Hasta La Ideas

Thanks to evolution, nature has balance designed into it, and it is us humans who typically muck that balance up with our deforesting and overfishing. It’s in our nature to build things and overtax them, whether it’s schools, slums or cell phone networks. So it was surprising to see, during this past weekend’s flash snowstorm in the American northeast, a sort of design failure on nature’s part.

Perhaps “failure” is not quite the right word, but the situation I’m referring to has to do with the design of leaves and their annual cycle of disappearance. Leaves are “designed” with a broad surface area, like a solar panel, to maximize photosynthesis and water collection. When the seasons become too cold for photosynthesis to be viable, the leaves die and drop off. Once it starts snowing, a leafless tree is much better able to hold snow on its bare branches without any ill effect.

But in this weekend’s case of snowfall in the Northeast, the leaves were still on the trees, and when the unseasonal snow started falling, it started piling up on that broad surface area, turning a canopy of leaves into an enormous source of deadweight. Branches designed to hold a certain amount of weight were suddenly struggling under the load of many times that number, and the result was many incidents of catastrophic structural failure. Branches and trees collapsed, blocking roads and downing power cables in unexpectedly high numbers, leaving more than two million people without power and causing far more devastation than a leafless-tree winter storm might.

The failure, of course, might be our fault; it’s possible that the early snow came as a result of something we’ve unwittingly done to the environment.

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