4 ms·

Then why is the restoration projects and various government acts focusing on restoring the water level and salinity?

s1artibartfast 4y ago
Misguided environmental sentiment based on the status quo after the flood but not before? The flood was part of an irrigation project to bring water to the desert. Irrigation of the imperial valley from the Colorado river continues today. For decades after the flood, excess water from farms would trickle into the slowly drying lake, and people got used to it being there. They also got used to the lack of dust from the dry lakebed. Now that it is going back to it's "natural" state, people don't like the prospect.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Most people who know about John Muir love him... Except for people who have studied any history of the indigenous peoples of California. Then he's a figurehead who tried to erase the natural and cultural history of California in an effort to further his own pastoralist agenda. That's the charitable way to interpret that. Much worse things are said about him. As someone else pointed out with the Salton Sea, Utah doesn't have a monopoly in the west on dumb myopic views on the natural world. And we are really bad with respect to caring about how things were when our grandparents were kids. Or their grandparents. Or the colonists, or the people they displaced.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    I care very little about how things were when my grandparent were kids, or 1000 years ago. I do however care what things will be like for my grandchildren, and perhaps 1000 years from now.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      You have no way of knowing how things will be 1000 years from now. The best you can do is know how the trends are going and try to be cognizant of them. But we also have cultural complexes that managed not to destroy the land for tens of thousands of years prior to industrial agriculture, and boy wouldn't it be handy if we could learn from them instead of having to derive the same things they did from first principles, but within a culture that is fundamentally extractive in nature and hence is poorly equipped to see the forest for the trees, real or proverbial.
      - s1artibartfast 4y ago
        I dont think modern culture is any more extractive than those that preceded it, we just have greater technology and capability. I think people have a bit a of a noble savage ideation for earlier times. I agree that we have no idea what things will be like 1000 years from now. Verry little damage is irreversible on those timescales
        hinkley 4y ago
        That's a Eurocentric view of history, and yes, that comes with a certain Noble Savage aspect. There are newer generations of books on indigenous peoples of North America. They still 'noble' it up a bit (the Lakota book in particular, which very carefully uses euphemisms for cannibalism). Robin Wall Kimerrer's books are easily the most romantic of the ones I've read. Tending the Wilds basically dismantles Muir's world view with a crowbar, and it's been a while but I don't remember if she even mentions Muir. It's very clear they are dismissing that same theory of California though. There were no primeval forests when Europeans arrived. It was all deeply curated and stewarded 'nature', heavily laden particularly with fire-adapted edible plants that the locals helped along if it had been too long since the last lightning storm took care of things. Nothing savage about it, debatably noble. Just a more animistic point of view and a bit more hedging against random acts of nature. We had some of that in europe too, but most of it was stamped out by the time Augustus became emperor. Written history is written by the victors. And the victors in Europe were agricultural+conqueror nations. Everything else got wiped out.
      - kortilla 4y ago

Misguided environmental sentiment based on the status quo after the flood but not before? The flood was part of an irrigation project to bring water to the desert. Irrigation of the imperial valley from the Colorado river continues today. For decades after the flood, excess water from farms would trickle into the slowly drying lake, and people got used to it being there. They also got used to the lack of dust from the dry lakebed. Now that it is going back to it's "natural" state, people don't like the prospect.

hinkley 4y ago
Most people who know about John Muir love him... Except for people who have studied any history of the indigenous peoples of California. Then he's a figurehead who tried to erase the natural and cultural history of California in an effort to further his own pastoralist agenda. That's the charitable way to interpret that. Much worse things are said about him. As someone else pointed out with the Salton Sea, Utah doesn't have a monopoly in the west on dumb myopic views on the natural world. And we are really bad with respect to caring about how things were when our grandparents were kids. Or their grandparents. Or the colonists, or the people they displaced.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  I care very little about how things were when my grandparent were kids, or 1000 years ago. I do however care what things will be like for my grandchildren, and perhaps 1000 years from now.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    You have no way of knowing how things will be 1000 years from now. The best you can do is know how the trends are going and try to be cognizant of them. But we also have cultural complexes that managed not to destroy the land for tens of thousands of years prior to industrial agriculture, and boy wouldn't it be handy if we could learn from them instead of having to derive the same things they did from first principles, but within a culture that is fundamentally extractive in nature and hence is poorly equipped to see the forest for the trees, real or proverbial.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      I dont think modern culture is any more extractive than those that preceded it, we just have greater technology and capability. I think people have a bit a of a noble savage ideation for earlier times. I agree that we have no idea what things will be like 1000 years from now. Verry little damage is irreversible on those timescales
      - hinkley 4y ago
        That's a Eurocentric view of history, and yes, that comes with a certain Noble Savage aspect. There are newer generations of books on indigenous peoples of North America. They still 'noble' it up a bit (the Lakota book in particular, which very carefully uses euphemisms for cannibalism). Robin Wall Kimerrer's books are easily the most romantic of the ones I've read. Tending the Wilds basically dismantles Muir's world view with a crowbar, and it's been a while but I don't remember if she even mentions Muir. It's very clear they are dismissing that same theory of California though. There were no primeval forests when Europeans arrived. It was all deeply curated and stewarded 'nature', heavily laden particularly with fire-adapted edible plants that the locals helped along if it had been too long since the last lightning storm took care of things. Nothing savage about it, debatably noble. Just a more animistic point of view and a bit more hedging against random acts of nature. We had some of that in europe too, but most of it was stamped out by the time Augustus became emperor. Written history is written by the victors. And the victors in Europe were agricultural+conqueror nations. Everything else got wiped out.
    - kortilla 4y ago