"Buy land, they're not making any more of it."
Is this quote, its attribution lost somewhere in the muck of cultural history (Mark Twain?), literally true?
No! Humans increase the area of land available to them all the time. We erect multi-story buildings, build artificial islands, and reclaim shallow waters. The Mississippi has been called "the land-making machine" because of how it made new land in its delta by depositing sediment from upstream. I put this in the past tense because, now, upstream management and strong-armed engineering of where the Mississippi enters the Gulf are preventing the river from making land in prototypical fashion. Change is needed for it to go back to its historical ways.
At a global scale, we are also running out of useful sediment. Both white, pillowy, instagram-ready sand and coarser gravel sand, useful for concrete, are scarce enough to warrant dark markets and large-scale international logistics. And we're consuming these sands faster than they can be created by nature's typical processes (wearing down shells of benthic organisms, erosion river rocks, etc). The sand floating in natural systems is no longer enough, due to urbanization and damming. Our wetlands just won't make it—they're going below sea level faster than they can lift themselves up. (If I had to credit any one particular essay with getting me to go to grad school, it's that one.)
This imbalance—the pace of anthropogenic forcing versus the pace of typical systems to adapting or replenishing—is the core driver of anthropogenic climate change. We're pumping CO2 into the air faster than it can be sucked back out by our oceans and trees; climate zones are moving faster than species can migrate, we're producing plastic much faster than it can decompose. From the temporal perspective of human lifespans, these are all linear processes, rather than a more sustainable circular system.
(In a cosmological timescale, everything is linear, towards the heat death of the universe. But our little microcosm of Earth is a fun place to see if circularity is possible... or maybe it is more of a spiral, anyway.)
But that's not the point. What do we do today? I'm starting to work with a friend on a proposal sharing thoughts on adaptation for Los Angeles. I'm interested in prototypical adaptation—effective and ethical policy change, managed retreat, living coastlines, context-sensitive and livable built environments—but I'm also interested in changes of mindset that reframe adaptation. Perhaps beaches don't need to be sandy to be "pleasant" and perhaps your home flooding twice a year should be expected. Perhaps we need to outlaw ordering food to go, perhaps we need to locally decompose all of our own waste. Perhaps we need to slow down, and let the land catch up.
Terraforming,
Lukas
Is this quote, its attribution lost somewhere in the muck of cultural history (Mark Twain?), literally true?
No! Humans increase the area of land available to them all the time. We erect multi-story buildings, build artificial islands, and reclaim shallow waters. The Mississippi has been called "the land-making machine" because of how it made new land in its delta by depositing sediment from upstream. I put this in the past tense because, now, upstream management and strong-armed engineering of where the Mississippi enters the Gulf are preventing the river from making land in prototypical fashion. Change is needed for it to go back to its historical ways.
At a global scale, we are also running out of useful sediment. Both white, pillowy, instagram-ready sand and coarser gravel sand, useful for concrete, are scarce enough to warrant dark markets and large-scale international logistics. And we're consuming these sands faster than they can be created by nature's typical processes (wearing down shells of benthic organisms, erosion river rocks, etc). The sand floating in natural systems is no longer enough, due to urbanization and damming. Our wetlands just won't make it—they're going below sea level faster than they can lift themselves up. (If I had to credit any one particular essay with getting me to go to grad school, it's that one.)
This imbalance—the pace of anthropogenic forcing versus the pace of typical systems to adapting or replenishing—is the core driver of anthropogenic climate change. We're pumping CO2 into the air faster than it can be sucked back out by our oceans and trees; climate zones are moving faster than species can migrate, we're producing plastic much faster than it can decompose. From the temporal perspective of human lifespans, these are all linear processes, rather than a more sustainable circular system.
(In a cosmological timescale, everything is linear, towards the heat death of the universe. But our little microcosm of Earth is a fun place to see if circularity is possible... or maybe it is more of a spiral, anyway.)
But that's not the point. What do we do today? I'm starting to work with a friend on a proposal sharing thoughts on adaptation for Los Angeles. I'm interested in prototypical adaptation—effective and ethical policy change, managed retreat, living coastlines, context-sensitive and livable built environments—but I'm also interested in changes of mindset that reframe adaptation. Perhaps beaches don't need to be sandy to be "pleasant" and perhaps your home flooding twice a year should be expected. Perhaps we need to outlaw ordering food to go, perhaps we need to locally decompose all of our own waste. Perhaps we need to slow down, and let the land catch up.
Terraforming,
Lukas