Margaret Cheasebro

Over the years, film maker and artist Joshua Bonnetta has made sonic records of places that had meaning for him. They were private mementos for him.

As he learned more about long-form field recording, he decided to document a pine tree in Tioga County, New York, for 8,760 hours, a total of 365 days from May 2021 to April 2022. The recording captured, among other things, the sounds of crickets and frogs, the tree's creaking branches, and even a raccoon.

With the help of Holger Klinck, an expert in conservation bioacoustics at Cornell University, he was able to use spectral analysis software to identify sounds graphically. Another friend, Josh Berger, introduced him to a program that helped him to clean up the sound as well as dismantle the sounds and put them back together.

It took Bonnetta three years between other jobs to create what he calls The Pines, a spectral collage of four hours of sounds that document a year in the life of the tree and its natural surroundings. An essay by Robert Macfarlane accompanies it. The Pines is out now on Shelter Press and The Dim Coast.

The Pines contains Bonnetta's amazing accomplishment of documenting the tree and its surroundings in the best way he could. No other year in the life of that tree will ever be the same. Bonnetta has, in essence, captured and immortalized sounds that are unique to that year.

To learn more about Bonnetta and his projects, read Claire Biddle's article, "Trunk call: Artist who spent a year listening to a tree," in the May 9, 2025 issue of The Guardian Weekly.

Bonnetta's next project is to document the inner geological sounds of the Alps. Currently, he lives in Munich, and the sounds of his new city fascinate him. Perhaps one of these days he will capture and immortalize them as well.

A fascinating article in the November 2023 issue of National Geographic tells about several projects around the world that are experimenting with ways to remove carbon from the air. "Clearing the Air" was written by Sam Howe Verhovek. It discusses many projects for sequestering excess carbon, which can overheat the planet enough to threaten life itself.

One such project in Iceland is working to capture carbon dioxide in porous basalt, in essence turning carbon into stone. The article also focuses on a project in Arizona that uses a mechanical tree to capture and store carbon. There's another project in Australia focused on trapping carbon dioxide and locking it in crevices under the earth.

Another project along Long Island's Little Peconic Bay in New York experiments with using a special green sand in an effort to remove carbon from the oceans. The sand is finely ground olivine, a type of magnesium iron silicate common in Earth's upper mantle. Still another project aims to use seaweed that, pound for pound, can sequester up to 40 times as much carbon as trees.

Carbon is not our enemy. It is essential to life. Plants need it for photosynthesis. The problem is that now there's too much of it in the atmosphere. That excess carbon became a problem when massive amounts of it were released when fossil fuels were mined, drilled for, or extracted in other ways.  If the planet gets too warm, it could threaten life on Earth.

Because my blogs focus on trees, I was especially intrigued by the mechanical tree project in Tempe, Arizona.  It is a form of direct air capture. Physicist Klaus Lackner has been working on the project for a long time. Lackner runs the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University.

What he calls mechanical trees are three-story tall devices that suck in carbon, filter it, and store it. Lackner says the mechanical trees are about 1,000 times more efficient than actual trees in their ability to sequester carbon dioxide. Unlike trees that release their carbon dioxide when they die, the mechanical trees keep it locked away.

To learn more about the fascinating carbon sequestering projects being developed right now, head for your local library and read the article, "Clearing the Air," in the November 2023 issue of National Geographic. It left me feeling hopeful that so many intelligent, creative, passionate people are dedicating part of their lives to solving a significant problem.