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How America Uses Its Land

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Re: How America Uses Its Land

#181

Post by ameister14 »

PakG1 wrote: post #95
jaggederest wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure the Oregon high desert is really good at being high desert. Does the Mojave have to be useful to humans to be a valuable thing?

I believe so. Other organisms don't really seem to have a concept of value, which would imply they're willing to make trades. Any organism that gathers things seems to hoard at best without any idea what it would trade for what it's hoarding.

Man, people have really jumped on the worst habit of Reddit here lately, downvoting people they disagree with.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#182

Post by TomMarius »

justinwp wrote: post #176
rayiner wrote: post #48

The one third being used for cows is misleading. Pasture is basically the Bureau of Land Management’s default use for the vast swaths of federal land. It’s like “here is this land, you’re allowed to graze on it with a permit.” That doesn’t produce that many cows—it’s more about politics and the fact that much of the land is good for little else besides growing grass. The real land use from growing meat comes from the…

>Pasture is basically the Bureau of Land Management’s default use for the vast swaths of federal land. It’s like “here is this land, you’re allowed to graze on it with a permit.” That doesn’t produce that many cows... And yet it is an incredibly destructive use of land for so few cows. BLM land is often shrubby desert and is not able to cope with the impacts of the cows and remain a healthy ecosystem.

I think that the point was that only minority of this land is really used for this purpose.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#183

Post by ameister14 »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #153
ianai wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, such places handle social interaction better. Birth rates decline in developed areas. My pet hypothesis is that “developed” countries/areas are only developed through extracting so much from workers that only a selected subset may reproduce.

Birth rates decline because of female education. This is such an established fact that your pet theory sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory "the moon landings were faked".

Really? Is it such an established fact? I seem to remember it still being a point of extreme contention, academically, only a few years ago. I haven't been in an academic setting discussing population growth and human movement for a while, but it's crazy that it would go from being one theory among many in an incredibly complex system to an established, unassailable fact in a decade.

Does Argentina have a much worse education system for women than Brazil?

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#184

Post by ameister14 »

eigenstuff wrote: post #124
ianai wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, such places handle social interaction better. Birth rates decline in developed areas. My pet hypothesis is that “developed” countries/areas are only developed through extracting so much from workers that only a selected subset may reproduce.

Or, y'know, developed countries have more access to birth control...

It's not only one cause - declining TFR has to do with a ton of different things, access to birth control being one of them but far from the only one.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#185

Post by AlwaysRock »

hirundo wrote: post #30

> More than one-third of U.S. land is used for pasture ... There’s a single, major occupant on all this land: cows. Not here. I live on cow range land, but the cattle are outnumbered by elk. The elk hunting industry here is larger than the cattle industry. Every third local seems to be a hunting guide, and many of those are cow growers too. This seems to me to be a very positive thing that should be encouraged. Inste…

Lot's of people truly enjoy nature and aspects of it but also love being able to walk to three grocery stores, 15 high quality restaurants, and knowing that they can get almost anything at any hour of the night. Cities offer something rural areas often do not. Rural areas offer something cities do not.

I grew up on a dirt road in the middle of no where and loved every minute of it. I've been in Chicago for the last four years and love every minute of it. Eventually I'll probably move somewhere like Denver that allows access to both within an hours drive or so.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#186

Post by Hupriene »

bunderbunder wrote: post #175
pythonaut_16 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you're being a little disingenuous to the OP. He's obviously talking about the economic/productivity value of the land, which is to say that the BLM considers large parts of the country to have little economic value beyond growing grass and thus designates it as free range grazing land. It doesn't mean it has no value as a wild, natural environment, just that from an economic development perspective there…

Nowadays, an alternative, and possibly greater, source of economic value might be as a carbon sink. I'm curious if some of this pasture land might be more heavily forested if it weren't being grazed. Out where my folks live in Colorado, for example, it's striking to see how anything that's anywhere close to flat enough for cattle to walk on is scrubland, but the sides of the mountains are well-forested. I'm no ecolog…

That might be true, but to establish that state we'd have to kill off the native grazers. People tend to forget that before we had vast herds of domestic cattle in the western plains we had vast herds of bison, antelope, etc.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#187

Post by jpadkins »

vfc1 wrote: post #134

Looking at that map, Between livestock pasture, feed and feed export it accounts for around 45% of the US. Food that we eat is only a small fraction. Isn’t this a huge waste of resources, and completely unsustainable? If we ate the produce directly instead of feeding it to cows and eating them, how many people could we feed? What about the gigantic consumption of water this implies? The link between this to global wa…

> What about the gigantic consumption of water this implies?

