Don’t misinterpret what I wrote to think we should leave it alone! Obviously, we’ve been doing it for millennia but we’ve only had the tools and machinery to massively change things for 200 years, or so. A farmer digging ditches to route water to his fields using a shovel, plow, and some mules is hardly equivalent to something like Three Gorges dam, the LA aquaduct, or the deforestation of the Amazon basin on a massive scale.

The human lifetime and memory are short. Don't neglect that much forest (in at least the US) has been chopped down multiple times over. The effects of that are still playing out, similar that we have carved up animal habitat with a dense road grid, and have done things like remove the buffalo.

I grew up in Florida. It was mostly a giant swamp. It has been turned into the world's largest concrete strip-mall. There's literally nothing natural left to see in Florida except a beach, and the small part of the Everglades they carved out as protected before it too got "developed".

This result came about from initially using African slaves to work plantations and build wealth. That wealth (and labor) was then turned into political capital to create the state itself. Then the state was used to develop a real estate market to create/centralize more wealth. WWII created even more development, bringing in the core of engineers to 'terraform' the land further.

At each stage of increased development, a different natural habitat was destroyed in order to create an artificial one to enable generating wealth for a select few. Native people were killed or driven off the land. Wetlands were destroyed, habitats and native species were razed and paved over, waterways were poisoned, and agricultural runoff created environmental disasters in the rivers, bays, and ocean. A vast number of invasive species were introduced which out-competed and eliminated many native species, and we are still battling to keep them under control. There are many superfund and other sites of long-term ecological damage. Drinking water is quickly becoming scarce due to the lowering of the water table. Mining pools are still infiltrating environments causing more damage. And of course, global climate change is exacerbating every single problem, plus adding erosion and elimination of land used for housing.

But hey, it's a virtuous cycle, right? We can manage without destruction, right? Just keep growing exponentially.

At some point we'll clean up all those superfund sites, and figure out how to stop the red tides, and giant heat-sinks of concrete and asphalt that create microclimates that eliminate native species, and figure out where to put trash once all the landfill sites are gone soon, and somehow rid the Everglades of all the boa constrictors and invasive plants, and somehow we'll catch all the green parrots out-competing native birds. And we will have to use this author's idea of desalination, since the fresh water table will be gone by then.

It'll all be fine. Once we figure out how to stop killing everything. Sometime in the future. Let's just not worry about that though. Onward and upward.

We are debating the past practices of our own ancestors, without which we wouldn't be here.

We shouldn't abandon civic projects and land development just because it was poorly done. It can be done well and it should.