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.
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Im seeing a lot of sparrows running around lately....
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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.
iirc it's both?
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.
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.
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