Yeah, what a system. Slaughter 60 million bison off of the land, add massive fossil fuel input, get 50 million cattle.
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This reminds me of a series of maps I saw in an urban planning class which depicted land necessary to house humans at specific densities.
If the entire human population lived in one city with density of Singapore, every human could fit into an area slightly larger than the state of Louisiana.
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“leave it in its natural state”
That natural state is supporting massive herds of bison with frequent wild fires. And that’s probably better than running cattle, but neither massive herds of bison nor frequent wild fires are feasible in 2018, for better or worse.
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Location, location, location. Golf tends to want large spaces closest to densely populated areas. There are 2 private golf courses just on the west shore of NY Harbor, and one of them, Liberty National, is trying to steal the only natural section of Liberty State Park’s waterfront to add a couple of holes.
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Note: I did not say “Well this means all golf courses and everything to do with them is totally fine now!”
One of generic argument against golf courses is they take up too much space. This chart counters that.
A particular course/club trying to usurp land better suited for something else is a specific argument against them. And golf courses are certainly not the only perpetrators of that. There are always developers for various interests seeking to use land for their ill-advised purposes.
that is a different issue/argument.
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I doubt anyone has had a problem with a golf course in the middle of nowhere, or has claimed they’re crowding out the cropland! But that’s not where they generally are. That’s why charts like this are of limited use.
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Ponder this: of the most densely occupied counties in the US only Manhattan lacks golf courses.
Check out how much of “housing crisis” SF is devoted to golf, I’m sure I missed a few. FWIW, I also bitch about how much of the scarce parkland in my very dense neighborhood is devoted to fenced ballfields rather than public greenspace.
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I am not here to have this argument with you. Feel free to argue with yourself.
have a nice day.
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If you don’t want your opinion challenged on the internets, keep it to yourself.
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That is not how it works. again, have a nice day. Please stop targeting me and discuss this with someone else
There never was massive herds of bison in the Great Basin of Nevada or in most western states. Introducing a completely foreign species to the area, ie domesticated cattle is the worst environmental policy one can introduce to the these habitats.
I would certainly prefer if the bison still roamed around here. I would even advocate mastodons and giant armadillos. But the world we live in now lacks those creatures, except for relatively few bison.
But we have to make do with what we have, not what we wish we had.
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You’re very practical. Still, things like the holocaust and the extermination of the prairie peoples along with the devastation of an ecosystem to raise a bunch of fucking cows should be remembered and reviled.
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There was bison AND corn in the Great Basin of Nevada:
"… Late Archaic Farmers
Groups practicing a mix of hunting, gathering and horticulture began to appear in the eastern and southern Great Basin about 1,600 years ago. In the eastern area, in the region of Utah, these “farmers”, who are called Fremont (a term which subsumes a number of regional variants), cultivated maize, beans, and squash, lived in fairly substantial houses of round pole-and-brush framework built over shallow excavated floors, kept their surplus food in well-built storage chambers made of adobe or stone, either above-ground or in pits, made pottery, and depicted ritual and war parties in rock pictographs. They also hunted bison and captured waterfowl and by 1,000 years ago had succeeded in breeding a stable, high-yield maize. Then shortly before 600 years ago, they disappeared, perhaps as a result of climatic changes."
Native Peoples of North America
How are you defining ‘massive herds of bison’ ? Kit Carson wasn’t shootin’ them wholesale back in those perfect states back East.
Edit: Oops! Did I say Kit Carson? I meant to say Buffalo Bill. Kit Carson shot people wholesale in the Western states.
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Once again, we have to do the best with the world we have, instead of the world we wished we had.
I am not entirely sure that the Fremont and Anasazi were building all those walls, fortifications, and cliff dwellings in order to keep out of reach of climate change. Just my personal observation.
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According to a study from BYU perhaps there were a few small herds of bison on the periphery of the Great Basin. But certainly nothing like the 60 million estimated to roam the Great Plains. Cattle tend to also muddy and shit and contaminate natural water sources and chase indigenous wildlife from water sources. They’re simply not designed fauna for the desert environments of states west of the Great Plains. Especially when many ranchers do not manage them appropriately, neglecting them and forcing them to basically become feral animals in the back country. There are several articles of the horrible ranching management practices of Cliven Bundy whereas his rogue cattle are actually attacking persons on public land, roaming on highways and entering private land where they are not supposed to be.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2760&context=gbn
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Defense is as big as airports, railroads, and rural highways combined.
Predictably.
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It’s entirely unsurprising and understandable if you pause to think about it. The land under “defense” is going to be mostly artillery / bombing ranges, airfields, and training grounds, all of which take up a lot of space but are also going to be put in places that aren’t going to be very useful for most other purposes. There’s no reason to feel outrage here.
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