last of the evening sun's rays stream through the glistening towers of steel, between the millions of individual leaves upon every balcony of the towering modern apartment complex which rises high on supports over the busy market square below. Flocks of hundreds of varicolored pigeons swoop and swerve as one between the tall buildings of the future city, gradually splitting and taking flight towards their home roosts in the many different balconies and gardens of a single immense steel and glass building complex. The structure is a beautiful feat of engineering, a matrix of towers and bridges forming the approximate outline of a towering cylinder - ten sturdy supportive towers arranged in a circular array, connecting to one another at every second story of their height with a landscaped bridge supporting flowering trees and shrubs and lattices of exotic vines. At the top, fifty stories from the bustling street below, a ring of dense green forest caps the structure, sprouting up from a single interconnected hoop roughly 150 feet in width which rings a wide open space with clear view down to the ground below, in the center of the cylinder, through which tens of the birds dive down through to slip into the vegetated bridges along the rounded structures borders. They split up increasingly as they spiral down into the interior well of the building, each bird knowing well which bridge is its specific roost. Scrawny feral birds gather clumped on shaded ledges, while others, far larger in both weight and wingspan, the owned birds - well-fed by a day's foraging far and wide across the open city with their free-living kin - slip through flaps into spacious coops to settle for the night in security in the specially-constructed shelters their owners have graciously provided them. The wild birds will have to fend for themselves in the night, while the elegant and sturdy domesticated pigeons, several times the size of their feral relatives, have warmth and safety, protected from inclement weather and all the city's nocturnal dangers in warm straw-lined nests - all but one, that is: their owners, who might cull one or two from their quiet roost in their sleep for their own supper every now and again as the population steadily grows. Everything in this world comes at a cost. The magnificent structure is but one of thousands of similar which stand in a staggered pattern for miles over-top the sprawling city below, all equally adorned with verdant plant growth along their every ledge. Every major global city has its trademark architectural designs, and the cylindrical suburbs that rise above the busy shopping centers and offices of central New York City are among the best-known. Across every complex's ten cylindrical support towers is hosted a total of 250 double-story apartments, home in total to approximately 1000 residents. Each apartment tower in each nearly identical communal structure is accessible by its own high-speed system of elevators and a basic outdoor fire escape on the interior side of the cylinder. The individual housing units in the cylindrical suburbs are very spacious by modern standards, among the closest society still comes to large suburban single-family homes. Each vegetated bridge between the towers is a personal garden connected to the apartment to its left (when viewed from its outer side) and measures approximately fifty feet in width by 150 feet in length, divided by a central pathway. Many choose to fill their airborne allotments with orchards of blossoming tropical flowers and jungle trees - an ornamental aesthetic. Others are more utilitarian, crowding every available inch of space with productive vegetable crops, suspending large wire chicken runs or dovecotes - the aforementioned pigeon coops, nightly roosts of the free-range livestock - above the plants to rear their own protein. For the modern family without an interest in botany, a low-maintenance, sky-high lawn might be planted upon which toddlers run and play alongside their puppy dogs, secure behind tall white picket fences that hide the elevated urban landscape beyond to give the impression of a typical 21st century suburban yard. No matter individual tastes, each home has a tastefully-designed yard in any case, private and secluded in the city's heights. From the windows in each apartment, which range from ground-level to fifty stories above the ground, thousands of people gaze out at their world - strange to us, but the only one they've ever known. Their technology in some respects is beyond ours, but the difference is less extreme than that of our modern 21st century technology compared to that of the early 1900s. While the progress of technological advance is always increasing, the rate of increase begins to slow by an exponential rate once a certain level has been reached, a level in this particular society reached centuries ago. For more than one hundred years, it's been a relatively static period of peace and prosperity, differing minimally decade to decade. Their culture has evolved and is at times different and strange to us, but their languages are not incomprehensible, even with the myriad of new words and phrases that they've adopted over the generations that we might not understand coming from so long before them. They remain