We can Terraform the American West
We’re missing 300 million Americans. We’re missing 30 global cities west of 100 degrees longitude. We should do something about it!
The western US is a parched opportunity to create millions of acres of prime land for the next billion Americans to live on. Only one ingredient is missing – water.
“Cadillac Desert” (1986) by Marc Reisner correctly pointed out that within the limits of natural precipitation, we’ve expanded habitation in the West close to its maximal extent. Nearly 40 years after he wrote, however, the answer to shrinking flows of the Colorado and ever more demand for living space is not to stage some kind of retreat from land otherwise blessed with climate, solar power potential, mineral and human capital wealth. The answer is to flex our industrial might and finish what the irrigators began a century ago, and bring water in vast quantities to the high desert, to terraform a few select valleys in Nevada, and build a 21st century aesthetic vision.
We’ve already Terraformed California and Florida. 63 million people live in sparkling prosperous modern metropolises that were formerly uninhabitable swamps, within living memory. How did we do this? Large scale infrastructure projects that moved natural resources, principally water, from one place to another.
