Comments on: The Great Green Saharan Wall, Redux

By: ej

ej — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:20:37 +0000

What made this “steampunk geoengineering project”? I don’t nderstand the steampunk part.

By: Alexis Madrigal

Alexis Madrigal — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 06:29:47 +0000

Climateering, in its weak and strong forms, is a fascinating response to industrialization. It’s like two stoned guys are sitting in a factory contemplating what it means to have harnessed coal and one guy is like, “We’re masters over nature!” The other says, “Yes! We control the ground. It does. our. bidding! We have dominion over this Earth.” As they are walking home, it rains on them (or the sun beats down upon them) and the second guy says, “You know, we should really have a way to stop this shit. Where is our dominion OVER THE SKY?” “Yeah! Yeah!” the other chants. And next thing you know they are firing particles into clouds hoping to make it rain right before the storm cells get to Moscow or building a huge wall of trees to stop the desert.

It’s remarkably consistent that when people dream of big visions of the future, humans suddenly have control over the weather. And hey look — lo and behold, we do! Albeit, it’s a very odd type of distributed control to burn fossil fuels and derange the atmosphere, but hey, you can’t have it all.

Anyway, when I’m thinking about weather control, I recall Tim Maly and the way he conceives of cyborgs and architecture as really being two sides of the same coin… “Architecture – as he understood it – was the process of altering our environment to suit people. Cybernetics was about altering ourselves to suit the environment,” he wrote one time. In pure Future Plural terms: Weather control could be seen as a kind of architectural coup, as the field usurps many of the functions previously assigned to cybernetics or, you know, product design.

Great post.

By: Matthew Battles

Matthew Battles — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 20:52:26 +0000

A 19th century American meteorologist proposed creating a wall of fire running North to South six hundred miles through the grasslands of North America east of the Rocky Mountain Front, in the theory that it would moderate climate in the Eastern half of the continent. At about the same time, someone proposed a great jetty—really an manmade peninsula—running East from the Maritimes to capture the warm water of the Gulf Stream. A Green Barrier is a much better idea!

By: Nicola

Nicola — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:23:43 +0000

Oh dear! Thanks for the correction, Charlie and Emanuel. Looks like I need to brush up on the geography part of Edible Geography…

By: Emanuel

Emanuel — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:37:33 +0000

The perils of Wikipedia… Algeria’s territory is 2,381,741 sq km, while Texas’ is 695,621 sq km. So it is more like three and a half times as large as Texas.

Interesting article, though!

By: Charlie

Charlie — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:34:56 +0000

According to Wolfram|Alpha Algeria is approximately 919,595 square miles and Texas is 262,000 square miles. Algeria is about 3.5 times the area of Texas. Wikipedia has been updated.