My main issue with this is the comment that we're not a desert, but a grassland. Well, it's technically a semi-arid desert, and our shortgrass prairie is more desert-like in it's moisture regime...
My main issue with this is the comment that we're not a desert, but a grassland. Well, it's technically a semi-arid desert, and our shortgrass prairie is more desert-like in it's moisture regime than the mid or tallgrass prairies found in the wetter parts of the Midwest. I've found that for people not from this climate, dancing around the desert name just causes people to assume we're as wet as somewhere like Iowa, when that's absolutely not the case.
As the climate changes too, it becomes all the more imperative to get people thinking about their resource usage in the most conservation-minded way possible. When we're reliant here in CO on a massive amount of transbasin water diversions across the Continental Divide from a river basin that's already overallocated and supplies "true" desert, if someone wants a full rock and cacti garden, go for it.
(Granted, this has been on my mind recently since I finished a book called The Water Knife, which involves a near-future Southwest so dry that water authorities literally have paramilitary divisions that fight over water rights-- it's scary how that premise doesn't even feel that far-fetched.)
My main issue with this is the comment that we're not a desert, but a grassland. Well, it's technically a semi-arid desert, and our shortgrass prairie is more desert-like in it's moisture regime than the mid or tallgrass prairies found in the wetter parts of the Midwest. I've found that for people not from this climate, dancing around the desert name just causes people to assume we're as wet as somewhere like Iowa, when that's absolutely not the case.
As the climate changes too, it becomes all the more imperative to get people thinking about their resource usage in the most conservation-minded way possible. When we're reliant here in CO on a massive amount of transbasin water diversions across the Continental Divide from a river basin that's already overallocated and supplies "true" desert, if someone wants a full rock and cacti garden, go for it.
(Granted, this has been on my mind recently since I finished a book called The Water Knife, which involves a near-future Southwest so dry that water authorities literally have paramilitary divisions that fight over water rights-- it's scary how that premise doesn't even feel that far-fetched.)