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