Blog  December 21, 2011

The Living Architecture of Meghalaya

Evergreen Brick Works sits within the city of Toronto’s natural floodplain, encouraging innovative and sustainable solutions to deal with on-site flood control, like our fifteen 20,000-litre rainwater collecting cisterns, and the wildlife-friendly stormwater management greenways that can be seen throughout the facility.

In Meghalaya, Northeast India, possibly the wettest place on Earth, they have to deal with a lot more rain fall than we do. There, rivers during the monsoon season are wild, unpredictable and impossible to cross.

In this visually stunning video, a man teaches his niece to care for a living bridge, which he started with a simple strangler fig tree 30 years ago. He shows her how to coax the roots to the other side of the river, where they will take hold, and create a living bridge.

Not only do the living bridges help get people around the village safely, they prevent the fragile river bank from washing away in the intense monsoon rain season. No person can complete this task in a lifetime, so the future generations are taught to continue and nurture the growing bridges for countless generations to come.