Forest

The word 'forest has a huge significance for the people of the Florian Age. Nearly all the world's food and resources come from the Green Zone, a roughly equatorial and nearly continuous belt of engineered and passionately tended forest in which nearly all the Full Circle bashas are located.

Origins
Zigsa's writings lay down the first vision fo the role of forests in sangsara. 'We must give our world a roof,' she says in the Karma Sutra, and she goes on to envision dense forest cover to keep us safe from cosmic radiation and solar wind outfall until the earth's systems heal again. When people returned to the surface in 2174, they found only scrub forest here and there. Thus began the first heroic Cloud, the Forest Cloud. Genetic engineers created new trees from seeds they excavated from incredibly dangerous places, people dug holes in the ground and buried fusion reactors which they lived above. every day they went out and battled a world that was worse that the wrost of today's Zero Margins. Slowly, they began to make headway.

Even in the survivariums, human waste was liquid gold, because it fed the hydroponic farms. Now that the earth was being re-terraformed, we needed all the shit and piss we could make. Hence one of the first features of modern bashas to be developed was the sewage system. With millions of basha roots ramifying out into the Green Zone carryign water and nutrients, each basha quickly became a green coin on the face of the devastated earth. Thus the forest grew.

Establishment
As the forest developed a canopy and began fruiting, the airwalks were set up to collect fruit and make the canopy accessible. People had not yet migrated to a fully crackerbox-based larder, so they still cooked natural food. Before they ate it, they analysed it thoroughly, In fact, they did this even with foods they could not eat b ecause of toxicity or other problems. They also analysed inedible things like wood, soil, grass, stone etc. All thes patterns went into the crackerbox. The goal of this was to fulfil Zigsa's dream of taking only nature's 'fruits' or surplus waste for our needs. Another goal was to 'make the trees hold hands', that is, to join up the areas of forest around the bashas and make the airwalks a continuous system of travel. These early forests were much drier than today and therefore an important innovation were the firebreaks, which later became the gamways. Pretty soon more than five thousand species of tree and uncountable inssects and fungi were flourishing in the forest. Zigsa's Nest marks the northernmost point of the Green Zone, kept warm by Siberian vulcanism, and Australia is the southernmost point. Other major areas include the Forest of the Sahar in Africa, Majjhima and Deccan in India, Arakan-Mekong in South East Asia, Florizona in the Americas, and Pairidaysa in West Asia.

Overchoke
However, around first Florian half-century, a problem showed up. The insect pests and predators could not keep up with the growth of the vegetation, and the trees were overgrowing, choking themselves with their own abundance. It was clear that herbivores were needed. Some could be provided by birds and reptiles, but not nearly enough.

Of the mammal species Zigsa saved, monkeys, mice, rats, deer, goats, horses and argali sheep were chosen as suitable. Till then they were living in pens around Zigsa's Nest, as part of the museum exhibits, as the forests were thought to be too dangerous to risk their safety. The rats were introduced first, and they thrived, so the other speices slowly followed suit. To keep a check on their numbers, cats were also released. howver, the horses dn deer are too large for the cats to take on at present, although the feral cats have grown in size in the four centuries since they were released. Domestic cats remain unchanged in size, infact have become a little smaller and lither due to theri arboreal habits. They rarely descend from the stackroots in the bashas.

Matirei Silvi Savitar's controversial Klimactic Thesis involves creating dog packs in the forest to prey upon large herbivores. Currently there is a dog poulation at Zigsa's Nest of dogs too wild to beome doglas. She proposes to make a new species out of them akin to the ancient wolf.