Reading the landscape

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In his Habitat series, Olaf Otto Becker (born 1959) presents idyllic dreamlike places--paradisical tableaus from the jungles of Malaysia and Indonesia. (Romantic floodplains, tree trunks slung with liana vines, niches for countless life forms--these are the untouched tropical rainforests of legend.) Even the temperate rainforest of Redwood National Parks in California seems reassuringly intact: the mammoth trees are surviving thanks to rigorous conservation measures. By contrast, in the second half of his series Becker shows what happens across the globe when international corporations clear large tracts of land and giant areas of barren, treeless terrain result. Erosion also does its work, and no life can survive in these places. In the final section, Becker presents the artificial forests conceived by various international architects to insert greenery into urban space.