alike us. They have similar hopes and dreams, hobbies and problems. They don't live forever, lifted to a god-like state, and they are not ruled by the iron grip of amoral technological overlords. And though their world is currently doing well, it is not entirely problem-free. If they are lucky and continue on their current path, they may soon be - but they are simply humans living in a human world, perfectly imperfect beings as they've always been and always will be. There is unfortunately no way to be certain past history will not repeat itself again one day in the future, be it in one century or thousands. But today, the outlook seems bright. ~~~~~~~~~ A world away, it is morning in the north of the Australian mega-city of Syndylia. The ground of the city is alive with foot traffic and vehicles who find welcome relief in the shade of their own elevated offices, apartments, and mega-structures from the hot sun, which makes little differentiation anymore between summer or winter. Raised forests upon every rooftop interconnect to form a nearly closed canopy in some areas, cooling the air at ground level considerably while giving animals as exotic as tree kangaroos, koalas, and cockatoo parrots sufficient food and shelter to thrive directly above hot dog stands, busy sidewalks, and crowded streets in the depths of the city below. Possums leap from tree to tree with ease, never mind the occasional chasm of one hundred stories as they periodically jump from one rooftop island to the next. In the middle of the canopy forest a bright green expanse of lawn can occasionally be found - a raised park hundreds of feet above the ground where citizens picnic and play while graceful rock wallabies bound with ease between ledges and balconies to graze at its peak on the lush green lawn, having adopted the heights urban jungle as their new alpine home. Silhouetted from inside a large picture window overlooking the park, a fluffy, flop-eared spotted canine wags its curly stump of a tail and whimpers at the sight of the excitement outside, anxiously awaiting the return of its owner from work and the long walk through the greenbelts it eagerly anticipates every afternoon. It hops up onto the windowsill and down again with stumpy little legs, its attention following the motions of every bird and creature that passes by. Superficially, it has so closely come to resemble a little dog that the house fox's true identity can often only be discerned by its amber eyes, the pupils drawn to cat-like vertical slits in the gleaming sunlight. The animals it watches so observantly during its daily period of solitude are many and varied. A tropical city, Syndylia has some of the most varied wildlife in the world. Many hundreds of bird species are documented to breed in the modern city and large mammals are especially abundant. With the north-Australian savannah just a few miles north of the Syndyllian city limits, a variety of small duikers and other antelopes transplanted here centuries ago have subsequently left their new wilderness for a safer life in the urban jungle, grazing in the raised parks and gardens and resting on shaded vine-covered ledges far above the ground to avoid the hungers of lions that lurk in the rural backcountry to the north and the plentiful dingos that move in to occasionally hunt the city streets below in the cover of darkness. The fox might regularly jump up to catch a glimpse of a swift wall gecko scrambling across its window in pursuit of a spider or beetle higher up the wall or even a hearty monitor lizard pausing to sun itself on the ledge just outside, a reptile which has learned well that a pampered predator behind glass can bring no harm. Pigeons, ubiquitous the world wide, readily nest upon the raised windowsills of Syndillian apartments, but so too do exotic doves and other birds native to the region, having proved fair competitors to their more widespread cousins in the new naturalized cityscape of the Terra Metropolitan world. While its twenty-first century ancestors would likely look upon the peeping nestlings of the zebra doves nestled on the corner of the high window ledge with salivating hunger, however, the pudgy domestic fox whines only with the drive to meet a new friend. As removed in just a few centuries from its own wild cousins as dog is from a wolf, the new instinct of this common future housepet is not to kill - but to cuddle. |
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The Gaiaverse | Eden | Terra Metropolis | Life of the Sylvan Islands | Other Spec Evo | Sheatheria | Serina | The Last Dinosaur A Wholesome and Good Thing | Sam | | |
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| Tartarus | Jan 17 2016, 07:26 PM Post #57 |
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Prime Specimen
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I like how this addresses an issue of technology that is often overlooked (or willfully ignored)- the fact that at some point technology would reach a peak where it just can't advance any further. Of course when this limit would be reached is impossible to know for sure- it could be in the not so distant future, it could be many millenia from now. But in any case, your portrayal of technological development slowing in the future makes sense.
