A reader writes concerning American concern for native ecology:
I’ve been saying for more than 20 years that the immediate area around Lake Mead drawing water from it was a disaster in the making, and mostly insane. Flying into Phoenix in 2002, it was crazy to see the amount of green growing stuff that should not be there — golf courses, lawns, orchards, crop fields. Plus the huge amount of urban sprawl just since the last time I flew over that area in 1994, much less the amount of metro growth since I passed through on the freeway in the mid 1970s.
From “Organic Farming in the Desert of Wadi Rum,” Charismatic Planet.
There’s a couple of related theories in my mind for our attempts to landscape the desert. The first is that we arrogantly believe that we can reshape the world into what we want it to be, without repercussions. We see this in China, throughout the United States, etc. Some people call these MegaProjects.
And then there’s what I call the graffiti theory. Mankind’s signature signal for mating is its ability to make a mark on the surrounding environment, such as climbing a water tower to decorate it with graffiti, or building Stonehenge. You do it to attract the attention of the sex to which you’re attracted, because that’s how humanity works.
So when you see a verdant farm in the middle of a desert that doesn’t need to be there, it’s not about feeding the fellow citizens so much as it is about leaving a mark, bending the environment to your will, and letting whoever you might want to mate with know about it.
And when the population is nearing the edge of the carrying capacity of land, well, we get madness like what my reader observes.
