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by kashunstva 1246 days ago
Keep it undeveloped for what, you ask? Interestingly this featureless wasted space is likely the home of a rich ecosystem evolved and evolving right here. And this very ecosystem may well support human thriving too in ways that people whooshing past won’t begin to understand.

> People would rather have unemployment and opiate addicts instead of development and progress.

So that’s our choice - big box stores and Amazon warehouses or opiate addicts and unemployment? In this formulation, the more progress, the fewer opiate addicts. So if we roll the clock back to, say, the mid 1500’s the whole continent would have been full of opiate addicts. Or possibly the directionality of the relationship is wrong. Or opiate addiction and unemployment are a little more complicated than that there’s “unused” land around.

1 comments

People always forget that there's plenty of land and you don't need to engage in greenfield really. You just need to build up. Keeping the ecosystems intact is much more important than keeping around a poorly insulated tinderbox of a home that was built in 3 weeks by unskilled laborers in 1935 around until the end of time. Ecosystems take thousands of years sometimes to develop all of their organic connectivity that we routinely destroy in no time at all.