In the pilot, they depict Mojave, California as being very terraformed from a desert to a lush parkland.
However, I find this a bit antiquated… this seems to be very much rooted in an atomic age scientific idealism that thought of how we could make the world work for us and bring it to more western standards of natural beauty.
I think this is in conflict with the TNG solar punk aesthetic and the general respect for nature implied by the Prime Directive - notice how there’s no desert bushes in sight as if they wiped them out. This seems to be insane damage to the ecosystem.
I wonder if they’ll ever revisit Mojavo on-screen, and whether they’ll retcon this so that Mojave is a gorgeous desert town where they solved the problems of drought and extreme heat plaguing the southwestern US while working in tandem with and even boosting the local wildlife, rather than just razing everything and plastering grass and non-native trees over it.
I’d bet we probably only have 3 seasons for it to happen, considering that 5 seasons has tended to be the length of most recent Trek shows (except poor old Prodigy). The only thing giving me hope is that SNW seems to be a decently successful series.
Yeah I don’t think 50 miles of parkland makes sense, but even desert lovers would rather picnic on grass than sand.