Weather engineering (and the extension or reduplication of military tactical thinking - not genealogical, but adjacent, para-productive, replicating?). Official bureaus of weather modification (under meteorology - is this what an 'applied' meteorology could look like?)
Weather modification and terraforming - intervention at atmospheric and terrestrial levels - how does one think infrastructure in an airy medium? How does one think about the kind of infrastructure - both physical and organizational - involved in something like a 'hydraulic state,' in relation to the specificities of different phases of matter. That is, is control of water different from management of water through infrastructure which takes always as its mode of operation the manipulation of solids (landscape features, etc)
In any case, control of weather - the inducement of moisture, etc. AO remarks: if Wittfogel writes of a hydraulic despotism, you write of the opposite, the control of dryness. But where dryness is configured as an absence of moisture, does it become the same?
A second episode. Environment as warfare. To consider: 1938 and the Nationalist flooding of the Yellow River. quick-n-dirty reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Yellow_River_flood
A third idea. Planting row after row of tree as a living barrier. But life is in time, and the dynamism of ecology also makes way for forms of unadvised growth. Here, an ethic of flourishing cannot hold, and I defer instead to Yi-Fu Tuan's reflections on the desert, wherein its very extraterrestrial facade, a stillness undisturbed by an intrusive vitality, is what lends it its stark beauty. That is, can we complicate an ethics that takes life, above all, as a good (// with the arguments about a neo-fundamentalist will-to-life in Life as Surplus), with an attempt to search out beauty or worth in that for which life is not a resistance but a disturbance?
Many ways to think here. Remember, for instance, the notion of a Mississippi Delta 'dead zone', where 'death' points not to a state of lifelessness but to an excess of unrecognizable living - massive algal blooms that preclude other species, but point to a kind of flourishing. Also sparks Zac C of UCSC and the invasive shad fish that must be destroyed in order to maintain sustainable ecosystemic equilibrium, as well as H Raffles in the NYT etc on the resonances of native species with anti-immigrant things of all kinds.
Spence 102 the search for modern China. "During the second half of the seventeenth century, scholars had been absorbed in searchign out the reason for the collapse of the Ming dynasty....They emphasized the Song because it was then that the philosopher Zhu Xi (d 1200) had given prominence to the view that there were indeed underlying principles (li) that explained heaven's actions and guided human conduct. Understanding such principles, Zhu xi and his later followers believed, would help men to live rationally and in tune with heaven, and would justify the attempts of moral men to find meaning in a public career" (102)
All of this has been procrastination because I had a second idea after the point on terraforming and weather control.
