5 ms·

How often has mankind attempted to alter the landscape to suit his purposes and found that, instead of improving it, it is destroyed instead. Far better is lear

How often has mankind attempted to alter the landscape to suit his purposes and found that, instead of improving it, it is destroyed instead. Far better is learn to live in the conditions as they are and adapt the techniques to utilize the natural resources. In some cases, maybe even that simply isn't possible so we just don't live there.

cle 2y ago
Humans altering the landscape enables civilization. Personally I'm more biased towards that than ecological conservatism. We should maintain a balance of course. I suppose the real problem here is agreeing on what "balance" means.
- uoaei 2y ago
  The ecosystems are where we live, what you say makes basically zero sense.
- kibwen 2y ago
  > I suppose the real problem here is agreeing on what "balance" means. Yet I think we can hopefully all agree that expending unbelievable quantities of energy in order to desalinate seawater and pump it uphill a thousand miles in order to turn a desert canyon into a lake for absolutely no good reason whatsoever does not qualify as "balance".
  - cle 2y ago
    Well the second paragraph of the article lays out what the author thinks the "good reasons" are. I don't even know if I agree or disagree with those as "good reasons". But also, we obviously don't all agree on them. Like, at all.
  - Brian_K_White 2y ago
    I don't understand "expending" energy in this case. Obviously a key part of the plan would be to use the unbelievable quantities of solar energy currently just going to waste. It doesn't even require high tech pv, just plain mirrors to make just plain heat for a large portion of the work. And pumping water is not just a cost, it's also a battery, a hugely valuable thing we don't have enough of yet, which would enable more of the grid to live on renewables. It's not all magic but it's not all impossible nor pointless either.
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  To me things are in balance if they're long term sustainable.
petesergeant 2y ago
Virtually all of Europe used to just be forest. Large swathes of East England used to be uninhabitable swamp, much of the Netherlands used to be underwater.
- DubiousPusher 2y ago
  If you think this is a convincing counterpoint, I assure you it is not.
  - petesergeant 2y ago
    It’s only not a convincing counter point if you’re a fantasist thinking we should be living in a Bronze Age utopia. I suspect if pressed this would turn out to be Motte and Bailey argument where: Motte: deforestation and draining wet lands is bad Bailey: we should reduce the global population by 95% so we can live without modern agriculture
    - sokoloff 2y ago
      Also probably about 1 out of 16 of us would be living at all.
    - kibwen 2y ago
      > if you’re a fantasist thinking we should be living in a Bronze Age utopia. Bronze Age people were smart enough to live in places with easy access to fresh water, so they're demonstrably wiser than whoever came up with this proposal.
      - petesergeant 2y ago
        > Bronze Age people were smart enough to live in places with easy access to fresh water But not wise enough to invent antibiotics so it’s a head-scratcher; am I willing to put up with pumped water to avoid dying of cholera and lockjaw?
    - DubiousPusher 2y ago
baxtr 2y ago
Landscapes are altered by all life forms, including plants, animals and believe it or not humans. We are part of the ecosystem. We shape it too.
- uoaei 2y ago
  Ah, the "private citizens owning nukes is covered under the 2nd Amendment" take. Flattening ontologies doesn't do anything useful.
- camgunz 2y ago
  There's a difference between clearing a few trees for a cabin vs desalinating and pumping millions of gallons of water and transforming the ecology of a state.
  - ithkuil 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - ithkuil 2y ago
    Yes. Indeed there is a difference between a philosophical consideration and a practical one. Of course we're part of nature and whatever we do will not "destroy" the world like the world was not "destroyed" when algae pumped toxic oxygen in the atmosphere. But for all intents and purposes we're able to "destroy" the things we care about the world and turn it into a place we would quite hate to live in (while cockroaches and rates may have no problems with it)
  - seadan83 2y ago
    Check pictures from before 1920 - note that all the trees are cleared from around towns and buildings. The cumulative scale is immense when everyone had a cabin and used wood for heating. I think you're understating the impact of "a cabin." European style living is not very sustainable, compared to those that lived in NA for many thousands of years prior.
    - camgunz 2y ago
7speter 2y ago
