Like climate change seems really easy to solve if we just plant a bunch of jojoba bushes in the Mojave desert.
Also it’s the easiest thing to get the billionaires on board. Argue we are learning how to terraform Mars and suddenly Bezos and Musks’s meats would be spinning.
the desert is it's own ecosystem and not just 'empty land' for us to take and change. second of all is how deserts are a core part of other ecosystems, for instance the Sahara plays a huge role in fertilising the Amazon rainforest as dust and sand is blown over the ocean very slowly, that allows for that ecosystem to exist. ecology is complicated and interdependent, as well as there not being any 'empty useless' spaces, so no we should not terraform deserts and it will likely backfire, and yes this goes for the current Chinese attempt to green the Gobi desert.
Did they not learn from the Four Pests Campaign?
Have we not learned from gestures at the last 300 years of modernity.
Part of the answer is that the anthropocentric view of life will always ignore or underplay the complexity of systems comprised of human, living and non-living beings. Modernity was a mistake.
You make a great point, though I still think that desert "terraforming" technology or, more accurately, a way to reverse desertification, is a sorely needed thing in the coming century. While long-lasting stable desert ecosystems should be seen as sacrosanct and worthy of preservation as any other wild ecology, there is more than enough previously fertile land that through over-exploitation and carelessness has become barren. If humanity collectively focused on just that it would still be a colossal amount of work in the next 100 or so years.
As to the Gobi project, my understanding is that its main goal is to reverse desertification and hold on to as much as possible in the coming climate collapse. Would appreciate any more information you have though, I'm by no means knowledgeable enough to make speak with certainty on it.
So even if Im talking very low scale?
Like the mass cultivation of Jojoba and the buildup of water through runoff collection.
I don’t think it would be possible to terraform the entire Sahara. I was thinking more as a border region thing in the Sahel, or in the area between the Colorado Rive and Palmdale.
yes, even that. The biosphere is very fragile, if you just started growing more fingers on your head after losing your hand that would not fix the problem and would probably cause more.
No it would not help. Yes the biosphere is fragile , but what are we doing when we have to deal with 10 billion people and 1.5C growth on the conservative end come 2050.
Is restoration and conservation in high CO2 capturing environments the only answer? I just don’t see that happening with the Amazon anytime soon.
At this point we can't go back, we should just stop all fossil fuel and let nature determine how she will face the new environment. Humanity has proven not up to the task of terraforming, given how badly we've fumbled so far, we should just let the cycles of nature even themselves out and just clean up the plastic.
Humanity has proven not up to the task of terraforming
Indigenous peoples beg to differ
I may be severely mistaken, but I believe that indigenous peoples have in general worked more with the land as it is, not made an irrigation nightmare in the desert.
They certainly have, but we must be careful not to fall into noble savage type mythologies here. Everywhere people have lived, from the Amazon, to Europe, and Asia, indigenous peoples have deliberately and methodically shaped the ecology of their native lands.
To call that not terroforming is to deny their successes and to centre this much needed science solely on white imperialist history and experience.
then perhaps I should regard that as light terraforming, not to dismiss its effects but to acknowledge it as not being as damaging as heavy terraforming which is what we now suggest.
I don't think I'm willing to cede this knowledge space to tech bro douchbags like Musk and Gates. Indigenous practices aren't "light" terroforming, they're successful terroforming. All the sci-fi shit being proposed is mostly just capitalist vaporware and grift.
we've been pretty successful in terraforming swamps into cities and deserts into farms, leveling mountains and making lakebeds dry. These things require more technology, and are also way more destructive.
Are you being deliberately obtuse right now, or just firing from the hip as the comments come in? The topic of this sub-thread is examples of successful and sustainable terroforming and how indigenous practices count for that. How is your comment a good response to my previous one?
the second one. Anyway, you're not being clear on the metric of success. I was suggesting light and heavy as signifiers because one is far more devastating and requires more power. To bring in the idea of successful is unclear, as the altering of the environment in modern america and europe sure has achieved its goals. If you mean sustainable that still doesn't really convey what is going on, as damming rivers is sustainable for the local region but screws the people downstream over more.
Placeholder commmet: I'm enjoying this conversation and will resume it after dinner.
:soviet-heart:
sorry for getting remove-happy there, I shouldn't end a chain over getting petty frustration at some random point, carry on (comments restored)
we have no idea how fragile and interdependent these systems can be. it's best not to throw a spanner in the works 'just to see', because this shit always backfires
Here's a documentary on a (successful) Chinese project to Re-green the Loess plateau. I'd like to point out that this was a restoration program meant to return life to a previously exhausted and desertified land, not an encroachment into pristine and stable desert ecology. Which, as @DeathToBritain mentioned, is no bueno.
We could do it, but it's probably not an optimal solution for a couple of reasons. For one thing, as others have noted, deserts are actual functioning ecosystems: even the Sahara has native animal life, and doing a massive land use geoengineering project would disrupt those ecosystems, with somewhat unpredictable results. Even setting that problem aside, though, there are some substantial issues. All of the world's terrestrial ecosystems put together remove about 3 gigatons of carbon (GtC) per year from the atmosphere, while we now emit somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 GtC per year. Land use changes (afforestation, planting more carbon sequestration efficient crops, &c.) are just not capable of operating at the scale that would be necessary to offset the fucking insane amount of CO2 humanity is pumping into the atmosphere. Realistically, we could maybe achieve something on the order of 0.8 GtC removal by 2030 with land use changes like this--it's not nothing, but it's not even 2% of what the projected CO2 emission increase is going to be over the same period. The amount of CO2 we're emitting as a global civilization (and the rate at which those emissions are increasing) is simply too high for these sorts of interventions to work on their own. Technological carbon capture and sequestration (along perhaps with enhanced weathering) are a bit more promising, but also unlikely to function at the scale (and cost effectiveness) that we'd need them to, at least in the short to medium term. The only reasonable path out of this mess we've created is to rapidly and aggressively decarbonize, which almost certainly also means dismantling global capitalism.
This report from the Royal Society is a good comprehensive overview of the costs and benefits associated with different geoengineering approaches, including carbon capture and sequestration via land use change.
No but we have to drive to Mars first and terraform the desert there, for reasons, because Tyson and Musk say so.
There actually was a Plane for this , and with the rising sea levels , it should be revisted..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project
Im a sucker for megaprojects..
mega projects should always be taking place in a global superpower.
It’s amazing America hasn’t even attempted a mega project since Eisenhower.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhoV-vBAyFI
This is from a pretty interesting youtube series about various water restoration projects in India covered by a US permaculture dude. I'm pretty dumb about this stuff but what he describes in this video seems somewhat miraculous, developing a forest and agriculture on what was essentially exposed bedrock.
I really want to start a thread on permaculture in one of the quieter comms. There's so many good ideas there, but the whole scene just reeks of white settler brainworms and Liberal half-measures. I'd love to talk it out in a more socialist and third-worldist context.
Any ideas what comm would fit?
Deserts are caused by local terrain and water cycle stuff so like bulldoze some mountains I guess?