So I take it pet foxes have grown more popular in the future. Cool. I know there's already a project in Russia that has successfully bred foxes into more tame domestic creatures, so it sounds quite reasonable that domestic foxes may become a more common thing in the future, as you have portrayed. |
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| Beetleboy | Jan 18 2016, 10:08 AM Post #58 |
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neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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This is gonna be great! |
| ~ The Age of Forests ~ | |
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| Sheather | Jan 24 2016, 02:08 AM Post #59 |
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The majority of Terra Metropolitan major city-states can be broadly divided into three major ecological zones, much like a natural forest. These would be the canopy, the "jungle", and the understory. Our focus here - except where otherwise stated - lies upon New York, among the most iconic cities of the modern era, but the pattern falls true for most modern urban environments across the globe. The canopy is the highest region of the city, the tallest rooftop gardens and the open planes of vegetation that grow on unobstructed walls and structures in the open sunlight at the top of the many-layered city. The canopy can broadly be defined as anywhere that rises above ground level with nothing higher above it, covering environments ranging from low greenbelts just a few meters above the ground to the peaks of skyscrapers hundreds of stories tall. The canopy is the realm of birds, which thrive in the modern urban city as a direct result of the modern emphasis on natural balance and green spaces that blur the line of urban sprawl and natural ecosystems and bring the two together into one. Window strikes have been significantly reduced as a source of avian mortality with the advent of modern windows used in skyscrapers, which utilize light-emitting polymers - structures to glow with ultraviolet light invisible to humans but obvious to birds by showing clearly the presence of a brightly-lit solid surface rather than a clear or mirrored window. The windows power themselves as the sun hits them during the day and continue to emit light, only on their outer sides, through the night to provide a beacon of warning to nocturnal migrators. Other animals abundant in the upper realms of the city are the squirrels, rats, and mice, the geckos and anoles and tree frogs, and the small carnivores: raccoons, cats, weasels and foxes. Where large enough green spaces permit, goats and even small members of the deer family thrive even at high altitudes, becoming adept at maneuvering a potentially trick and dangerous landscape where just one poorly-planned leap could lead over the edge of a rooftop and have fatal consequences. The canopy of the city blends subtly with the middle of the urban environment - the jungle - by far the most varied and largest biome, generally covering from ground level to a level of many stories. The jungle can be defined on a basic level as anywhere above the ground but below the rooftops and green spaces - or anywhere left in shadow for at least a portion of the day. It is in the jungle that the vast majority of business, stores, and industry lie, underneath the tallest buildings which generally support high-end living and agriculture as well as recreational space and wildlife habitat. The jungle is the stereotypical urban environment in many respects, shaded and grey compared to the lush and vegetated canopy. The wild pigeons thrive here, making their living as they have for centuries, and there are few large animals for there is simply not enough plant cover to feed them and provide a place to retire away from the crowds. In most cities, this ecosystem is one of small creatures and based upon the refuse of man, numerous shopping centers, restaurants, and human presence providing an effectively limitless supply of high-energy food. The air is not always as clean in the lower levels of the city as in the upper reaches and humans are much more prevalent, crowding walkways and gathering in large groups that may be difficult to infiltrate to glean a living for all but the most bold or sneaky of animals. For those that can do it, however, this is a rich habitat. It is an environment of opposites - to survive here requires either secrecy and a knack to stay hidden from sight or an appearance and mannerism so harmless and cute that a presence here, amongst the people, is encouraged. Rats and cockroaches fall into the first category, while cuddly little cats, fluffy squirrels, and pretty little birds tend towards the second. Nonetheless, throughout the world even quite unexpected animals can occasionally make a healthy living in the center of the city; across the United States the mountain lion thrives in the new urban environment, and throughout Europe and Asia, it finds its analogue in the elusive yet remarkably common city leopard, which makes a living hunting alleys and rooftops in the dark of nigh, taking anything from pigeons to dogs. If they don't become too bold, the smallest new subspecies of the rapidly-evolving black bear can find an excellent living even in dense urban sprawl, denning away in quiet backyards and rooftop hiding spots by day and foraging under cover of darkness. Periodically throughout the lower realms of the city, the ground gradually drops downwards into the last and lowest reach of the city. Below the "forest floor", a second city, hidden below the first, can be found. ~~~ New York, like most modern cities in Terra Metropolis, makes great use of vertical expansion to maximize available space, permitting incredibly voluminous, multi-tiered cities that are acre-per-acre much more efficient than any modern day equivalent. Farms and housing complexes are almost universally vertical rather than sprawling and many distinct structures of numerous function are readily stacked upon