Pretty often. The article's title is a bit misleading to it's own detriment; "terraforming" brings to mind images of using massive furnaces to burn mass to release CO2 on a barren planet. What the author of this article is proposing is pretty routine relative to human societal needs, which is shifting the flow of bodies of water to get water to Nevada. I'm not a geology expert so I don't know the viability of this proposal, but it seems the author is proposing to bring flow back to rivers that have dried up at some point in the past. I took enough geology in college to understand that humans have been shifting riverflows since at least the Ancient Egyptians (with the Nile river), and Los Angeles' vitality is a product of artificial waterflow shift (the movie Chinatown touches on this at least tangentially). If I'm not mistaken, even Hoover Dam diverts a significant amount of water that once flowed elsewhere, though many environmentalists would tell you today that dams are horribly harmful to local ecosystems. My guess is that with climate change causing significant changes to multiple regions via weather and climate, causing massive upheavals for large swaths of populations, it might be in America's interest to consider where it could create new population centers again by shifting waterflow.
- kibwen 2y ago
  > relative to human societal needs, which is shifting the flow of bodies of water to get water to Nevada This is not a societal need. If you want access to fresh water, do not choose to live in a desert.
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  The immediate counterargument is that we already tried pumping water into a desert basin so we know perfectly well what will happen. You end up with the Salton Sea. A notoriously toxic and unpleasant body of water. Irrigating water across a small area is one thing, what this article proposes is a whole other thing. Lakes that have no outflow, like the Salton Sea, and the Great Salt Lake, end up being collectors for pollutants.They also aren't exactly major attractants for population. Most of the great salt lake shoreline is uninhabited, and most of the development on the East side hugs the mountains rather than the lake. Both lakes have pretty serious issues regarding pollution that will need to be solved. I'm not sure why we would ever want to make another one of those. There are plenty of places in North America that have plenty of room and resources for people. Coastal sections of the Pacific Northwest are pretty empty still despite ideal climate, water, arable land, etc...
BurningFrog 2y ago
Probably 99% of us are alive because our ancestors altered the landscape to provide food and shelter. Yes, it goes wrong sometimes, but on balance it's a great, even essential thing.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  Yes don't get me started on this path. Draining marshes, improving soil, air conditioning and heat, levelling grades, dredging rivers. All capital and labor intensive. We can manage without destruction and it's enabled exponential population and economic growth in a virtuous cycle.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - 0xbadcafebee 2y ago
    I grew up in Florida. It was mostly a giant swamp. It has been turned into the world's largest concrete strip-mall. There's literally nothing natural left to see in Florida except a beach, and the small part of the Everglades they carved out as protected before it too got "developed". This result came about from initially using African slaves to work plantations and build wealth. That wealth (and labor) was then turned into political capital to create the state itself. Then the state was used to develop a real estate market to create/centralize more wealth. WWII created even more development, bringing in the core of engineers to 'terraform' the land further. At each stage of increased development, a different natural habitat was destroyed in order to create an artificial one to enable generating wealth for a select few. Native people were killed or driven off the land. Wetlands were destroyed, habitats and native species were razed and paved over, waterways were poisoned, and agricultural runoff created environmental disasters in the rivers, bays, and ocean. A vast number of invasive species were introduced which out-competed and eliminated many native species, and we are still battling to keep them under control. There are many superfund and other sites of long-term ecological damage. Drinking water is quickly becoming scarce due to the lowering of the water table. Mining pools are still infiltrating environments causing more damage. And of course, global climate change is exacerbating every single problem, plus adding erosion and elimination of land used for housing. But hey, it's a virtuous cycle, right? We can manage without destruction, right? Just keep growing exponentially. At some point we'll clean up all those superfund sites, and figure out how to stop the red tides, and giant heat-sinks of concrete and asphalt that create microclimates that eliminate native species, and figure out where to put trash once all the landfill sites are gone soon, and somehow rid the Everglades of all the boa constrictors and invasive plants, and somehow we'll catch all the green parrots out-competing native birds. And we will have to use this author's idea of desalination, since the fresh water table will be gone by then. It'll all be fine. Once we figure out how to stop killing everything. Sometime in the future. Let's just not worry about that though. Onward and upward.

