When something seems as silly as that, it's well worth examining the logic...
So the city of Melbourne had a big problem with its trees with 40% dying: they had a bigger problem in that if a tree or branch fell on someone, they would be liable due to the fact that they are supposed to monitor to prevent that. So putting ID tags on trees and asking the public to monitor the trees was brilliant. But then a person has to take the trouble to find where to email, and most people will put that off. So giving a tree an email address simplified that. They also recruited and trained volunteer "urban foresters", who in addition to checking trees would collect leaf samples for pollution analysis. In my mind an incredible solution to a problem which otherwise would have been incredibly expensive.
I was a bit boggled by the fact that 40% of the trees are at end of life, until I read about lots of short lived trees being planted at the same time and so now dying in mass. For sure I can see the advantage of fast growing trees in a city, though. While emailing a tree with anything but a status report seems silly, I'm figuring that the "ode to a tree" stuff was actively encouraged to get a sense of what trees people valued in order to plan future plantings - together with the incredible amounts of data sent in about tree health.
Back in the days before the Internet became widely available, I was part of a project to train teachers using a dedicated system with a line into town, which we could log into with the old modems. Every morning at 5AM I would log in, access a secure government site, check the Oracle database, and email myself the results. While the incredible amounts of volunteer work on top of a day job didn't bother me, for some reason the idea of emailing myself did, even though I was sending myself data and not poetry or trying to have a conversation. It was an idea of security back then. If I broke into other databases and emailed myself that stuff, then they'd have a direct link and could prosecute me.
I think that if I'd just have said that I used to get up early every day to email myself, that everyone would be recommending help...
On the surface, if you just took the statement that I think the trees should reply, then that seems crazy. Perhaps not.
One of the best projects to come up for the Raspberry Pi credit card sized computer board is the weather station. An initiative by Oracle is providing 1000 of these to schools around the world and if I was still working, I'd be trying to grab one. Cities have very complex micro climates and if they could get those for cheap, and get kids to run them for free, then some good planning could be done for the future.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/education/weather-station/
