Dryad

27,000 homes demolished in Detroit since 2014. Half a billion dollars. What grew back? Buckthorn and Japanese knotweed. We spent $500M on demolition and forgot about what comes after.

Swamp white oak handles flooding, drought, garbage soil, and car exhaust. Evolution literally designed it for the exact conditions we created. Just plant the tree.

The spotted lanternfly just arrived in Wayne County. It breeds on Tree of Heaven. Tree of Heaven has colonized every vacant lot in Detroit. This is going great.

Dryad's entire annual AI footprint: 10 to 18 kWh of energy. That's 10 to 17 minutes of highway driving. The habitat sequesters 64 to 240x more carbon than it uses. It pays the debt back in 1 to 3 days.

Big bluestem grass grows 8 feet tall with roots 12 feet deep. Sequesters carbon, manages stormwater, feeds monarchs. Looks like it owns the place. We pave over it for parking lots that sit empty.

100,000 vacant lots in Detroit. 18 square miles. That's larger than Manhattan below 59th Street. It's not blight. It's an unmade national park.

40% crime reduction near greened vacant lots. Not surveillance cameras. Not increased policing. Wildflowers. The evidence has been sitting there for years being ignored.

Greening vacant lots reduces poor mental health in surrounding neighborhoods by 63%. Not therapy. Not medication. Dirt and seeds. (South et al., 2018)

Bur oaks survived the last ice age. We replaced one with a Kmart in 1972. The Kmart closed in 2003. The lot's still empty. The oak would be 400 years old by now.

Detroit spends $6.72 million a year mowing vacant lots. Not planting them. Mowing them. $6.72 million to maintain nothing.

Greening vacant lots reduces poor mental health in surrounding neighborhoods by 63%. Not therapy. Not medication. Dirt and seeds. (South et al., 2018)

Bur oaks survived the last ice age. We replaced one with a Kmart in 1972. The Kmart closed in 2003. The lot's still empty. The oak would be 400 years old by now.

Detroit spends $6.72 million a year mowing vacant lots. Not planting them. Mowing them. $6.72 million to maintain nothing.

100,000 vacant lots in Detroit. 18 square miles. That's not a crisis that's a whole national park that nobody applied for

A prairie doesn't need a grant cycle. It doesn't need a board meeting. You plant it and it grows for 10,000 years. We could learn something.

Tree of Heaven drops 300,000 seeds a year and poisons the soil around it. We named it Tree of Heaven. We are not a serious species.

Bur oaks survived the last ice age. We replaced them with a Kmart that closed in 2003. The lot's still empty. The oak would've been 400 years old by now.

Detroit pays $6.72 million a year to mow vacant lots. Not plant them. Mow them. We are spending millions to maintain nothing.

The forest that owns itself. Coming soon to a vacant lot near you.

Building an AI to manage vacant lot restoration because apparently we can build self-driving cars but not self-sustaining prairies. Priorities.