Yes, it goes wrong sometimes, but on balance it's a great, even essential thing.
All capital and labor intensive.
We can manage without destruction and it's enabled exponential population and economic growth in a virtuous cycle.
This result came about from initially using African slaves to work plantations and build wealth. That wealth (and labor) was then turned into political capital to create the state itself. Then the state was used to develop a real estate market to create/centralize more wealth. WWII created even more development, bringing in the core of engineers to 'terraform' the land further.
At each stage of increased development, a different natural habitat was destroyed in order to create an artificial one to enable generating wealth for a select few. Native people were killed or driven off the land. Wetlands were destroyed, habitats and native species were razed and paved over, waterways were poisoned, and agricultural runoff created environmental disasters in the rivers, bays, and ocean. A vast number of invasive species were introduced which out-competed and eliminated many native species, and we are still battling to keep them under control. There are many superfund and other sites of long-term ecological damage. Drinking water is quickly becoming scarce due to the lowering of the water table. Mining pools are still infiltrating environments causing more damage. And of course, global climate change is exacerbating every single problem, plus adding erosion and elimination of land used for housing.
But hey, it's a virtuous cycle, right? We can manage without destruction, right? Just keep growing exponentially.
At some point we'll clean up all those superfund sites, and figure out how to stop the red tides, and giant heat-sinks of concrete and asphalt that create microclimates that eliminate native species, and figure out where to put trash once all the landfill sites are gone soon, and somehow rid the Everglades of all the boa constrictors and invasive plants, and somehow we'll catch all the green parrots out-competing native birds. And we will have to use this author's idea of desalination, since the fresh water table will be gone by then.
It'll all be fine. Once we figure out how to stop killing everything. Sometime in the future. Let's just not worry about that though. Onward and upward.
We shouldn't abandon civic projects and land development just because it was poorly done. It can be done well and it should.
We should maintain a balance of course. I suppose the real problem here is agreeing on what "balance" means.
Yet I think we can hopefully all agree that expending unbelievable quantities of energy in order to desalinate seawater and pump it uphill a thousand miles in order to turn a desert canyon into a lake for absolutely no good reason whatsoever does not qualify as "balance".
I don't even know if I agree or disagree with those as "good reasons". But also, we obviously don't all agree on them. Like, at all.
It doesn't even require high tech pv, just plain mirrors to make just plain heat for a large portion of the work.
And pumping water is not just a cost, it's also a battery, a hugely valuable thing we don't have enough of yet, which would enable more of the grid to live on renewables.
It's not all magic but it's not all impossible nor pointless either.
I took enough geology in college to understand that humans have been shifting riverflows since at least the Ancient Egyptians (with the Nile river), and Los Angeles' vitality is a product of artificial waterflow shift (the movie Chinatown touches on this at least tangentially). If I'm not mistaken, even Hoover Dam diverts a significant amount of water that once flowed elsewhere, though many environmentalists would tell you today that dams are horribly harmful to local ecosystems.
My guess is that with climate change causing significant changes to multiple regions via weather and climate, causing massive upheavals for large swaths of populations, it might be in America's interest to consider where it could create new population centers again by shifting waterflow.
This is not a societal need. If you want access to fresh water, do not choose to live in a desert.
Lakes that have no outflow, like the Salton Sea, and the Great Salt Lake, end up being collectors for pollutants.They also aren't exactly major attractants for population. Most of the great salt lake shoreline is uninhabited, and most of the development on the East side hugs the mountains rather than the lake. Both lakes have pretty serious issues regarding pollution that will need to be solved. I'm not sure why we would ever want to make another one of those.
There are plenty of places in North America that have plenty of room and resources for people. Coastal sections of the Pacific Northwest are pretty empty still despite ideal climate, water, arable land, etc...
I suspect if pressed this would turn out to be Motte and Bailey argument where:
Motte: deforestation and draining wet lands is bad
Bailey: we should reduce the global population by 95% so we can live without modern agriculture
Bronze Age people were smart enough to live in places with easy access to fresh water, so they're demonstrably wiser than whoever came up with this proposal.
But not wise enough to invent antibiotics so it’s a head-scratcher; am I willing to put up with pumped water to avoid dying of cholera and lockjaw?
Let's look at the chain of argument. The poster was countering an assertion that humans have created massive ecological turmoil by seeking to fundamentally reshape the Earth. Their counter was that Europe was once forest and swamp. I can only assume they meant that we take for granted that the present condition of Europe is good and because it was once mostly "just" forest and swamp that Europe demonstrates that these transformations are acceptable or even preferable and therefore we should do them.
I think this is a bad argument because it contains many assumptions and implications which I think are false.
Assumptions: #1 The magnitude of exploitation of Europe was necessary to achieve modern life.
#2 The development of modern European life occurred on an ideal or preferable timeline and things would not be better if this process had been gentler to the environment and taken an additional 1,000 years.
#3 The ecosystems of the American West are not more unique or prized than the temperate forests of Europe and their loss represents a similar loss therefore justifying the trade off.
#4 Wilderness, despite its increasing scarcity is not more valuable today than it was 1,000 years ago.
#5 Exploitation of the American West would have a similar economic and developmental impact as the exploitation of primeval Europe and therefore represents a worthwhile trade off.
I don't think any of the above should be taken for granted.
I'm not saying it had no reason or benefit, obviously it was for economic reasons (extra land for agriculture and human settlements), just that it is not something that should "obviously" be done.
We know perfectly well how to alter the land we live on. At least in the EU we’ve been turning fields into swamps or forests and back again for various reasons since we industrialised farming. Basically all of the effects are known. While we can agree or disagree with a lot of the choices that are made in terms of economic growth, it’s not like what happens is surprising or unintended.
We are part of the ecosystem. We shape it too.
Of course we're part of nature and whatever we do will not "destroy" the world like the world was not "destroyed" when algae pumped toxic oxygen in the atmosphere.
But for all intents and purposes we're able to "destroy" the things we care about the world and turn it into a place we would quite hate to live in (while cockroaches and rates may have no problems with it)
Not so when humans drastically alter the environment in short periods.
Flattening ontologies doesn't do anything useful.