The circle of life

As I come toward the end of my stay here in the far east, the steppes, it's only fitting I go back to my first blog, before I decided I was an investigative journalist and got all off subject. So, some of you may recognise the landscape in the adjacent picture as the same landscape, or at least same shot from way back in early 2010. The tree came, it went, then sprouted forth in glorious strands of LED driven bloom, set off against an iridescent trippy astroturf. It's surprisingly convincing up close, and my first comment to a fellow commuter was that the grass wouldn't last the summer. The electrico-trees, I suspected, were not entirely natural. Perhaps GM.

I was first disappointed and cynical at finding out the whole garden is plastic, fake, driven by high doses of electricity and presumably hazardous luminescent chemicals. But I've come to love this little garden over the past week. It has an uplifting, cheerful quality reminiscent of the Telly-tubby's TV set, but is made out of chloro-boro-benzo-carbonate materials tougher than nature can concoct. And Atyrau needs cheering up.
There's a guy here I see in the lift, who I greet with a, no doubt gratingly cheerful, "hello, hows it going?" a couple of times a week. He doesn't know what to do with the human contact. He sits in the company paid for cafeteria, focussed on his buffet quality lunch, at an empty table for four, amused not even by the TV. He's like a young male Eleanor Rigby, and he's not one individual but he's every fourth guy I see.
After my own recent foray into the stockmarket, money seems such and ethereal (..) thing to make a person come out to a frontier like this, to endure boredom, loneliness and separation. But then money's a powerful elixir (my ill-fated foray into the stockmarket has been my kryptonite, when it comes to getting too attached to money).
The tree's evoke another response too - what's wrong with something artificial, where nature can't provide. I struggled with this first when working briefly in Abu Dhabi, and drove from the city 250km to a power and desalination plant; the road was lined three deep with thick foliage, practically fueled by an equivalent number of kilometres of polyethylene veins, pulsing with millions of litres of water purified through oil fueled desalination, delivered by giant oil fueled compressors that form the steel heart of this system.
The then head of Abu Dhabi emirate, Sheik Zayed, foreseeing one day the end of oil perhaps, had a vision of this desolate desert nation becoming not only a nerve centre for business in the middle east but a giant ecological oasis, made possible by a somehow perverse but somehow appealing and logical cycle, by combusting the epochs-old decayed plant matter in turbines that chug out pressure and energy to give life. The theory was apparently that if enough foliage could be induced to grow, it would eventually reach a critical mass that exerted it's influence on the climate and soils to a point of sustainable growth.
The idea seems at one time optimistic and naive but perhaps also has a touching altruism. It is one I've learned since is shared elsewhere, even here in Kazakhstan. Polymer LED trees aside, the planting programmes also continue in Atyrau, along all the roads and highways and in the parks, sucking water from the Ural and aquifers, and employing an army of gardeners who bravely face what looks like an eternal struggle.