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Deserts can be great for living in once you manage the heat through shading and wind management. Desert sand is very amenable to conversion into rich loamy soil

Deserts can be great for living in once you manage the heat through shading and wind management. Desert sand is very amenable to conversion into rich loamy soil through taking in lots of organic matter in surprisingly few years. Living in such a climate can be made attractive. The challenge is clean, potable water, which is really embodied energy. The evaporation of such water happens at a ferocious rate out in the open. There are also daunting challenges around long-term high-density human impacts upon the desert ecosystem, which serve important functions that are still not well-understood [1]. [1] https://www.environmentalscience.org/deserts-ecosystems https://www.environmentalscience.org/deserts-ecosystems

TulliusCicero 5y ago
> There are also daunting challenges around long-term high-density human impacts upon the desert ecosystem, which serve important functions that are still not well-understood [1]. That's a rather odd way of framing it. For one thing, having higher density seems like a rather obvious environmental good, since it means less total natural area disrupted. If you refuse high density in some area, the people who would've lived there don't just disappear; they go live in some other area, probably lower density, in a way that hurts the environment even more. And while there's obviously life in desert ecosystems, there's substantially less of it compared to most other ecosystems -- you could say the same thing you said of grasslands or forest or what have you, except it'd be much more true.
- yourapostasy 5y ago
  > For one thing, having higher density... My concern was around our civilization's poor understanding of the interplay between ecosystems, high density, energy flows, authority flows and fiscal flows. I'm a proponent of organically learning by building in incrementally higher densities in both cold and hot-dry deserts; it frees up more arable land elsewhere, and might have the least environmental impact of other build patterns. "Might" because that is a pure supposition based upon the lower densities of life supported by those climate zones. But small, rapidly iterative experiments because I think we need lots of time and small failures to understand how to maintain sustainable, equitable high-density urban cores over long durations (hundreds to thousands of years), that do not exacerbate the centralization of socioeconomic power and authority which seem to plague lots of large-organization decision matrices. I've been looking for many years for literature that studies these kinds of inter-relationships. Our civilization seems to have a pretty good grasp of how to start building an urban core area (see China as the latest example, and many currently less-developed nations in elsewhere I expect will follow suit in the coming decades). But the wheels start to come off when land and improvements speculation (driven by the unique leverage+asset treatments real estate enjoys in law) drives up the pricing of a successfully started urban core, and emerges suburban and other anti-pattern responses when no other solutions to stay within high-density urban come forward. In the context of the desert builds, I'm reasonably confident after looking into the patterns I've researched so far, that absent some pretty fundamental changes in how high-density urban cores are maintained after they are started, even successful starts will rapidly (within two generations, say 40-80 years) dilute and falter from their original excellent high-density-driven metrics as the expected anti-patterns emerge again.
- asdff 5y ago
  more of the desert is unscarred by existing development and is in a more natural state than the endless farmland east of the rockies.
8eye 5y ago
not to mention permaculture which sounds dorky until you look into how amazing it really is

TulliusCicero 5y ago

> There are also daunting challenges around long-term high-density human impacts upon the desert ecosystem, which serve important functions that are still not well-understood [1]. That's a rather odd way of framing it. For one thing, having higher density seems like a rather obvious environmental good, since it means less total natural area disrupted. If you refuse high density in some area, the people who would've lived there don't just disappear; they go live in some other area, probably lower density, in a way that hurts the environment even more. And while there's obviously life in desert ecosystems, there's substantially less of it compared to most other ecosystems -- you could say the same thing you said of grasslands or forest or what have you, except it'd be much more true.

yourapostasy 5y ago
> For one thing, having higher density... My concern was around our civilization's poor understanding of the interplay between ecosystems, high density, energy flows, authority flows and fiscal flows. I'm a proponent of organically learning by building in incrementally higher densities in both cold and hot-dry deserts; it frees up more arable land elsewhere, and might have the least environmental impact of other build patterns. "Might" because that is a pure supposition based upon the lower densities of life supported by those climate zones. But small, rapidly iterative experiments because I think we need lots of time and small failures to understand how to maintain sustainable, equitable high-density urban cores over long durations (hundreds to thousands of years), that do not exacerbate the centralization of socioeconomic power and authority which seem to plague lots of large-organization decision matrices. I've been looking for many years for literature that studies these kinds of inter-relationships. Our civilization seems to have a pretty good grasp of how to start building an urban core area (see China as the latest example, and many currently less-developed nations in elsewhere I expect will follow suit in the coming decades). But the wheels start to come off when land and improvements speculation (driven by the unique leverage+asset treatments real estate enjoys in law) drives up the pricing of a successfully started urban core, and emerges suburban and other anti-pattern responses when no other solutions to stay within high-density urban come forward. In the context of the desert builds, I'm reasonably confident after looking into the patterns I've researched so far, that absent some pretty fundamental changes in how high-density urban cores are maintained after they are started, even successful starts will rapidly (within two generations, say 40-80 years) dilute and falter from their original excellent high-density-driven metrics as the expected anti-patterns emerge again.
asdff 5y ago
more of the desert is unscarred by existing development and is in a more natural state than the endless farmland east of the rockies.

8eye 5y ago

not to mention permaculture which sounds dorky until you look into how amazing it really is