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Counterpoint: they didn't need to clear all the trees, or at the very least, they could have replaced them with more native trees once they were done building. I'm not gonna pretend that houses don't cause a ton of environmental destruction, but imo they really don't have to continue to be destructive long-term; they do it because people usually go with the lowest bidder.
Counterpoint: they didn’t need to clear all the trees
You're not laying plumbing and electric through an old growth forest. The roots of those trees won't allow it. You've got to clear the whole lot and then replant.
they could have replaced them with more native trees
That would require a local nursery specializing in the cultivation of native plants at the scale the developer requires. At the industrial level, its easier to just ship in some stock variants, whether they work locally or not.
From an ecological level, it is easier to simply not break things than it is to fix them afterwards. Stripping the soil and resodding it, tearing up all the old plants and replanting, and kicking out the native wildlife for years at a time isn't in any way conducive to ecological preservation.
You're not laying plumbing and electric through an old growth forest. The roots of those trees won't allow it. You've got to clear the whole lot and then replant.
Okay, but... What if... You didn't bury the pipes and wires and put them overground (you have good points, I'm just shit-posting NCD-style now)? Snake them between the trees. You don't have to have houses all in a row. Sure, they're less efficient space-wise, but then you can have your yard and your white picket fence without disturbing the surrounding environment!
That would require a local nursery specializing in the cultivation of native plants at the scale the developer requires. At the industrial level, its easier to just ship in some stock variants, whether they work locally or not.
Just uproot the trees and replant them later, EZ.
From an ecological level, it is easier to simply not break things than it is to fix them afterwards. Stripping the soil and resodding it, tearing up all the old plants and replanting, and kicking out the native wildlife for years at a time isn't in any way conducive to ecological preservation.
Yeah, well, we're gonna have to learn how to do it eventually.
From a semi-serious standpoint, if our population keeps growing, we're either going to have to learn how to tear up ground and then replace it in an ecologically-friendly manner, or we're going to have to push off into space. We're currently scheduled to have a population collapse due to climate change, but let's be honest here, that's going to come with significant ecological destruction.
Cough I mean: nature put it there, just have nature put it back. Simple as.
You didn’t bury the pipes
Seems like a bad idea in colder climates, and also, in other non-cold climates. If the pipes aren't below the frost line, then they'd freeze and bust open, or, if they drained, you'd be without water for the whole of the winter. You might be able to get away with it in a hotter climate, but then you run into other problems. What do you make these pipes out of? A single conduit of inflexible pipe would be best, since this would deliver water along the fastest route, would be easiest to service, and might also require less chopping of local ecology than if the network was more decentralized or if the pipe was flexible. Because you're going to have to chop up the local ecology to some degree. Tree branches will grow into or around the pipe, which is a bad thing. A flexible pipe might avoid that but you'd gain a lot of other problems in return. If you go with steel, especially galvanized, that's kind of ideal, as plastic is gonna have a pretty sorry half-life in the sun and heat and elements. So, you could do it, but, it would take some amount of effort. If you had a stable singular conduit, you could also maybe pump the hot water through more constantly, or, pump it back and forth in times of low demand and otherwise store it in some sort of tank more local to the houses, which might help prevent freezing.
I think probably the best solution, in this case, is just to dig deeper than the, say, 7 feet that the tree roots are gonna be, and then bury your pipe about that deep. Only problem is that you're gonna have a much harder time servicing anything if you have any sort of problem along the way, since now you'd have to trek through the forest and try to get at it through there. You might want to make a whole fucking very deep custom underground service corridor for all of your utilities, at this point, and that's going to be incredibly expensive. Especially if your soil conditions are garbage, which they probably are, and you're still going to have to dig and chop through the roots of the trees where you decide to have outlets for your utilities. I can see some sort of combination of an overhead pipe and an underground service tunnel here, that seems more reasonable while still also being insane, very stupid, and inefficient.
Just uproot the trees and replant them later, EZ.
Old growth forests have interconnected root systems, so you'd have to cut up all the trees at the root, raise them up, and then hopefully you can put them all back in the same configuration you got them out in. Not really a great way around that. This is probably going to kill all your trees. The local nursery is actually a better idea, and it's better just to move away from an industrial scale of tree production that only produces a couple different kinds of trees, which I think is kind of psychotic at its face.
Yeah, well, we’re gonna have to learn how to do it eventually.
I dunno if our population will keep growing, to be honest. I'm not entirely sold on the idea that just education and birth control will curtail population growth to a maintainable degree, or at least, to the degree where our level of growth won't outstrip our level of innovation to be able to compress said growth.
Also, probably no chance that we return earth to a pre-change state. Well, maybe. You have promising ideas like spraying sulfur dioxide or some other type of aerosolized chemical high in the atmosphere, like in snowpiercer, and that might be able to curtail a lot of the major effects of climate change if only someone was really willing to do it or co-ordinate an effort.
But seed banks, banks of genomic information to re-sequence species from close neighbors. You can't really bring back those plants or those species if the conditions which surrounded them no longer exist. I'm not even talking, say, the rainforest as a whole, right. That would be incredibly difficult, but you could line up a process of succession, take the hardier species, plant those, propagate them, then slowly start to propagate other plants that can take over and develop other niches as they arise, same with animals, and probably you'd wanna pair both of these with a good degree of population control so you don't get any runaway problems like with kudzu in the south.
No, the bigger problem there is that, I don't really know how you would decrease carbon levels, or global temperatures, or decrease soil acidity, or other chemical traces in the soil, or the level of sand in the soil, or whatever other problems you might have. The reasons why those plants and ecosystems destabilized and went extinct will still be around, and would still have to be combated. You could maybe cook up some different schemes to try and solve those, more geoengineering, more terraforming, but we've already been straining credulity with this whole thought experiment, here. At some point, you really have to start asking why a shit ton of people would start to undergo this sort of a process if they couldn't even see the value in the ecosystem enough to prevent themselves from destroying it in the first place.
You're also kind of looking at it in terms of, what level of natural change should be allowed to happen. The dinosaurs went extinct from natural causes present in their ecosystem, whether that be an asteroid or a big volcano or whatever. The massive fungus forests that died because of the proliferation of cyanobacteria, that was also a natural process. These things were also massive extinction events. So we really gotta figure out what we're trying to do here. Are we trying to preserve human suffering? Are we trying to lock nature in some kind of stasis because we think that to be advantageous? Are we maintaining nature and trying to minimize human involvement out of a kind of ethical obligation to do so? I don't really know.
I dunno, in any case, better to just have everyone live in an apartment complex, I think.