Hacker News Reader

Comment by aporetics | Hacker News Reader

Yikes. The sheer, unacknowledged hubris of this is bewildering. Let’s just remake the arid west?

One mans hubris, another mans hope for a better future.

To put this proposed project into context: humans already did something similar in scale in what is now the Amazon. We accidentally rewilded the entire area via plagues. The Sahara is also a pretty new thing, and something we could reverse.

We've long past the point of playing god or not. We now only have two options:

1. playing an incompetent god, pretending that our actions are not our fault

2. playing a competent god, taking responsibility and trying to do better

Surely you acknowledge that "taking responsibility and trying to do better" means learning from our past mistakes and not repeating them? The project in the OP is motivated by vanity, not necessity.

Wanting to make a biome more habitable is not vanity.

Is it vanity to want a park in your city or a river to be clean of pollutants?

We are scared of projects like this because the scale betrays our inability to do them or perhaps fully anticipate the consequences, which is good enough reason for caution.

But vanity? A garden is never reducible to vanity, it is the cultivation of the earth and the prosperity of living things, regardless of how vainglorious the gardener may be.

A measurable ratio of a continent is not a garden or a city park. Even just using this metaphor seriously is, yes, straightforward hubris and vanity.

The whole world has been formed already by our presence and will continue to be. Humans modify our environment, for good and ill, and this is happening in all cultures and at all scales of civilization. Gardening proves microscopically what happens on the macro scale. To presuppose that is hubris is one way of looking at it, but a very narrow one.

The real fault in your reply, besides missing the substance of mine, is that framing such things as “hubris” doesn’t really help us weigh the value of the idea. At most it’s a critique of ambition, but an idea’s ambition isn’t related to its validity.

Also, wanting other humans to flourish is nearly the opposite of vanity.

There is already a biome living in the arid west. It’s hubris and vanity to remove and destroy that biome and replace it with our own.

How much of that biome is the result of a previous ecological disaster? The US is covered by those from what I've understood. Vast tracts of lands are arid because beavers were hunted to extinction for example. Protecting the accident of the previous 100 years doesn't sound so compelling.

The west is not arid due to beaver hunting. It’s been arid for thousands of years due to tectonic plate activity and a cold deep ocean that flows clockwise bringing colder water down from the north. The cold water and tall mountains produce arid inland conditions. This happened so long ago that the ecology evolved to the arid land.

More habitable for whom?

The point is that we do not need this land. There is plenty of land all around the United States that is "habitable". And given the trend of birth rates and urbanization there is virtually no reason to go destroying fragile and unique ecosystems just so people can satisfy some compulsion for a manifest destiny of occupying every available square foot of this planet.

This might shock you, but we aren't the only species on the planet.

We cannot consume every piece of the planet and leave nothing for other species, and there are already far more of us than necessary.

“This might shock you”

Really??? I expect more of HN than snark like this.

Argue in good faith and assume good faith, please.

> and there are already far more of us than necessary.

I think trying to argue how many humans should exist based on something like “necessity” is pretty weird. Who gets to decide our necessity?

Humans aren’t “necessary” in some way that transcends philosophical argument and neither should we preserve other species according to such a metric.

Damn, every day must be bleak with a mindset like this.

The Amazon is losing forested area, is nearly carbon positive, and was previously sparsely populated (it being a jungle and all). I have trouble squaring this understanding with the idea it was recently rewilded.

It sounds like the parent comment was referring to geological timescales. In that case, the 16th century would count as recent.

Truly, even if we were to disregard the ecological and social impacts on existing inhabitants, the energy required would be extreme. And thankfully that alone is enough to make this simply a fantasy.

I actually quite like the arid west, if anything we should be letting it return to aridity as current water use (I.e. rerouting a lot of the Colorado River to California) is well known to be on shaky ground at the least. If you don’t like arid areas move somewhere else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com