one another in a layered labyrinth intermixed with beautiful green spaces where people relax and animals make their homes. However, many cities have continued this trend in the opposite direction as well, in the form of subterranean cities that may rival or exceed the size of their visible surface portions - and these environments, too, suit certain adaptable forms of animal life. The hidden underground districts of New York, Syndyllia, Sounder, and countless others across the globe are the unseen powerhouse of the massive city-states. Enormous caverns have been carved out beneath the ground in these regions and a second city built below the first, extending the urban environments not only far above but far below the soil. By area, the basement of New York has more ground area than its ground-level counterpart by a ratio of five to one, its immense and sprawling presence leaving considerable room above ground for the restored wild environments the city is notable for. An architectural wonder of a scale entirely unimaginable by modern standards, the basement of the modern city is a remarkable feat of engineering. They are anything but dreary, utilizing specialized cables than collect and channel sunlight from the world above through periodically-planted solar panels and disperse it through hundreds of billions of tiny light-emitting diodes that come together to form an ever-changing and constantly animated artificial sky upon the ceiling of the understory to exactly mirror the lighting conditions up in the real world directly above by day and to store energy to power identical sun-mimicking artificial lighting by night. The understory of New York never sees nightfall, the artificial sun circling bright blue skies 24 hours per day. This eternal fair weather, combined with year-round climate-control, means the underground city is a veritable tropical paradise even in the coldest of January days, typically ranging between 72 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit the year round. A condensed form of the upper city, understories are most often very lush and green, rich with gardens and manicured landscaping but lacking in large-scale wild environments while being very rich in human activity. The understory is where most of the city's low-cost and high-efficiency housing can be found but also some of its finest shopping and recreational opportunities. Life in the understory is abundant. Warm weather the year round is a factor hard to pass up for migratory birds who no longer have to travel thousands of miles to find food and good weather in the winter but can just fly downwards and into the paradisaical basement of the city to find all they need. Descendants of formerly migratory warblers, robins and tanagers who stumbled through the countless openings to the understory in good weather and found themselves locked in come winter have yet to leave again, hundreds of generations having shaped their populations at times to a considerable extent as they adapt to their new tropical world - followed by predators, owls and falcons, who too live their entire lives in the artificial world of eternal sun beneath the towering green city above. Reptiles and amphibians can spread far beyond their natural ranges in a sprawling world of endless summer heat and bright sun, and lizards and frogs proliferate abundantly throughout the basement of New York. Large animals in the understory, effectively an indoor corridor even if immense, are very uncommon and rarely encouraged if they find their way in, but every now and again creatures like deer, or locally wallabies, may occasionally find a home in the understory where sufficient vegetation - mainly lawns - is present for their survival, sometimes followed in by foxes or even coyotes who learn quickly how to operate motion or weight-sensitive doors to come and go through the city's layers as they please. Small mammals are incredibly numerous in the form of squirrels, opossums, raccoons, skunks, rabbits, mice, and shrews - even moles - making a very healthy living in the underground garden of New York City. ~~~ As a result of its distinctly multi-layered design and the fact that the majority of its acreage falls underground, from the air New York comes across as an especially sparsely laid-out city, or a collection of smaller ones, consisting mainly of numerous islands of urban development surrounded by nature, widely-spaced aggregations of towering buildings butted up against on all sides by huge green spaces, parks, and tracts of restored native woodland. Between the urban islands and the parks a broad belt of protected natural forest, among the largest continuous tract in North America, has been allowed to spring up again around the city where moose, elk, bear and cougar have returned to their historic range. Free to roam between the city's urban islands, it is almost as if the entire system has been reversed; it appears as if the preserve has grown to outsize and surround human civilization, which here lie in isolated pockets - absolutely immense pockets, but very widely separated. Thanks to the connective channels of the under story that honeycomb the underground landscape between the islands, however, with a magnificently efficient system of public transport in the form of high-speed trains that carry people wherever throughout the city they need to go, the city, through all of its levels, is united as one. |
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The Gaiaverse | Eden | Terra Metropolis | Life of the Sylvan Islands | Other Spec Evo | Sheatheria | Serina | The Last Dinosaur A Wholesome and Good Thing | Sam | | |
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| Beetleboy | Jan 24 2016, 10:03 AM Post #60 |
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neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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What life is there in the sewers, by the way? |
| ~ The Age of Forests ~ | |
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