cle 2y ago

Humans altering the landscape enables civilization. Personally I'm more biased towards that than ecological conservatism. We should maintain a balance of course. I suppose the real problem here is agreeing on what "balance" means.

uoaei 2y ago
The ecosystems are where we live, what you say makes basically zero sense.
kibwen 2y ago
> I suppose the real problem here is agreeing on what "balance" means. Yet I think we can hopefully all agree that expending unbelievable quantities of energy in order to desalinate seawater and pump it uphill a thousand miles in order to turn a desert canyon into a lake for absolutely no good reason whatsoever does not qualify as "balance".
- cle 2y ago
  Well the second paragraph of the article lays out what the author thinks the "good reasons" are. I don't even know if I agree or disagree with those as "good reasons". But also, we obviously don't all agree on them. Like, at all.
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  I don't understand "expending" energy in this case. Obviously a key part of the plan would be to use the unbelievable quantities of solar energy currently just going to waste. It doesn't even require high tech pv, just plain mirrors to make just plain heat for a large portion of the work. And pumping water is not just a cost, it's also a battery, a hugely valuable thing we don't have enough of yet, which would enable more of the grid to live on renewables. It's not all magic but it's not all impossible nor pointless either.
BurningFrog 2y ago
To me things are in balance if they're long term sustainable.

petesergeant 2y ago

Virtually all of Europe used to just be forest. Large swathes of East England used to be uninhabitable swamp, much of the Netherlands used to be underwater.

DubiousPusher 2y ago
If you think this is a convincing counterpoint, I assure you it is not.
- petesergeant 2y ago
  It’s only not a convincing counter point if you’re a fantasist thinking we should be living in a Bronze Age utopia. I suspect if pressed this would turn out to be Motte and Bailey argument where: Motte: deforestation and draining wet lands is bad Bailey: we should reduce the global population by 95% so we can live without modern agriculture
  - sokoloff 2y ago
    Also probably about 1 out of 16 of us would be living at all.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    > if you’re a fantasist thinking we should be living in a Bronze Age utopia. Bronze Age people were smart enough to live in places with easy access to fresh water, so they're demonstrably wiser than whoever came up with this proposal.
    - petesergeant 2y ago
      > Bronze Age people were smart enough to live in places with easy access to fresh water But not wise enough to invent antibiotics so it’s a head-scratcher; am I willing to put up with pumped water to avoid dying of cholera and lockjaw?
  - DubiousPusher 2y ago

baxtr 2y ago

Landscapes are altered by all life forms, including plants, animals and believe it or not humans. We are part of the ecosystem. We shape it too.

uoaei 2y ago
Ah, the "private citizens owning nukes is covered under the 2nd Amendment" take. Flattening ontologies doesn't do anything useful.
camgunz 2y ago
There's a difference between clearing a few trees for a cabin vs desalinating and pumping millions of gallons of water and transforming the ecology of a state.
- ithkuil 2y ago
  [flagged]
- ithkuil 2y ago
  Yes. Indeed there is a difference between a philosophical consideration and a practical one. Of course we're part of nature and whatever we do will not "destroy" the world like the world was not "destroyed" when algae pumped toxic oxygen in the atmosphere. But for all intents and purposes we're able to "destroy" the things we care about the world and turn it into a place we would quite hate to live in (while cockroaches and rates may have no problems with it)
- seadan83 2y ago
  Check pictures from before 1920 - note that all the trees are cleared from around towns and buildings. The cumulative scale is immense when everyone had a cabin and used wood for heating. I think you're understating the impact of "a cabin." European style living is not very sustainable, compared to those that lived in NA for many thousands of years prior.
  - camgunz 2y ago

