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.
If they changed this in the way you describe, I wouldn’t even personally consider it retcon.
To me, “retconning” is changing some point which is kinda substantiative so that it disagrees with what was presented before. “This thing we said happened? Well it didn’t.”
If, as you suggest, they kept the idea of making the Mojave hospitable and pleasant but changed this so it’s more respectful of the existing ecosystem, then to me that’s not a retcon, it’s more like updating the existing concept to be better in line with the ideals of a contemporary audience. A refresh, if you will.
It would be very much in line with what the original was trying to say and mean; that humans have this power to change the environment for the better and we are using it for the good of society, it’s simply that our understanding has changed in the last several decades in a way which means the visual presentation of that concept on screen needs to change.
So I’d be totally fine with that :)