i hope the aesthetic brigade will rescue these beasts and blend them better into nature, but this kind of system could be an exo/endo-skeleton, around which landscaping can be designed.


'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

Colorado Springs, for example, is in a "semi-arid" area, and gets around 300 mm of precipitation per year. There is NO REASON for a town to be located here. It was built as a railroad tourist town, then became a TB sanitarium town, and then a military town, and recently an evangelical town. There is essentially no industry other than call centers for Bible Ministries.

So when they built the town, the idea was that it would be irrigated and made to look like a town in a humid climate. So we built canals and tunnels and dams and treatment plants and all sorts of other infrastructure to allow us to have nice lawns and parks and gardens. We pump millions of liters of water from the western slope of the Rocky Mountains (which would normally flow via the Colorado River down to the Pacific ocean on the coast of Mexico) to the eastern slope (where it flows via the Arkansas river to the Gulf of Mexico.) Because of all that infrastructure, it's practical and pleasant to live here. (If you can manage to ignore local politics.)

At this point, now we have a built landscape where around 400,000 people live. They moved here based on an assumption that this is what the landscape would look like. Just like the aqueducts of Rome, or the sewers of Paris, or the underground rivers of London, the infrastructure has a huge impact on the livability of the system.

So why should we suddenly disallow me from watering my grass, just because the Californians want to grow lettuce in their desert? (They might ask the opposite question!)