Environmental Engineering Reference
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(a)
(b)
FIGURE 16.1
(a) The ghost town of Roan Creek, abandoned when its water was removed to supply Las Vegas. (b) Las Vegas'
illusory landscapes are created almost entirely from imported resources. (From Wescoat, J.L. Jr. and Johnston,
D.M., Political Economics of Landscape Change, Springer, Dordrecht, the Netherlands, 2008.)
Dried-up small towns and artificial oases are opposite facets of a single problem. Both
fail the test that Aldo Leopold used to define his land ethic. “A thing is right,” he wrote
in his 1949 Sand County Almanac , “when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and
beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Leopold suggests
that economic value can—and must, especially in deserts—be based on the inherent and
complex worth of place.
16.2 Sustaining the Desert?
All human development simultaneously depends upon and alters the ecosystem in which
it occurs. Thus, sustaining a place and sustaining a human population (especially a
large one with modern consumption habits) may be incompatible goals. Nowhere is this
thrown into sharper relief than in desert regions. Sustaining the desert means maintaining
conditions that many humans consider inimical. Developing the desert conventionally
means replacing predevelopment ecosystems with landscapes dependent on imported
and exported resources. The importation and exportation of resources is a critical question
but often underemphasized in discussions of desert settlement and, indeed, in envisioning
sustainability in general.
A desert, by definition, is “a region rendered barren by environmental extremes”
unpopulated, unproductive, lacking useful vegetation, water, and other essential
resources.* Deserts are defined by their inability to support human life, or their undesirability
as places to live. Yet today, North American deserts are popular sites for development,
their spacious, iconic landscapes attracting both tourism—since at least the 1800s—and
urbanized settlement.
Modern desert development relies heavily on imported water and food; exports, especially
of minerals, support these imports as an economic exchange. Conventional development of
regions with limited carrying capacity requires exportive economics—removing resources
* American Heritage Dictionary, 1976.
 
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