Tumblr is that barren pasture in Costa Rica that was purposely filled with 12,000 metric tons of orange peels by conservation researchers. Initially, the orange peels decomposed into “sludgy stuff filled with fly larvae.” This led to accusations that the juice company providing the peels were “defiling the land,” and thus, the site was ultimately abandoned. But when researchers went back about 15 years later, they discovered “the arid landscape had been unrecognisably transformed into a dense, vine-filled jungle… as for how the orange peels were able to regenerate the site so effectively in just 16 years of isolation, nobody’s entirely sure.”
