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Somewhat off topic, but if anyone's read Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, he talks about how the American Southwest, specifically Arizona, used to be green.

Somewhat off topic, but if anyone's read Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, he talks about how the American Southwest, specifically Arizona, used to be green. Apparently the familiar reddish brown resulted from human impact

PaulHoule 3y ago
I went to school in Socorro, NM which was very brown on a dry year and pretty green on a wet year and my understanding is that it was a pretty grassland before white folks showed up but overgrazing caused the creosote bush to move in. If you go up the hills to the plains of San Augustin where the VLA radio telescope that is around 7000 feet in elevation and I think a bit cooler and wetter and that is a very pretty grassland where you see big herds of antelope grazing and you might think you were in Africa.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Considering that there are archaeological sites in the American Southwest that are posited to have been abandoned due to the disappearance of their water supply, it is hard to blame all the aridness on “white folks”. Moreover, when I cycled through the Anza-Borego State Park in California, several of the information boards discussed how hardscrabble the existence of the Native American peoples in this area was, because it was already very much desert and required special strategies to survive.
  - xhkkffbf 3y ago
    This is a solid point. I was at Mesa Verde, the national park with the cliff dwellings. Apparently the people who lived there just up and left, well before Columbus showed up on the other side of the continent. One theory is that the current Hopi people are their descendants. It's pretty clear that bad things happen, even when white people aren't around.
    - AlotOfReading 3y ago
      It's not really a "theory" as anyone normal uses that term. We know beyond any reasonable doubt that there's significant genetic, cultural, and political ancestry tying modern Puebloan groups to the the people who inhabited Mesa Verde (and other earlier pueblos). "Most" went east to the Rio Grande area, but plenty went west too. Some Hopi ancestry also comes from other groups to the north, west and south (into modern Mexico) where Puebloan groups no longer exist. With that said, Spanish and American colonization of the Southwest has radically changed the landscape. Much of what's now low brush used to be substantially more vegetated, similar to organ pipe national monument. Mesquite was rare outside intentional cultivation. It's actually an invasive species from the separate Chihuahuan deserts in Texas that was spread alongside cattle. Another fun fact is that prior to colonization, no part of AZ+NM was more than a day's walk from water (~20mi), which was important to long distance travel and later the Apache wars. That's no longer true due to groundwater depletion.
      - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
        Do you have a citation on mesquite spreading from Texas with cattle? I ask because the aforementioned information boards in the Anza-Borrego State Park speak of the local Native American population consuming mesquite, and Wikipedia, too, says the same about those Cahuilla people of southern California. From what I gather, it is only certain species that have later been invasive?
        AlotOfReading 3y ago
        Checking back this was somewhat of a subspecies thing, but indigenous people were also cultivating mesquites outside their native ranges for food.
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      To be fair, North America used to have a lot of megafauna like wooly mammoths and they were hunted to extinction by "native Americans" when they showed up via the land bridge at Alaska.
slashdev 3y ago
What’s the proposed mechanism for that? It doesn’t seem plausible to me on the surface.
- hedora 3y ago
  I don’t know about Arizona, but apparently, parts of the great plains were dense forest that Europeans clear cut, and they simply never recovered. Also, California used to be green in the summer, but then people introduced non-native grass that grows rapidly in spring, choking out the native plants, but dies by July. It is the reason the hills are so yellow and dusty and dry. There is some stuff along route 66 that suggests the desert was there longer than humans though. One example is the crater they used for moon landing training. It’s basically undisturbed, and is extremely old.
  - hyperbovine 3y ago
    The Great Plains have been grassland since the LGM, that’s one thing you can’t pin on European settlers. East of the Mississippi though, a squirrel in the 17th century could have walked from Maine to Georgia and back without ever touching land.
deleted 3y ago
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PaulHoule 3y ago

I went to school in Socorro, NM which was very brown on a dry year and pretty green on a wet year and my understanding is that it was a pretty grassland before white folks showed up but overgrazing caused the creosote bush to move in. If you go up the hills to the plains of San Augustin where the VLA radio telescope that is around 7000 feet in elevation and I think a bit cooler and wetter and that is a very pretty grassland where you see big herds of antelope grazing and you might think you were in Africa.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Considering that there are archaeological sites in the American Southwest that are posited to have been abandoned due to the disappearance of their water supply, it is hard to blame all the aridness on “white folks”. Moreover, when I cycled through the Anza-Borego State Park in California, several of the information boards discussed how hardscrabble the existence of the Native American peoples in this area was, because it was already very much desert and required special strategies to survive.
- xhkkffbf 3y ago
  This is a solid point. I was at Mesa Verde, the national park with the cliff dwellings. Apparently the people who lived there just up and left, well before Columbus showed up on the other side of the continent. One theory is that the current Hopi people are their descendants. It's pretty clear that bad things happen, even when white people aren't around.
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    It's not really a "theory" as anyone normal uses that term. We know beyond any reasonable doubt that there's significant genetic, cultural, and political ancestry tying modern Puebloan groups to the the people who inhabited Mesa Verde (and other earlier pueblos). "Most" went east to the Rio Grande area, but plenty went west too. Some Hopi ancestry also comes from other groups to the north, west and south (into modern Mexico) where Puebloan groups no longer exist. With that said, Spanish and American colonization of the Southwest has radically changed the landscape. Much of what's now low brush used to be substantially more vegetated, similar to organ pipe national monument. Mesquite was rare outside intentional cultivation. It's actually an invasive species from the separate Chihuahuan deserts in Texas that was spread alongside cattle. Another fun fact is that prior to colonization, no part of AZ+NM was more than a day's walk from water (~20mi), which was important to long distance travel and later the Apache wars. That's no longer true due to groundwater depletion.
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      Do you have a citation on mesquite spreading from Texas with cattle? I ask because the aforementioned information boards in the Anza-Borrego State Park speak of the local Native American population consuming mesquite, and Wikipedia, too, says the same about those Cahuilla people of southern California. From what I gather, it is only certain species that have later been invasive?
      - AlotOfReading 3y ago
        Checking back this was somewhat of a subspecies thing, but indigenous people were also cultivating mesquites outside their native ranges for food.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    To be fair, North America used to have a lot of megafauna like wooly mammoths and they were hunted to extinction by "native Americans" when they showed up via the land bridge at Alaska.

slashdev 3y ago

What’s the proposed mechanism for that? It doesn’t seem plausible to me on the surface.

hedora 3y ago
I don’t know about Arizona, but apparently, parts of the great plains were dense forest that Europeans clear cut, and they simply never recovered. Also, California used to be green in the summer, but then people introduced non-native grass that grows rapidly in spring, choking out the native plants, but dies by July. It is the reason the hills are so yellow and dusty and dry. There is some stuff along route 66 that suggests the desert was there longer than humans though. One example is the crater they used for moon landing training. It’s basically undisturbed, and is extremely old.
- hyperbovine 3y ago
  The Great Plains have been grassland since the LGM, that’s one thing you can’t pin on European settlers. East of the Mississippi though, a squirrel in the 17th century could have walked from Maine to Georgia and back without ever touching land.

deleted 3y ago

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