Images of Los Angeles when it was covered in wetlands | Hacker News Reader

Images of Los Angeles when it was covered in wetlands

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104 pointssologoub39 comments

Looking at that original wetland map makes me better understand the liquefaction zones south of Santa Monica. I'm very happy that my apartment is on the original surface bedrock, but it's amazing how much has been built on relatively baseless infill. That's going to be huge trouble during the next big earthquake.

http://geohub.lacity.org/datasets/4842ad85584c43048124685228...

For anyone from LA visiting Christchurch in New Zealand, go to the some of the empty areas of the eastern suburbs of Christchurch: large areas where homes used to be - all removed due to liquifacation.

That's a nice one. Will have to bookmark.

If anyone needs to check their parcel for lots of info, ZIMAS is very useful:

http://zimas.lacity.org/

Water in the American West is one of those topics that sounds boring on the surface, but gets more interesting the further down you go.

A good introduction is the "Cadillac Desert" documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0444F9186975498D

Very good, thanks for the link.

Great documentary! Too bad its quality is so poor!

One thing to keep in mind that a natural wetland area in the LA basin in 1800's is going to be full of mosquitoes that carry malaria. People were highly motivated to eliminate all standing water that mosquito larva could breed in. Thus, fill in the marshes/wet meadows to create dry land and/or dredge to make lakes/ponds. Most current First World inhabitants greatly underestimate the scourge of malaria, especially before modern medicine allowed for a cure. The herd immunity like situation of modern California to endemic malaria is due to a wide assortment of factors and is maintained with relatively small cost today, but I imagine malaria could tip back to being widespread pretty quickly.

The history of US fascinates me as a foreigner. How it went from a totally unknown land to a super power within few centuries.

In places like LA it only took a few decades from the late 1800s on. Almost like China now.

In short, lots of land and resources, and then coming out on top after both world wars.

If that interests you, The Accidental Superpower provides the best overview of the subject I've found.

I lived in Playa del Rey for years just a few blocks from the house on the hill in the 4th pic.

A few of the local coffee shops and restaurants have some of these old photos and I always found it amazing that you could still see the resemblance despite all the development.

The building being built along the road in the 4th pic is a karate school now. The lagoon is a few ugly condos, a baseball field and mostly mud now.

As far as I can tell, that building is next to the karate school. My office last year was the two upper left windows. Crazy seeing how different it was!

Do you know what all of that piping and industrial looking stuff is east of Playa on Culver?

There are methane storage wells as wells natural methane pockets under playa vista and that area or playa del rey. Those pipes are part of the wells.

Almost like we’re a virus that invades something beautiful and balanced, replicates at breakneck speed with no limiter— except when it kills / ruins its host entirely....

Was it ever beautiful and balanced if it gave birth to such a virus? We didn't come to be outside of nature.

So it wasn't a desert after all, and all those people claiming 'all' of LA's problems are due to idiots building a city in the desert are just... false?

From what I have heard LA could support around one million people naturally along a very thin strip along the coast. Certainly not the number of people there now.

It's also not a desert climate but "arid mediterranean climate".

> From what I have heard LA could support around one million people naturally along a very thin strip along the coast. Certainly not the number of people there now.

One million people at what level of resource efficiency? The efficiency of the 1970s, when washing machines used ~200L of water per load, and people watered their lawns with spray sprinkers, which would evaporate half the water before it touched the ground?

Or one million people using modern, water-conserving appliances, and, heaven forbid, not having evergreen lawns?

This statement was made at a workshop I attended a while ago. I don't think it was meant as a precise statement but to illustrate that the LA area is vastly overpopulated in comparison to local resources.

No, LA is not a desert. The desert (e.g., the Mojave) is over on the other side of the mountains. Coastal Southern California is not a desert.

Here’s a blog by a couple of LA friends about the partly-covered LA creek network: https://lacreekfreak.wordpress.com

Wetlands and desert are hardly the same thing.

Smoking one cigarette in your life probably won't kill you.

Smoking 20 cigs a day will.

A few people living in the dismal swamp isn't a problem.

1.2 million people is.

A lot of it was "tamed" with major engineering around the river.

http://lariver.org/ for pictures

What will be left of earth in 100 years? We can't seem to understand, or be disciplined with what we understand, that we're destroying what ultimately sustains us.

These are beautifully sad pictures. If there were any pictures of the vast Icelandic forests before they were razed, I'd feel the same.

Nearly every space of earth is trending towards pavement and buildings. I'm asking myself, what can be done, where is there hope...

What can be done is to build up areas which are already built up, increase density, and bring people out of sprawl. Preserve areas and leave them untouched, and meanwhile make the most of the areas that we do use.

This is good for humans (far higher economic activity) and good for the environment. We must fight height restrictions, and other sprawl inducing laws. We must have more protected areas. And we need to provide transit options that scale well in dense areas.

I'd wager that Agriculture has eliminated more natural habitats than any population sprawl. I'm reminded of this every time I drive out of Colorado and into Kansas.

Yes, agriculture is a massive impact, but as we get better at farming we require less land (at least in the US, I'm not very familiar with other countries.)

From the 1920s to the 1970s, forests on the Eastern seaboard had actually been rebounding due to less intense agricultural use:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/us-eastern-forest...

But then since the 1970s they have begun shrinking again as suburban sprawl took over.

Sorry, but babies are public enemy number one. As long as population grows, pressure on the environment grows. The growth will end, but probably won't end well.

I don't think it's babies, but rather how we handle population growth.

>These are beautifully sad pictures. If there were any pictures of the vast Icelandic forests before they were razed, I'd feel the same.

>Nearly every space of earth is trending towards pavement and buildings. I'm asking myself, what can be done, where is there hope...

Yes, we have a responsibility to maintain the ecosystems which sustain life. But there seems to be a total lack of understanding in modern environmental movements between the difference of preservation and conservation which borders on outright misanthropy. The former promotes a world view which defines all things "natural" as "good" things to be protected and untouched, the latter sees the natural world as a means to man's end, while simultaneously acknowledging our grave responsibility to ensure that means' survival.

Give me stunning architecture, works of art, thriving industry, and world class educational institutions over a bunch of dirt and trees any day. Nature is beautiful, but the things that humans do are a thousand times more interesting and complex than a scenic view will ever be.

There is vastly more pavement, but also vastly more greenery and trees today in LA today than in those photos. I prefer modern LA to swamp LA.

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Cool! I had no idea.

What is cool about this? I understand the beauty and also the amazement about not knowing this before, but just to say it's neat is so disconnected from what followed. I.e. "wow, that's so cool the area used to be vast wetlands and now it's all paved over and suffering from droughts etc etc!"

The user you're replying to read a cool article, with some cool photos, learning a cool new fact, and wanted to express that it was "cool" in the comment section of the link.

Don't be weird with people, it makes people less likely to hear your message.

Please avoid empty 'comments' like this. These will be the slow death of HNews quality.

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