On Terraforming
Filed Under: Science
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.
