Removable and Place-Based Economies: Alternative Futures for America’s Deserts - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 287

from one region to support another. Even in purely economic terms, this conventional
relationship between desert and nondesert is hardly sustainable. Exporting raw resources
and importing finished goods puts a region at a serious disadvantage, as the 13 American
colonies soon realized even in a setting far from desert. As for the environmental results,
as early as the 1950s, author Peter Matthiessen warned that the American West and the
Southwest more particularly, were slated to become a “national sacrifice zone.” 2 His warn-
ing was born out by a headlong increase in mining and drilling lease activity across the
American West during the Bush-Cheney administration.
16.3 Resources versus Places
To be sustainable, desert development must go well beyond “green” technologies, although
these will clearly be important. 3 In particular, desert regions must resolve the paradox of
resources versus places. Put succinctly, that paradox is this: we value raw materials enough to
destroy the living land in extracting them . In nondesert regions, society may be able to ignore
the conflict between place and resource. In the desert, the paradox is unavoidably and
starkly visible.
Desert places and resources have been fertile ground for conflict since European
development began. Today, deserts worldwide are threatened by exponentially growing
demands, driven by declining mineral supplies and changing demographics. These trends
contain the seeds of new conflict—and in the desert, dormant seeds can lie hidden for
years, and then sprout with sudden ferocity.
16.4 Wholesale History
A history of desert settlement has been detailed in previous chapters (see Chapter 26).
When evaluating prospects for desert sustainability, historical habits of resource use
(and changes in those patterns) become critical.
The American West was acquired wholesale, that is, in large chunks and at a steep
discount. Whether taken directly from native cultures or bartered among colonial powers,
the land transfers were vast: the Louisiana purchase, the Alaska “folly,” the Guadalupe-
Hidalgo treaty. Although not exactly terra incognita to white settlers, much about these
regions was unknown. Land was subdivided and property rights were assigned using a
grid of anonymous square tracts, a land-use system that military and imperial regimes
throughout history have found practical for occupied regions (Figure 16.2)* Land claims—
and government giveaways to the railroad or other industries—were by the square mile.
Since so little was actually known about the characteristics of any given tract of land,
profiting from the mineral and agricultural claims was considered a gamble.
* For a variety of interpretations of the significance of grid settlement planning, including its prevalence under
expansionist empires including Chinese, Japanese, and Roman, see Smith. 4 A grid is an ideal system for rap-
idly identifying locations in unfamiliar territory; in some ways, the gridding of land might be added to Jared
Diamond's list ( Guns, Germs, and Steel ) of factors giving “Western” cultures the ability to conquer other societ-
ies, whose way-finding methods commonly required intimate first-hand knowledge of place.