My employer gifted me a tree for my work anniversary, but I'm unsure where this tree exists, or what it is. Is it a living being? a conglomeration of living beings? a number? capital? an idea? who takes care of my tree while I'm not there?
If I forward this email from HR, will another tree be planted? Should I spam the world with anniversary trees and populate the entire continent in one sleepless night of email spamming scripts? Computing should be like that, tethered to the real world.
Facts: it turns out, my tree is in Ethiopia, and it is a Rhammus Prinoides tree, a small tree, a shrub native to that part of the world, known as Gesho by the inhabitants of that land. They make with its bark an alcoholic beverage called Tej. Tej is also called Honey Wine, because it's main ingredient is honey.
And I realise that I have zero knowledge about Ethiopia, other than its position on a map, some 3,500 miles away in a straight line, which doesn't help with anything. So I read. I read that a compatriot of mine, Pedro Paez, a missionary in 17th century Spain, was the first European to describe the Tej to outsiders, like myself and himself. A catalogue was started.
Charles Louis L'Héritier de Brutelle is the next outsider listed: he was the first person to document Gesho scientifically in 1789. The Latin name derives from "Rhamnus" (from Greek "rhammnos" or Celtic "ram" meaning bush) and "prinoides" (meaning "looking like Prinos," referring to leathery leaves). A page was added to the catalogue. A useless catalogue for the people who have been making Tej with the Gesho tree for millenia.
I am still unsure whether my anniversary tree is a tree with bark that can be used to make Tej, or if it is an addition to a binary float in some financial investment fund. There are pictures on a website of trees being planted. There is a location on a map and the name of an NGO. Is this proof that my anniversary tree is a living being? Does it matter? Not to the HR team.
I created some images of trees (above). I co-created them I should say, using AI, specifically an open source small model run on my laptop. I cheated though: I hacked the model, forcing the algorithm to converge into the simplest tree it could imagine. Like my anniversary tree, these are not trees with bark that can ferment Gesho, but they are my trees at least in part.