What's the craziest, most god-defying shit humanity has ever done? I'm going with that one time we tried to terraform the steppe for the shittiest grain in the world
>Nikita "what the FUCK did you just say about corn?" Khrushchev decides to grow some ears in the USSR
>Ukraine is still too Holodomor'd to handle corn
>Blindly points at a map to decide where he should grow corn
>Central Asia
>Decides to go with it anyway and creates a plan to turn a desert waste into paradise
>By completely reversing the course of some of the longest fucking rivers on the planet
>By draining the Aral FUCKING Sea to make the water travel south instead of north
>Ecological disaster ensues
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea#Irrigation_canals
Didn't most of the sea dissappear because of overuse of its water?
>>908915
He, reminds me of California.
>>908918
What happened there?
>>908936
I may just be talking out of my ass right now, but the place is pretty much a big desert with a few big rivers. Someone decided it was good to start farming there, in the desert, requiring them to pump large amounts of water form nearby Rivers and lakes. Now they have been hit by a rather heavy drought tough and since most of the water goes off to farming and none is doing anything about that they may very well destroy the entire fucking Echo System due to water getting sparse and the nature that stops desetification risking to simply thirst to death.
>>908936
Kind of this >>908976
The problem California has always had is disproportionate growth with little return. People flocked over for gold, movie jobs, etc. with fairly small chances of actually getting anything. Farming is a GREAT example of this. In California, they have tremendous dry spells and pretty good wet ones. They are coming off of a pretty substantial wet season that sparked a huge farming boom in valleys all over the state. Because so much water has been used, compounded with the typical dry/wet cycle, they are having a severe drought.
>>908998
Is there any chance of ruining the eco system for at least one generation forward or is the nature to resistant for that?
>>909021
Some of the articles I was reading estimate that this new drought could hit for up to 3 decades. My guess is that , if there are no signs of major improvement by the end of the year, a lot of agriculture will move back Midwest. Michigan is already experiencing agriculture growth from ex-California farmers.
>>908998
>the death of California is nigh
AT LONG LAST
>>909496
>12% of US population
>14% of US GDP
>California refugee crisis here we come
this is what you get for irreparably shitting our state up with your hippies and okies
we're taking the ship down with us
>>908882
Stupendous works by Pre-Modern Civilizations.
Like Roman Ruina Montae mining in which whole fucking mountains were levelled or China carving out an artificial river to connect those two great rivers of theirs.
>>909628
Well send them somewhere else from Texas you fucking nigger.
>>909642
Oh that's the stuff. How long did the China one take?
>>909805
The T'ang Canal was actually started during the Sui Dynasty. Took the entire 7th Century to finish. And it only connected the Great Rivers. The Ming Dynasty extended it to Beijing in the 1400's
Communist China had it repaired and widened for modern barges.
The Chicago River was reversed.
>>909642
Relevant.
>>908882
By 1800 western Europe was largely deforested and it's a god damn miracle coal became a thing. England started a replanting program for naval timber as early as 1650. by 1700 most large cities were built with Scandinavian timber.
>>909869
Pretty amazing feat
>>909890
where is this from?
>>910148
Adam Smith: An inquiry in the nature and causes of the wealth of nations.
Great book if your an autist for pre industrial economics.
Now I've only read one book on Chinese history and forgotten around 95% of what I read, but wasn't the capital relocated several times and they always issues with logistics since it was either in bumfuck nowhere at the start, or the population outgrew the production capacity of the surrounding farmland?
>>910166
Nope. Capital remained where it was for long periods of time. Only changed when Dynasty changed...
...or not. Chang'an/Xian was the Capital of Qin, Han, Sui, and T'ang Dynasties. Beijing was the Capital of Yuan, Ming, and Qing.
Also it was never in bumfuck nowhere, it was always somewhere where a lot of communications/transpo networks hubbed out (Chang'an being the most smack in the middle of a great river). Beijing is actually weird because it is the furthest a Chinese capital has ever been: near the borders of China proper and for a good reason: to keep an eye out of the uppity Steppe Nomads during the post-Mongol years.
>>908911
Yup. They needed all that water for cotton production. The soviets were so desperate for cotton towards the end that when the villagers left their farms they got picked up by helicopters and landed back on the farms.
>>910236
Danskjävel?
>>908936
This is just anecdotal, but if you drive through central valley you'll see huge patches of farmland with water spraying through the air at 100 F at high noon
It's not even people food half the time, it's all cow feed
>>908882
This is Australian agriculture in a nutshell.
Fun fact, we grow huge amounts of rice here... in the desert by diverting rivers and shit as well.
The Murry Darling (the major river across several states) is FUCKED because of it.
The Libs (right wing party) for decades have wanted too turn this into the largest rice growing fields in the world in a plan called the "Northern foodbowl" for decades.
>>910912
>The Libs (right wing party)
Fucking straya cunts, even your politics has shitposting in it
>>910912
Not entirely. We still have enormous amounts of arable land that we are utilising for agriculture. We grow most of our rice in the Murrumbidgee and Murray Valley in NSW.
>>910925
No he's just a far leftist
>>910236
Hei Norge! Går det bra?
>>910912
>The Murry Darling (the major river across several states) is FUCKED because of it.
[citation needed]
>>909642
Why didn't they just go by sea for fuck's sake. The coast isn't that far. Was their piracy problems? I can't imagine the Yellow sea being that rough.
>>908976
> echo system
Lol
>>913646
The Grand Canal was built in the T'ang Dynasty. There's really super few Chinese cities in the coasts at the time- the only one of note was the ancestor of Shanghai, and only because it sat tat the mouth of the fucking Yangzte- and its only trading partner of note across the water was fucking Japan. To whom Chinese ships sailed from the Great Rivers out to the Yellow/Bohai Sea to sail to Japan.
The objective of the Canal, If you look at the map, was to connect the existing cities relatively nearest the coast and nearest the Great Rivers were connected with a long canal. Bear in mind not all those cities are reachable if you follow the natural river travel alone.
Not to mention sailing from the mouth of the Huanghe just to go down to the Yangtze takes a huge fucking amount of time. You're better off going on foot - oh wait, you have to cross those small(ish) rivers from North to Southern China and lord knows how many tolls those are
Traffic slackened in the canal somewhat during the Song dynasty when Nomads turned the silk route to shit and Chinese turned to sea trade. But it remained a major transport highway.
Not necessarily one individual thing, but dams in general do some freaky shit to the landscape.
>>914294
forgot pic
Why totalitarian regimes like to mess up with nature so much?
>>914296
>>914315
Of course an autistic german would come up with something like this
>>914315
Its like in Vidya. Great works are like wonders that not only have economic benefits, but shows off the prestige of a state.
>>908976
>destroy the entire fucking Echo System
oh no what would become of us without the fucking delta smelt
>>914408
WAT?
>>914315
Isn't this impossible because of plate tectonics?
The greatest change of climate was probably caused by Korea during the Hyper war due to their construction of the autism ray.
Due to the large amounts of heat caused by tard-rage from the weapon it needed gigantic amounts of water to cool down, the Koreans emptying the entire Sahara, creating the desert we got till today as the place was unable to recover..
>>909628
Almost none of that population or GDP is tied to farming. Even while the Californian agricultural sector dominates relative to any other state, it only makes up 2% of the Californian economy.
If farming disappeared then all that land would just end up getting developed.
