Green power is getting even more literal thanks to University of Washington findings on tree power.  Electrical Engineers Babak Parviz, Brian Otis, and undergraduate Carlton Himes will be reading their own story in an upcoming edition of The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer's Transaction on Nanotechnology for their success in powering an electrical circuit, entirely from a tree.

A continuation of last year's study on the electrical output of plants done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the UW engineers decided to measure the electrical output of trees as a possible source of green energy. Undergraduate Carlton Himes spent his summer under the beautiful emerald canopies of the Pacific Northwest forests, sticking nails and electrodes into tree trunks to measure their electrical output, discovering outputs of several hundred millivolts with regular consistency.

Brian Otis led the team's development of a boost convertor, a device which takes low incoming voltage and stores it to produce a greater output. Himes was able to pinpoint large leaf oak trees as having the highest electrical output. The boost convertors designed to be plugged into trees via electrode, remain in sleep mode as they themselves use part of the scant power given off by the trees and therefore do not foretell of park picnicking humans recharging their iPods and cell phones by plugging into the local oak tree. Thank-god.

To be honest, the whole idea makes me sick. Don't we do enough to trees? Do we really need to be recharging our mp3 players by nailing in some electronic device into the side of a tree? Is that the whole point of this study? To see how we may be able to use up, yet another precious resource in nature? Last time I checked, the idea was to plant a tree, recycle paper, stop deforestation and in general, stop abusing the natural world. Let's stick with that.

There are so many cutting edge solar devices, that are portable and efficient in powering small electronics, recharging batteries, and do not require the violation of trees. What  exactly is the electrical pulse these engineers are picking up with nails and electrodes? It's the tree's life force. It is the electromagnetic field of life itself, within the tree and within the plants that MIT also detected- a field and force which, all living things by nature, give off. Including humans. Anyone seen The Matrix? Remember the fields of humans being grown and used as batteries? That's what we are taking about here.

I, for one, do not support using anything living as a battery. That's what vampires do. As it is, there is already a controversy of forests being cut down for crops grown only for biofuel. That is not sustainable energy. We have sun, wind, hydrogen, hydro-electric, and perpetual motion technologies that are more than adequate to support our electrical needs, specifically if we are talking about powering small, portable devices. I don't think we need to start plugging into trees, too. Do you?

Plugging into trees to suck and exploit their life force out for the benefit of using, yet another product from Apple... is rather ironic, don't you think? I do not support the further development of electronic plugs or boost convertors to make the internet more accessible to sycophants lost in the wild. I would be interested to know if these studies continue, in an effort to communicate with the trees, not from them. They compared the electrical pulse of the trees to a human heartbeat and discussed the possibility of leaving tree sensors plugged in throughout the forest.

“Tree power is unlikely to replace solar power for most applications, Parviz admits. But the system could provide a low-cost option for powering tree sensors that might be used to detect environmental conditions or forest fires. The electronic output could also be used to gauge a tree's health.”

I can only guess what a tree would like to say to us about logging, human caused forest fires, and its overall health as it drinks in polluted ground water from pesticide run off and breathes in city smog and car exhaust. Let's tap into that. Of course, this experiment was never about helping trees, it's about using them for our own purposes. What else is new? Hopefully, phase two of this little project, funded in part by The National Science Foundation. Maybe tree power, can be used to empower trees?
Wait, I'm already getting a flashback of the tree shepherds in J.R. Tolkien's, “Lord of the Rings: Two Towers”, when the trees fight back. Awesome!

http://uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=51869