7 ms·
>much of the land is good for little else besides growing grass. From an agricultural standpoint perhaps.
by wavefunction 8y ago
>much of the land is good for little else besides growing grass.
From an agricultural standpoint perhaps.
- craftyguy 8y agoYea, clearly gp has never ventured out into some of this. There are gems here for hiking/backpacking, and preserving wildlife/watersheds, and much more than just feeding cows.
- davidw 8y agoYes, but some of it... it's really just like this: https://goo.gl/maps/rQjoQWY9Svu 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.
- jaggederest 8y agoI'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?
- PakG1 8y agoI 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.
- beambot 8y ago> 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.
- andai 8y agoThis was my first response to "animals have no sense of value", that what is valuable to the animal is what helps it to survive and reproduce. The animal may not know that grass helps it survive and reproduce, but the individual whose instincts draw it towards places where there is grass (the individual who "values" grass) will do better than one who does not "value" grass.
- PakG1 8y agoI believe that doesn't satisfy the definitions of the word value. Per https://www.dictionary.com/browse/value?s=t 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?
- EliRivers 8y agoI 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-each-other-for-mutual-advantage https://www.quora.com/Do-any-non-human-animals-trade-with-ea... https://www.seeker.com/parrots-barter-with-nuts-1767294582.html https://www.seeker.com/parrots-barter-with-nuts-1767294582.h...
- PakG1 8y agoThese are good links, but please see my reply to beambot for what I'd consider a proper response.
- ameister14 8y agoMan, people have really jumped on the worst habit of Reddit here lately, downvoting people they disagree with.
- dang 8y agoDownvoting for disagreement has always been ok on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16574021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16574021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
- ameister14 8y agoThat's pretty fascinating, because as I understand it, downvoting pushes comments down a page and makes it harder to see, it functions as an added method along with flagging and moderating of enforcing community norms and removing unwanted behavior. I'm surprised that extends to valid but unpopular opinions, as well. Thanks, that's interesting.
- hueving 8y ago>Does the Mojave have to be useful to humans to be a valuable thing? Yes, humans are the only creatures we know of with the concept of valuing land.
- perfmode 8y agohuh? do other creatures not inhabit space? does a creature need to have a concept of value in order to value things?
- distant_hat 8y agoTerritoriality is coded really deep in evolution. Even animals as simple as the fruit fly get aggressive when another fly takes its space.
- hueving 8y agoThey don't value anything other than the space they currently occupy. That's not valuing land so much as valuing immediate space. There are absolutely no animals in Africa that value any land in South America other than some humans.
- jaggederest 8y agoWell, I value both the Mojave and the Oregon High Desert as unique places in the world. Not everything needs to have a ROI, usefulness, or our permission to be valuable.
- black_puppydog 8y agowow that's some whacky camera mount. For a second there I thought this was the world's steepest desert 0_o
- pythonaut_16 8y agoI 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's not a lot going on there.
- dbingham 8y agoI think the OP probably did mean that and wasn't thinking that much more deeply about the statement, but I also think it is that very mindset that the posters challenging it are targeting. Because that mindset - looking at everything through a lens of economic development, and a very narrow definition of economic development at that - is incredibly destructive. I don't think its necessarily a knock on OP, so much as it is just meant to be a reminder that we should really try not to just fall into that way of thinking.
- bunderbunder 8y agoNowadays, 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 ecologist, but I doubt that's because trees just happen to only grow well on steep terrain.
- Hupriene 8y agoThat 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.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
- zebrafish 8y agoIt does have to be useful to the owner of the land who is getting taxed on it and has some investment in the land.
- jaggederest 8y agoTaxed? The BLM? It's an arm of the federal government. They don't pay taxes.
- justinwp 8y ago>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
- logfromblammo 8y agoThat 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.
- redblacktree 8y agoAlso, > shitty meat from cows Ribeyes are delicious