Years ago I wanted a logical reason for areas of the country to be completely overgrown with full grown forests even though less than a century had passed since the fall of civilization. What I came up with was an idea that forestry companies would have developed a fertilizer or genetically modified tree that would grow and mature at an accelerate rate. This would allow them to plant young trees and be able to harvest the lumber in as few as three years.
This eventually became the basis of an adventure I ran several years ago and am currently working on occasionally tinker with, "The Whispering Woods". This idea of genetically modified plants eventually found its way into another adventure I posted back in '08, "The Garden of Evil".
Interestingly enough, I came across an article today where a growth acceleration fertilizer was used with disastrous results:
The flying pips, shattered shells and wet shrapnel still haunt farmer Liu Mingsuo after an effort to chemically boost his fruit crop went spectacularly wrong.The director of the vegetable research institute at Qingdao Academy of Agricultural Science, Cui Jian says the chemical "should not harm anyone's health." Well, not unless one of those melons were to blow up in your face.
Fields of watermelons exploded when he and other agricultural workers in eastern China mistakenly applied forchlorfenuron, a growth accelerator. The incident has become a focus of a Chinese media drive to expose the lax farming practices, shortcuts and excessive use of fertiliser behind a rash of food safety scandals.
[guardian]
So you can see where you could have some fun with plants and science gone wrong.
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1 comment:
actually, left to it's own devices nature tends to come back pretty quick. while i wouldn't expect many "old growth" forests to suddenly spring back up in empty land, most of any region that had been built over by man would be greened over within a decade. most deforested regions would have young growth forests within about 40-50 years.
the history channel show "Life after people" and it's canadian counterpart "aftermath: population zero" do a good job of showing this in detail. while most of the tougher buildings and such would still be around after a hundred years or so, they'd basically be overgrown crumbling wrecks. cleared areas for farmland and such would eventually return to enviroments comparable to their pre-civilization states.
that said, growth hormones would be a neat tool for localized regions, like for example redword forests and other such unique (and currently endangered) enviroments where they could serve as a preservation of the location.
another neat idea might be wild "designer plants" like the pygmy grains and fast growing plants being developed for the space program. they offer great chances for expanding regular agriculture, and post-crash, would likely grow wild all over.
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