We Can Terraform the American West

Posted by jasondavies 10/26/2024

We Can Terraform the American West(caseyhandmer.wordpress.com)

246 points | 316 commentspage 2

aporetics 10/26/2024|

Yikes. The sheer, unacknowledged hubris of this is bewildering. Let’s just remake the arid west?

boxed 10/26/2024||

One mans hubris, another mans hope for a better future.

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

seadan83 10/26/2024|||

The Amazon is losing forested area, is nearly carbon positive, and was previously sparsely populated (it being a jungle and all). I have trouble squaring this understanding with the idea it was recently rewilded.

VVertigo 10/29/2024||

It sounds like the parent comment was referring to geological timescales. In that case, the 16th century would count as recent.

kibwen 10/26/2024|||

Surely you acknowledge that "taking responsibility and trying to do better" means learning from our past mistakes and not repeating them? The project in the OP is motivated by vanity, not necessity.

ordinaryradical 10/26/2024||

Wanting to make a biome more habitable is not vanity.

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.

TinkersW 10/26/2024|||

This might shock you, but we aren't the only species on the planet.

We cannot consume every piece of the planet and leave nothing for other species, and there are already far more of us than necessary.

steveoscaro 10/27/2024|||

Damn, every day must be bleak with a mindset like this.

ordinaryradical 10/27/2024|||

“This might shock you”

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.

giraffe_lady 10/26/2024||||

A measurable ratio of a continent is not a garden or a city park. Even just using this metaphor seriously is, yes, straightforward hubris and vanity.

ordinaryradical 10/30/2024||

The whole world has been formed already by our presence and will continue to be. Humans modify our environment, for good and ill, and this is happening in all cultures and at all scales of civilization. Gardening proves microscopically what happens on the macro scale. To presuppose that is hubris is one way of looking at it, but a very narrow one.

The real fault in your reply, besides missing the substance of mine, is that framing such things as “hubris” doesn’t really help us weigh the value of the idea. At most it’s a critique of ambition, but an idea’s ambition isn’t related to its validity.

Also, wanting other humans to flourish is nearly the opposite of vanity.

chewbacha 10/26/2024||||

There is already a biome living in the arid west. It’s hubris and vanity to remove and destroy that biome and replace it with our own.

boxed 10/26/2024||

How much of that biome is the result of a previous ecological disaster? The US is covered by those from what I've understood. Vast tracts of lands are arid because beavers were hunted to extinction for example. Protecting the accident of the previous 100 years doesn't sound so compelling.

chewbacha 10/26/2024||

The west is not arid due to beaver hunting. It’s been arid for thousands of years due to tectonic plate activity and a cold deep ocean that flows clockwise bringing colder water down from the north. The cold water and tall mountains produce arid inland conditions. This happened so long ago that the ecology evolved to the arid land.

DubiousPusher 10/26/2024|||

More habitable for whom?

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.

jackyinger 10/26/2024||

Truly, even if we were to disregard the ecological and social impacts on existing inhabitants, the energy required would be extreme. And thankfully that alone is enough to make this simply a fantasy.

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.

Bjorkbat 10/26/2024||

Kind of reminds me of an idle thought I have every now and then. Between the sheer difficulty of establishing any kind of foothold on Mars, and the vast amount of uninhabited land, it’s curious that more thought hasn’t been given into the much easier task of making the empty parts of the planet more bearable.

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.

xnx 10/26/2024||

Colonizing Mars is a joke. Earth was more habitable the day after the asteroid hit that Mars is now.

kbutler 10/26/2024||

More people (net, absolute numbers and percentages) move to Montana or Wyoming than California, Oregon, and Washington combined.

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...

dimal 10/26/2024||

Holding up Florida and Los Angeles as models for development doesn’t seem like a good argument to me. No thanks.

DubiousPusher 10/26/2024||

As a life long resident of the American West, I can imagine few ecological crimes more horrifying. This is one of the most unique geographies on this planet. The life here is thoroughly adapted to a fragile balance of long want and occasional abundance. Everywhere you "terraform" would obliterate that balance. The application of the word itself is obtuse. How can you make more Earth like what the Earth itself made? I suggest that you take your infrastructure projects and apply them where people already live. The damage has already been done there. And those places have an elasticity of life due to the high amounts of water that let them bounce back at some point. Instead I suggest for the West we take a page out of Edward Abbey and simply marvel at its incredible uniqueness and beauty.

