On Terraforming

I wrote the below for a mail­ing list the other day in response to a ques­tion about whether we’re ter­raform­ing our envi­ron­ments for good. I liked it, so I thought I would share it with you all:

I think Americans ter­raform quite a bit, but they do so in a not-environmentally concious/protective ways. Grass lawns and farm fields are two good exam­ples. Grass species that are planted on your aver­age lawn are in no way native to America (last I checked any­way). They are for­eign species, and by plant­ing them, we have cre­ated mas­sive arti­fi­cial habi­tats for no rea­son that I can discern–what, because we think grass is pretty and it’s easy on the feet?

Farms are also a form of ter­raform­ing. We took the world’s largest con­ti­nous long-grass prairie and turned it into a mas­sive food pro­duc­ing ecosys­tem (with 1/1000th of the bio­di­ver­sity, but that’s a digres­sion) (Actually, there’s some belief that many of the grass species that we found in the mid­west when whites set­tled had actu­ally been semi-cultivated by native amer­i­cans for a few thou­sand years, and some anthro­pol­o­gists argue that it wasn’t really a native ecosys­tem at that point either. This brings up lots of debates in habi­tat restora­tion that I bet Melinda knows a hell of a lot more about than I do).

As part of this, we straight­ened the HELL out of every river we could, which had pro­found effects on flood­ing and river ecosys­tems. Did you know that if it wasn’t for the Army Core of Engineers, the Mississippi would enter the Gulf of Mexico some­where dozens (hun­dreds?) of miles east of where it does now? I think I read that some­where in a book about giant engi­neer­ing projects “gone wrong.”

The Army Core of Engineers almost spe­cial­izes in refor­mat­ting the land­scape for human pur­poses. However, they don’t quite do it on the scale that you are talk­ing about, and I think the main rea­son is, these buffer zones that were pop­u­lar to dis­cuss after Katrina are not “cost effec­tive” sim­ply because they would eat up valu­able real estate that MUST BE DEVELOPED, THERE’S GOLD IN THEM THERE SWAMPS! In my opin­ion, noth­ing should ever be built on a flood plain, but flood plains are real estate, the most valu­able “invest­ment” you can make in America. Damn the future, build build BUILD!

I have been col­lect­ing a lot of links regard­ing archi­tec­ture plans for build­ing homes that are envi­ron­men­tally sus­tain­able and that become a part of the land­scape instead of paving it. There may very well be a move­ment afoot here, but it’s in Europe, not in the land of out­sourc­ing and ser­vice indus­try (here).

The big projects you see of this sort in the future are almost all going to have to do with stealing/moving fresh water around to places where we shouldn’t have built really big, water-guzzling cities (IE: any­thing west of the rock­ies, minus the Pacific Northwest). I think it’s a race over whether a mas­sive war is going to be fought over remain­ing oil or remain­ing fresh water. Our use of it far out­strips its avail­abil­ity and there is seri­ous con­flict ahead (assum­ing some­one doesn’t invent some cheap and low-energy way of desalin­iza­tion or something).

Finally, I recently read a short arti­cle on Deep Sea News about how huge chunks of the ocean have effec­tively been aquaformed by the process of deep sea trawl­ing. Trawling may very well be THE most eco­log­i­cally dam­ag­ing prac­tice we humans con­tinue today. It destroys thou­sand year old deep sea corals and other habitat-necessary organ­isms in a mat­ter of min­utes. Imagine a giant hand com­ing out of the sky and scrap­ing your city away, and you’re close to what this does. However, in the after­math, the process seems to make a bet­ter home for some pop­u­lar and tasty fishes, and the process is prob­a­bly irre­versable, so there’s an argu­ment that once a nation has destroyed their waters this way, they should just keep doing it because we won’t see a recov­ery in cen­turies, per­haps millenia.

Oh, we’re shap­ing the world alright, is my basic opin­ion. We’re just doing it in search of a short term buck and damn the future. Damn it straight to the biggest god­damn mass extinc­tion the world has seen yet.

Tagged as: grass, Science, terraforming, US