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DOGE staffers flew to California to try and release water themselves during LA fires
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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I make no claim of long-term planning.
Longtermism is a philosophy that Musk has been writing about for many years.
Elon isn't one for careful planning.
He is one for careless disregard of short-term consequences while seeking what he has determined to be a long-term good.
I have personally argued for restoring the central valley swamp ecosystem in California. Doing so should be a delicate task, because the valley is no longer hydrologically or morphologically tuned to swampland. The entire overland water transport hydrological system in the valley was redesigned by humans to support farmers in a dry basin decades after the cotton farmers drained it.
Just dumping water into what used to be the lakebed is reckless. It is an action taken with no long-term planning for rebuilding an ecosystem that emerged from the last ice age thanks to careful maintenance, gardening, and stewardship by indigenous peoples; building this ecosystem required human ingenuity and careful planning; so will rebuilding it. It is an action taken without even short-term planning for what happens to the water next as it refills a basin now adapted to dry conditions; it is one of our nation's agricultural powerhousen.
I believe that he thinks that just putting the water in the right place without anyone helping develop the new swamp ecosystem is enough to restore California's wetlands. Maybe he's right, on a long enough timescale. I think we should prefer to be careful and to work with the various relevant communities in that area to ensure that any further changes we make to this ecosystem are done responsibly.