Desert Solitaire https://a.co/d/16MZLfL

anon84873628 10/26/2024||

People assume deserts are lifeless and useless, as opposed to the intricate thriving ecosystems they actually are.

This is something "Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't" has been great at showing.

dave333 10/27/2024||

There are bad examples of land use like agricultural monoculture and suburban lawns but if you compromise with nature it can be a thriving ecosystem albeit one designed to benefit humans.

https://youtu.be/wd-b_C7a_es?si=lLAPl4Bcii62g3Cm

xhkkffbf 10/26/2024||

There are a number of interesting videos on YouTube about people who are adding swales and rock dams to their western land to slow down the departure of rain water. Apparently just these extra terraforming can be enough to turn barren land into a green and lush forest.

Has anyone tried this on their own land? I'm tempted to try it.

doug_durham 10/26/2024|

That's fantasy. If you don't live in the West it's difficult to appreciate that there simply is no water. No amount of of "swales" or rock dams change the fact that water doesn't fall from the sky in sufficient amounts to create a "lush green forest". Also every drop of water that hits the ground has been accounted for long ago and is part of some water pact. If you create a dam upstream you are guaranteed to get a visit from the water rights holders.

carapace 10/26/2024|||

> Untouched and eighty years old, it was supposed to have been built by men with carts and horses during the Roosevelt years in the 1930s.

> The soil was springy and spongy when you walked on it. Like an uncompacted garden bed it was full of mulch captured by rain water. Eighty years of humus was deposited here during flash floods, without any help from mankind.

> The trees were all self seeded.

> Geoff plunged his hands into the soil and went down 8 inches of moist, black, rich, composted soil. It was still damp.

https://www.permaculturenews.org/2014/10/11/discovering-oasi...

xhkkffbf 10/27/2024||||

That was what I thought too. But there are videos from people who are doing it successfully in the American west -- and in the edge areas around the Sahara.

It's worth poking around YouTube to see just what people are saying they've achieved. It changed my mind.

pegas1 10/26/2024|||

Actually, most of these regions have rain. (The Atacama does not!) And you do not need lush green forests right away, prairie grasses are a good start. Well-applied rain retention measures do work.

Sabinus 10/26/2024||

Modern desal uses chemicals in the water to help prevent mineral buildup within the plant, and these chemicals are present in the effluent. I wonder if the author has accounted for this pollution?

navi0 10/27/2024|

Or the nanoplastics that commercial RO filters appear to create [0]?

[0]https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300582121

carapace 10/26/2024||

I thought this was a good idea too but then a scientist pointed out that those areas radiate heat into space at night and the last thing we want right now is less of that.

It's a little like a bald person putting on a wool hat: great if you're cold, but counter-productive if you're already too hot.

- - - -

In the next twenty years we will build as much city as we have so far. In other words in the next twenty years the amount of urban area will double. We've gotta design and build these new cities to be in harmony with the global ecosystem that maintains life support for everybody.

"Building cities with ecological harmony" | Dror Benshetrit | TEDxAmazônia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OrRCGY_lkk

ZeroGravitas 10/26/2024||

There was some recent work on cheaper desalination based on cheap intermittent solar (the common reverse osmosis approach apparently doesn't work well with intermittency) that mirrors the blog writer's approach to efuels, so surprised he didn't mention it.

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.

EGreg 10/27/2024||

Let them try it in Australia first. The whole continent is mostly desert (hi Mad Max!) and just a few cities on the coast.

Or at least if they can't terraform the desert, let them terraform "the bushland" first: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bush#/media/File:View_...

This is egregious considering that humans have actually terraformed forests into farms [1], and now 1/3 of the arable land is desertified [2]. How about terraforming it back into arable land by regenerative permaculture [3]? Start there first!

1. https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture

2. https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/fores...

3. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/08/22/orange-new-green-h...

composter 10/26/2024|

If the Casey's interest is in terraforming the American West to support substantial population growth, I would start with the Columbia River Basin and identify the bottlenecks to growth there.

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

prpl 10/26/2024|

Yeah this is the place to do it. Much less competition with established places.

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.

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