On 29 Nov 1995 04:33:21 GMT, in JMC.95Nov28203321@Steam.stanford.edu> jmc@Steam.stanford.edu (John McCarthy) wrote.....

According to the Statistical Abstract the U.S. has 77,000 square miles of built-up land out of at total of 2 million square miles in the lower 48. We are not running out of land fast.

John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305

John, I think you are just trying to get me to go deeper into the water, to give me opportunity to restate the perhaps overzealous or even overwrought rhetoric of the title post, for I know that you distinguish between just any land and farmland. You are undoubtedly right in that there are more than a million square miles of land not built upon in the U.S. The narrow strips of tillable soil paralleling the Upper Santa Cruz riverbed in southern Arizona are flanked by wide sloping undeveloped plains and rolling hills that reach unto the mountains, constituting the valleys.

I understand why these bottom soils are being built upon, covered with golf courses and asphalt, expansive suburban homes far from cities. There is no one or many who have the money, the knowledge, the will, and the vision to farm them profitably, to recapture the ancient patterns of adding new soil from monsoon stream flows, naturally increasing the amount and fertility of the arable soil, to integrate desert populations with agriculture by modifying the questionable modern "convenience" of polluting all humanly used waters with human waste. More immediate money can be made by selling them to developers who are eager to purchase simply because the land is flatter and not so troublesome to put in compliance with grading regulations, and such forth. The houses are all to be landscaped with desert vegetation and gravel in compliance with building code so the fertility of the soil is largely irrelevant to the home owner. Golf courses, undoubtedly do better, but there are fine examples all along the valley in the higher non-agricultural soils. 

Why does society allow potential to be diminished? Perhaps because too few envision the potential, or because it is a too long-term vision to be considered. I know that we are supposed to believe that the pursuit of money is wisdom in itself, that we are all better off with increase of GDP, that developers make their just profits by creating for us only that which we will purchase. And there is no present need for such small tracts of difficult to manage farmland, and may never be, for as long as we are rich we can truck in what we lack from Mexico, or fly it in from Chile. We have less need now to be farmers.

But I look at all the land not built upon alongside these riparian areas, and I ask, why? Why do buildings and asphalt have to cover these good soils when there is so much other proximate land available? Is a cost savings of a few hundred dollars a house truly worth the sacrifice? Nothing can allay the violation that I feel, for I know those soils as others do not, and have passed years seeking and dreaming their potential.

I could tell you that a soil is a very fine sandy loam alluvial aridisol, with a water holding capacity of 2" per foot and a pH towards 7.5 and you would have a partial agronomic description. But you would not feel a wet ball of that soil pressed through your fingers with a consistency quite different from a clay loam; you would not know that wet smell, know how it dries powdered on your hands as you wield a shovel, or how it feels under bared feet, a recently watered field cool and yielding under the Arizona sun. You would not see the green of the wheat field grow rich emerald with the zenith of the day, or hear the crystalline cries of the red-winged blackbird in the mesquites at the edge of the field, denoting your distance from that edge.

You could find in a government publication the agricultural classification of the land as Class 1, prime, but I would say to you, nay, it is greater than prime. It is in my vision unique, the last and only grade above prime. It could yield a great variety of vegetable crops both in the winter and the summer. It could still be nourished with the river's silt, even though that intermittent flow has been turned into a raging madness by the ill-designed drainage of subdivisions and the loss of rangeland topsoil. It could bear people in concentrated numbers at its edges and allow all manner of innovation between those people and their agricultural foundation, without deplenishing the net groundwater. It could be the terminus of a maglev powered by photovoltaic cells stretching into Mexico. 

Something within me profoundly laments upon crossing the border and returning to the land of my birth, to know progress named that which is but greater dependence upon superfluous exhaustion of the blood of the dinosaurs, to see asphalt cover wantonly, to seek something that might be done which I consider wise and find nothing.

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