7speter 2y ago

Pretty often. The article's title is a bit misleading to it's own detriment; "terraforming" brings to mind images of using massive furnaces to burn mass to release CO2 on a barren planet. What the author of this article is proposing is pretty routine relative to human societal needs, which is shifting the flow of bodies of water to get water to Nevada. I'm not a geology expert so I don't know the viability of this proposal, but it seems the author is proposing to bring flow back to rivers that have dried up at some point in the past. I took enough geology in college to understand that humans have been shifting riverflows since at least the Ancient Egyptians (with the Nile river), and Los Angeles' vitality is a product of artificial waterflow shift (the movie Chinatown touches on this at least tangentially). If I'm not mistaken, even Hoover Dam diverts a significant amount of water that once flowed elsewhere, though many environmentalists would tell you today that dams are horribly harmful to local ecosystems. My guess is that with climate change causing significant changes to multiple regions via weather and climate, causing massive upheavals for large swaths of populations, it might be in America's interest to consider where it could create new population centers again by shifting waterflow.

kibwen 2y ago
> relative to human societal needs, which is shifting the flow of bodies of water to get water to Nevada This is not a societal need. If you want access to fresh water, do not choose to live in a desert.
dghlsakjg 2y ago
The immediate counterargument is that we already tried pumping water into a desert basin so we know perfectly well what will happen. You end up with the Salton Sea. A notoriously toxic and unpleasant body of water. Irrigating water across a small area is one thing, what this article proposes is a whole other thing. Lakes that have no outflow, like the Salton Sea, and the Great Salt Lake, end up being collectors for pollutants.They also aren't exactly major attractants for population. Most of the great salt lake shoreline is uninhabited, and most of the development on the East side hugs the mountains rather than the lake. Both lakes have pretty serious issues regarding pollution that will need to be solved. I'm not sure why we would ever want to make another one of those. There are plenty of places in North America that have plenty of room and resources for people. Coastal sections of the Pacific Northwest are pretty empty still despite ideal climate, water, arable land, etc...

BurningFrog 2y ago

Probably 99% of us are alive because our ancestors altered the landscape to provide food and shelter. Yes, it goes wrong sometimes, but on balance it's a great, even essential thing.

jvanderbot 2y ago
Yes don't get me started on this path. Draining marshes, improving soil, air conditioning and heat, levelling grades, dredging rivers. All capital and labor intensive. We can manage without destruction and it's enabled exponential population and economic growth in a virtuous cycle.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- 0xbadcafebee 2y ago
  I grew up in Florida. It was mostly a giant swamp. It has been turned into the world's largest concrete strip-mall. There's literally nothing natural left to see in Florida except a beach, and the small part of the Everglades they carved out as protected before it too got "developed". This result came about from initially using African slaves to work plantations and build wealth. That wealth (and labor) was then turned into political capital to create the state itself. Then the state was used to develop a real estate market to create/centralize more wealth. WWII created even more development, bringing in the core of engineers to 'terraform' the land further. At each stage of increased development, a different natural habitat was destroyed in order to create an artificial one to enable generating wealth for a select few. Native people were killed or driven off the land. Wetlands were destroyed, habitats and native species were razed and paved over, waterways were poisoned, and agricultural runoff created environmental disasters in the rivers, bays, and ocean. A vast number of invasive species were introduced which out-competed and eliminated many native species, and we are still battling to keep them under control. There are many superfund and other sites of long-term ecological damage. Drinking water is quickly becoming scarce due to the lowering of the water table. Mining pools are still infiltrating environments causing more damage. And of course, global climate change is exacerbating every single problem, plus adding erosion and elimination of land used for housing. But hey, it's a virtuous cycle, right? We can manage without destruction, right? Just keep growing exponentially. At some point we'll clean up all those superfund sites, and figure out how to stop the red tides, and giant heat-sinks of concrete and asphalt that create microclimates that eliminate native species, and figure out where to put trash once all the landfill sites are gone soon, and somehow rid the Everglades of all the boa constrictors and invasive plants, and somehow we'll catch all the green parrots out-competing native birds. And we will have to use this author's idea of desalination, since the fresh water table will be gone by then. It'll all be fine. Once we figure out how to stop killing everything. Sometime in the future. Let's just not worry about that though. Onward and upward.