Interview with a science nerd seeking a new landscape for planetary salvation
After a long journey of learning and drawing on that learning, Wellingtonian Steve Mushin has turned his busy brain to the creation of a one-of-a-kind book that conveys a high-tech and high-speed city version of rewilding.
To communicate this idea he invented the term ‘ultrawilding’.
Ultrawild creator Steve Mushin with Wellington fans of his book Linda Beatson and Patrick Morgan.
“Rewilding is about giving nature a leg up, then stepping back and letting nature return and thrive on its own terms – without intensive human management. By this definition we can’t truly rewild cities, because cities are so densely populated with people and so are necessarily human managed.
“It was while I was exploring ways to rapidly rewild every city on earth that I realised we needed a new term for city rewilding – where we use technology to help us return wild ecosystems to urban areas, ultra-fast, AND to co-exist happily with them. That’s what led me to coin the term ultrawilding.”
In the afterword to this successful mix of non-fiction and design – the book has won awards for both – Steve writes that be it either fanciful theory or everyday practice, “ultrawilding cities as fast as possible will require ludicrously dramatic changes to the ways we live”.
He calls it the “greatest design project in history” and one that will require “more ideas than ever before in history”.
A proud resident of Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Steve has had a long career in industrial design, primarily in Australia where he moved to study at RMIT University.
In 2010 Steve began working at the CERES Community Environment Park as part of a team of engineers and scientists on a suite of projects designed to showcase technologies that could help Australian cities reach zero emissions. These included a demonstration urban biogas plant, large scale composting and aquaponics systems, EV conversion for commercial vehicles and rain and storm water recycling.
It was a time in his evolving career in Narrm Melbourne when he thought that responses to climate change were rapidly gaining traction.
“It felt like the shift to a zero-emissions economy was really gaining momentum.
“Then later in 2016-2018 it felt like huge breakthroughs were happening. I still remember the sense of empowerment that Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion created. But since then I think we’ve lost our way on climate action…”
Ultrawild is in some ways proving to be an antidote to that feeling of things stalling, while also being a demonstration that the momentum for new ideas hasn’t stopped.
The exceptional thing with Steve Mushin is that he hasn’t just written a children’s book about future technologies, he’s also been making large inroads into making full-scale prototypes.
Steve works with landscape architects and engineers on large-scale climbing structures to inspire thinking about science and rewilding.
His bus-size prototype of a Mechanical Millipede which tears up roads and plants forests can be found at the CERES Terra Wonder project in Melbourne.
A van-sized mechanical version of the now extinct megafauna Diprotodon can be found at Melbourne’s Selby House, and he is currently working on a seed-pod inspired monocopter – also an adventure playground sculpture in Australia that’s designed to inspire thinking about seed dispersal and biomimicry.
By the time Steve embarked on his book journey he could call on two decades of experience working on ecological design and engineering projects, in science communication as a STEM and design workshop facilitator, and as an artist exhibiting large scale drawings and models of ecological machines.
Other precursors included work featured in CUSP, a touring exhibition of futures thinking developed by the Australian Design Centre in 2013. In 2014 an exhibition in Japan at Spiral Gallery presented 10 of his projects exploring ideas for re-imagining Tokyo as self-sufficient in food production and running workshops, and in 2015 Steve was recognised by the Australian Design Centre – celebrating it’s 60th anniversary this year – with an Australian Design Honours for his work in sustainability design education.
As reviewed in September on Landscape Architecture Aotearoa, Ultrawild is a carefully crafted book where readers can follow Steve as he brings a joyfully inventive engagement to “making things that are as ridiculous sounding as possible, while also being as serious as possible about the massive changes we need to make.”
To complement his wild ideas, Steve showcases real-world climate reversing technologies too.
Steve: “Ultrawild begins with the assumption that humanity moves to 100% renewable energy as fast as possible.
“I wanted to focus on ecosystem restoration inventions rather than renewable energy ideas – because we already have the technologies we need to quit fossil fuels now and power the world safely. And also because most people don’t have much agency when it comes to the changes in energy policy that are required to speed up this revolution.
“But when it comes to rewilding, we can all get involved in making a difference – and we can have a lot of fun in the process”.
Steve Mushin speaking at Unity Books in Wellington on Thursday 3 October.
Steve is grateful that his publishers Allen & Unwin let him break many traditional rules of layout design in the making of Ultrawild. And by the time you reach the end of the book’s terrain of over 100 design ideas there is a pointer to ultrawild.org for further learning tools and even an inventions log.
The fact that Ultrawild is on to its third print-run and proving so successful is something that Steve attributes partially to its density of information and ideas.
“There’s a niche market of kids and adults who crave massive ideas and complexity,” he says.
“When I run workshops, every kid is excited and onboard with ultrawilding. But there’s a couple of kids in every class who come up to me afterwards, bursting to tell me everything they know about nuclear fusion, or nanobiology. Ultrawild is written for them”.
One of the reasons Ultrawild should also commend itself to Landscape Architecture Aotearoa readers, and family members, is its emphasis on experiment-starters.
Ultrawilding projects are popping up all around the world. The Supertrees in Singapore, bustop roof gardens for insects in the Netherlands, bird bricks in the UK and 3D printed owl hollows in Australia are some recent cool projects.
Steve quotes Harvard academic Dr Shelley Carson who writes “…by forming mental images of highly unlikely scenarios, you are training your brain to think outside the proverbial box.”
As Steve advises his readers: “Ludicrous ideas are boot camp for brains”
Finally, in Ultrawild’s afterword Steve takes his hat off to the “rewilding doers of the world”, including the thousands of people in Aotearoa who are making a difference to enabling “nature to rebuild itself, at its own pace” through projects like Predator Free 2050.
Equally he pays respects to “the untold indigenous inventors and ecosystem management pioneers from around the world and throughout history, whose wisdoms of reverence, kinship, guardianship and partnership with nature represent timeless design elegance”.
Editor’s note: Steve is based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. He is currently touring Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia with his Ultrawilding Design Workshops.
Recommended additional reading:
Sunlight and Seaweed: An Argument for How to Feed, Power and Clean Up the World, by Tim Flannery (Text Publishing, 2017)
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, edited by Paul Hawken (Penguin, 2017 and The Drawdown Project).
Aotearoa Deep Time Walk: Writing on the Dark Green Aotearoa website, Gary Marshall and Finn Mackesy set out a way to examine the ecological foundations of Aotearoa in the form of a narrated walk 251 million years back in time. Sadly the originator of the ‘Deep Long Walk’, British zoologist Dr Stephan Harding, died last month on 2/9/2024. Vale Stephan Harding.
User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play, by Cliff Kuang with Robert Fabricant (Penguin, 2020)
… anything by George Monbiot or Victor Papanek or Buckminister ‘Bucky’ Fuller, to mention some other points of inspiration.