Posted by jasondavies 1 day ago
To put this proposed project into context: humans already did something similar in scale in what is now the Amazon. We accidentally rewilded the entire area via plagues. The Sahara is also a pretty new thing, and something we could reverse.
We've long past the point of playing god or not. We now only have two options:
1. playing an incompetent god, pretending that our actions are not our fault
2. playing a competent god, taking responsibility and trying to do better
Is it vanity to want a park in your city or a river to be clean of pollutants?
We are scared of projects like this because the scale betrays our inability to do them or perhaps fully anticipate the consequences, which is good enough reason for caution.
But vanity? A garden is never reducible to vanity, it is the cultivation of the earth and the prosperity of living things, regardless of how vainglorious the gardener may be.
We cannot consume every piece of the planet and leave nothing for other species, and there are already far more of us than necessary.
Really??? I expect more of HN than snark like this.
Argue in good faith and assume good faith, please.
> and there are already far more of us than necessary.
I think trying to argue how many humans should exist based on something like “necessity” is pretty weird. Who gets to decide our necessity?
Humans aren’t “necessary” in some way that transcends philosophical argument and neither should we preserve other species according to such a metric.
The point is that we do not need this land. There is plenty of land all around the United States that is "habitable". And given the trend of birth rates and urbanization there is virtually no reason to go destroying fragile and unique ecosystems just so people can satisfy some compulsion for a manifest destiny of occupying every available square foot of this planet.
I actually quite like the arid west, if anything we should be letting it return to aridity as current water use (I.e. rerouting a lot of the Colorado River to California) is well known to be on shaky ground at the least. If you don’t like arid areas move somewhere else.
Alas, the list of reasons to live in the Great Plains is very short, which is also why I’m kind of skeptical of terraforming the American West. You can make existing major cities more livable, sure, but don’t expect a surge of people moving to Montana or Wyoming.
By contrast, Los Angeles and Miami have ocean access. Terraforming coastline is a no-brainer.
Net migration to each of those coastal states is actually negative, so the "combined" is a bit of a red herring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/01/novel-pv-driven-desal...
However, I was under the impression that for the US it's mostly a market failure and farmers are intentionally wasting scandalous amounts of water because they'd lose their water rights if they used the countries resources optimally.
The Columbia River drainage basin is larger than the Great Basin (670k km2 [1] vs 541 km2 [3]), it's the 4th largest river in the US by flow [1], and there are already existing megaprojects like the Columbia Basin Project [2] that have unmet potential.
If the growth Casey envisions isn't happening and/or won't happen with the easy access to substantial volumes fresh water of the Columbia River then it's very unlikely to occur in the scenario they envision with desal + pumping water into the Great Basin.
- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River - [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Basin_Project - [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Basin
I think Bend and Boise are likely to experience rapid expansion in the next 20 years on the west coast, especially as winters grow milder.
The western water projects were an engineering marvel, but short sighted. And Florida? Gee, how long can it stand against the rising seas?
As a result we have been living on the infrastructure that our parents and grandparents built while supporting 10x the population. Which is incredible but at some point something has to give.
Maybe it hasn't continued because that type of infrastructure reached a local maximum.
If you want dreams, how about reshaping the California Central valley as an enormous management intensive agroforestry system that uses highly diverse and resilient native species to meet human calorie needs.
This isn't an engineering challenge, it's a social, cultural, and political one.
The weather is a bit nicer in Utah/Colorado/New Mexico - especially the lower elevations, but it’s too reliant on the Colorado/Rio Grande IMO, and has to compete with southern California and Arizona/Vegas and Texas. Western Montana is also nice but may be a bit too snowy in the winter until climate change takes hold.