There’s really nothing else like Ultrawild: An Audacious Plan for Rewilding Every City on Earth, a new oversized book packed with outrageous, scientifically grounded inventions aimed at transforming urban landscapes. It’s a book that’s more important than ever, as it takes the very scary and super serious global problem of global warming and reduces it to solution-based learning. Are Steve Mushin’s ideas outrageous and over the top? Yes, but as this book proves, thinking big may be the only way to save humanity from environmental disaster.
Ultrawild is very much a book for everyone, though its lightheartedness feels like it’s for middle and high school kids. At the end of the day, this book will inspire future engineers and scientists that there can be solutions found in the weird and outstanding ideas. Mushin makes a strong case for how it has already transpired, from Einstein’s ruminations turning into real-world scientific rules and solutions. Speaking for myself, we know for a fact that sci-fi like Star Trek has inspired people to invent technology from fiction.
This book is organized into 14 chapters, preceded by a prologue and followed by an epilogue. It’s cleanly laid out, with the oversized format using every inch of the page to make its points. The big idea at work here is rewilding cities on Earth to slow down and reverse global warming. Very clearly, Mushin opens the book by explaining that there were many more organisms early on, and they were massive. What did this mean? A lot more fertilizer by way of feces, and a lot of tilling of the land under their feet. These two things together could build jungles quickly, and thus, this book’s first invention is born: compost-firing cannons!
Graphic Universe
Yes, cannons that shoot poop is how this book starts. From there, Mushin expands to larger and larger scales, building on plausible yet sometimes impractical technologies to reverse the greenhouse effect. Mushin makes it quite clear that these ideas aren’t going to happen overnight, but thinking outside the box could inspire new technologies and approaches to help us all stay alive a bit longer.
Visually, this book is a delight to look at. Not only is this explained through traditional left-to-right comic book storytelling, with Mushin in the comic serving as a kind of engineer host, but also with impressive, highly detailed vehicle and environment renderings to illustrate it all. It’s as informative as it is visually appealing. There are also multiple double-page splashes that nicely convey the technology, appealing to the non-technical eye. As a longtime comics reader, Mushin does things with layout that are new and exciting, making for a pleasing book to open and not even read, but take in.
If this all sounds fantastical and a bit too positive, fear not, as Mushin spends chapter 11 discussing how implausible it is to fix the Earth given how bad it is already, and how fossil fuels aren’t stopping anytime soon. This section has gutters and panels all in black, with text and drawings in white, conveying the dark and somber nature of this topic. It adds some weight to the entire production, reminding us that this is a very scary topic not to be taken lightly.
Like a futuristic Where’s Waldo for the inner scientist in all of us, Ultrawild is a fantastic read. It manages to be both a dazzling art book and a manifesto for radical thinking, reminding us that solutions to the climate crisis may only come if we allow imagination to guide our understanding of science. Mushin’s work is about proving that dreaming outrageously might be the first step toward surviving the future.
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