Using the Great American Desert, Properly, For Once

IN THE LATE 19TH AND EARLY 20TH CENTURIES, settler flooded into the region between Kansas City and Denver, New Mexico to Montana, looking for cheap land, freedom, and opportunity. When it became evident that making an agricultural living in this vast area was difficult at best and nigh impossible at worst due to a chronic shortage of rainfall,, it became known as "the great American desert". the middle of it, western Kansas and eastern Colorado, the "high plains" or High desert", is far more suitable to wildlife, Buffalo, wolves, elk, prairie dogs, eagles, hawks, than to human habitation. The early ranchers and farmers, in their desperate struggle to scratch a living form the soil, overstayed their welcome, failed to give the land the rest it periodically requires, damaged the land, and now half the topsoil is forever gone. Partly because of this, for decades the human population of the entire region has been gradually, steadily declining. The great America desert has emptied itself out almost imperceptibly. Where has everyone gone? Many, to the huge metropolitan centers in America's true desert; Los Angeles, Phoenix, Los Vegas, Albuquerque. to places where the lack of water make big cities unfeasible, but hasn't prevented us inexplicable, impetuous Americans from founding and over populating them. the lure of big city culture, no matter how ill conceived the location of said city. conquer nature. Ignore common sense. The water problem will solve itself, or somebody will solve it with good old fashioned American ingenuity. There is safety in numbers. suck the Colorado river dry, as its final, melancholic trickles drips into the ground unseen by us ever upperwardly mobile mortgaged commuters. The ordinance of 1763 forbade the American colonists from settling west of the Appalachian mountains. Daniel Boone and the others laughed at this futile attempt by our British masters to control our destiny. Should we have listened to the King? Or should we have settled for the eastern side of the Mississippi, should Thomas Jefferson have presented the Louisiana purchase as a gift to the true natives, in perpetuity? Perhaps. After all, the Indians already owned it, by right of possession. Its too late now. What do do now? Desalination plants along the coasts, using solar energy to make water pure, and pipe it to where it is needed? Think of all those oil pipelines, ready to be phased out of the fossil fuel business, ready to take water to our over burdened western cities! Or maybe a huge new national park, stretching all across the western fruited plain, bereft of human settlement, another Yellowstone, only more immense, a place where the deer and the antelope, and the buffalo and the wolf, can roam again, while we the American people do what we really do best, when we are at our best; observe, study, and appreciate.