Comment on The climate change is actually kinda nice
protist@mander.xyz 1 year agoCanada has had their worst wildfire season ever this year and it’s not even over. Over 30 million acres have burned. In the northern parts of the country, the permafrost is melting and making the ground unsuitable for building
sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 1 year ago
It has had the most histrionic wildfire season ever this year, that's for sure.
Forest fires are part of the natural lifecycle of a forest. They're so normal that many plants require them to grow. The seeds sit there sealed up until a forest fire comes through. Lots of fires don't really mean much to the Inhabitability of the place other than it's warmer and drier, but far warmer far drier places than northern Canada are happily populated and have been for millennia.
Permafrost melts, leaves behind muskeg, which is a known quantity. Very common, not the end of the world. Even so, much of the country isnt permafrost, it's just cold -- so if it gets less cold it gets more inhabitable. Unlike 95% of Canadians, I've actually lived in those places.
Humans thrive in all kinds of places that should be inhospitable. The United States was almost entirely uninhabitable when the colonists arrived, and through engineering made it into a place people happily live from coast to coast.
protist@mander.xyz 1 year ago
wtf
sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 1 year ago
American history is really something else, and because our ancestors were so effective in some key regards, we don't even realize.
Huge swaths of the us are only inhabitable the way they are because of large engineering projects. The southeastern US was a swamp where you could catch malaria and die (a lot of Africa was the same), and a lot of the southwest was uninhabitable desert. The rocky mountains were conquered with blood building transportation networks that would have been unthinkable in previous eras. They managed to get water to dry areas and drain water from wet areas, and build transportation networks to remote areas that supply goods for regions that are productive today but wouldn't be without trade.
If you head into some of the more historic regions and look around, you really have to go "why the hell would people leave the relative comfort of Europe during the enlightenment for a frozen hellscape in the bush?"
protist@mander.xyz 1 year ago
Large engineering projects only enabled large scale settlement and large scale agriculture. But Native Americans lived in almost every ecological zone in North America prior to European colonization, including the deep south and the southwestern deserts