The water isn't destroyed. It goes right back into the ecosystem. The planet surface is 70% water. We aren't running out of water.

> how many people could we feed? The US could probably feed the entire world with meat, with unlimited energy / $$. People going hungry is not a food production problem, it's an economic and logistic problem. If we use plant based food, we could probably feed 3X the world problem (or use 1/3rd the land). World hunger isn't caused by lack of productive land.

Your other point on meat requires more land use and energy than plant food is correct.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#188

Post by logfromblammo »

justinwp wrote: post #180
davidw wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but some of it... it's really just like this: https://goo.gl/maps/rQjoQWY9Svu It doesn't support many cattle, but that's about all you can do with it, and there are better places for 'outdoor activities'. Cattle do need to be managed so as to allow the native species (sage grouse for instance) to thrive.

>but that's about all you can do with it, and there are better places for 'outdoor activities' there are better things to eat than shitty meat from cows grazing in a desert. i'll take the outdoor activities and the preservation of these ecosystems

That stretch of highway seems like about 95% of the way to the place where you buried the bodies, or the barrels full of cash and/or guns. Or a good spot to pick up a supernatural hitchhiker of some sort, like your own father, but 5 years before you were conceived.

Also, that Street View vehicle needs to readjust its camera mast to vertical.

If I managed a beef herd out there, I wouldn't expect it to gain much weight out there. I'd actually worry a bit about waking up one morning to find a bunch of cow mummies, still standing up, just about where I left the live cows.

Seems like a good place for solar power plants, though. Or anything that doesn't depend on water, unlike most of human civilization.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#189

Post by PakG1 »

beambot wrote: post #101
PakG1 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe so. Other organisms don't really seem to have a concept of value, which would imply they're willing to make trades. Any organism that gathers things seems to hoard at best without any idea what it would trade for what it's hoarding.

> Other organisms don't really seem to have a concept of value. To first-order approximations, most living creatures seem to value their lives & habitat.

I believe that doesn't satisfy the definitions of the word value. Per https://www.dictionary.com/browse/value?s=t

1. relative worth, merit, or importance: the value of a college education; the value of a queen in chess.

2. monetary or material worth, as in commerce or trade: This piece of land has greatly increased in value.

3. the worth of something in terms of the amount of other things for which it can be exchanged or in terms of some medium of exchange.

The key words here are "relative", "trade", and "exchange". Just because something is mandatory for an organism's survival or well-being, it does not mean that the organism is able to attribute value to it. For example, an animal would be unable to say what they'd be willing to trade for the grass they eat for survival, nor how much grass they'd be willing to give up to make the trade, and vice versa.

EliRivers shows a few links that present examples where various animals demonstrate ability to attribute value. I'm not sure that it's "value" that they're contemplating when they make their decision though. In the first link, all the examples are 1-for-1 trades, albeit displaced by time. In the second link, the parrots may come close to doing what's described, though I wonder if it's simply a case of the parrot not preferring to eat pecans anymore after having tasted cashews.

I once adopted a street cat and the first thing I fed her was some sausage snack I bought from the convenience store right by where the cat was. She ate the sausage snack voraciously and happily. A few years later after feasting on various types of the best cat food, I went and bought that same sausage snack for nostalgia's sake. My cat would not even touch it. After having a long conversation with my cat about me thinking that she didn't appreciate the early days of our relationship and her thinking that I was being condescending and inappropriate, I threw the sausage snack out and gave her proper cat food, which she promptly ate. I am very sure that the one that was not in her mind was what value the sausage snack had to her. I venture that if I starved her, she'd eat the sausage snack out of desperation, but I don't think that has anything to do with how much she values the sausage snack.

Or maybe the parrot is able to attribute different amounts of value to different nuts, who knows?

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#190

Post by PakG1 »

EliRivers wrote: post #117
PakG1 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe so. Other organisms don't really seem to have a concept of value, which would imply they're willing to make trades. Any organism that gathers things seems to hoard at best without any idea what it would trade for what it's hoarding.

I disagree. Here are some other people who disagree too. Some animals trade goods and services. https://www.quora.com/Do-any-non-human-animals-trade-with-ea... https://www.seeker.com/parrots-barter-with-nuts-1767294582.h...

These are good links, but please see my reply to beambot for what I'd consider a proper response.
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