I listened to this piece on NPR this morning while driving in to work. It says we have a dust problem in arid areas of the western states because the biologically produced crusts on the soils there are being disturbed. Off-road vehicles and cattle-ranchers are blamed, "...dust storms are the result of tires and hooves." The problem will get worse because we are heading into a drought period.
I would love to hear other people's opinions on this but I was struck by the lack of historical perspective in the piece. Are there more cattle on the range today than there were megafauna on the range earlier in the Holocene? If these folks are concerned about dust now, can you imagine how they would have felt 10,000 years ago. Vast areas of the west are covered with loess deposits - wind deposited silt carried from the margins of retreating continental ice sheets - in some cases 100 ft thick. Can you imagine what those dust storms must have been like?
And there's a typo as well - it's the Mancos Shale. Do I sound cranky this morning?
4 comments:
Sounds pretty fishy to me too, Reid. The West has had a reputation for dustiness for quite a while. I can believe that there are localized problems, probably mostly related to extraction and construction projects (I hear that air quality in the Wind Rivers is not what it once was, following the oil & gas boom around Pinedale, though that goes beyond dust). But hooves and ranch tires? I don't think so. If anything, there's way, way more land in the West off-limits to vehicles and grazing than forty years ago. I'd say old fashioned erosional processes disturb the soil and stir up dust on a much grander scale than we can aspire too.
I would tend to give the report some credence, insofar as there were no bison in the Great Basin in historic times -- hardly any west of the Rio Grande, I think, but Bodio would know.
Now we have cattle and sheep and vehicular traffic on top of the natural wind-raised dust.
Not modern bison, no-- but plenty of horses and such. A lot was apparently pinon- juniper too during and immediately after glaciation.
Tim Flannery thinks all our ecosystems have been in flux since the glaciers-- well, before that too, but then you get into different.
Ecosystems have been in flux, well - since life evolved. Huge changes like the rise of the first critters that released that toxic oxygen into the atmosphere periodically reboot the plant, so to speak.
It's not possible to live a life w/o creating any impact on your surroundings. The issue is, of course, that we humans need to find a better balance. And to learn to come to terms with the changes that will inevitably come - whether we create them or not.
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