Word: semiarid
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...than an engineer's pipedream. Solar energy will probably not become practicable on a large scale for several decades. Coal, which the U.S. has in abundance, does not seem to be the only answer. Deep mining is expensive and dangerous and stripmining scars the land, especially in the semiarid West. Coal-fired plants are also far from clean...
...profit?" she groans. "There's only one person in the world who'd buy it, and you already have." In fact, thousands of others have bought such desolate plots. According to an indictment handed down by a federal grand jury last week, 77,000 such "semiarid desert lots" have been sold-sight unseen...
History is full of such expensive errors, of cities and civilizations brought low because their leaders failed to exercise even ordinary foresight. Any good agronomist, for example, could have predicted that overplanting of semiarid land would lead to the vast Midwestern dust bowls of the '30s. Anybody with ordinary intelligence could have discerned in the '50s the potential for violence that resulted in the black explosions of the '60s. No disaster, however, has been more visible from a distance-or caught people more off guard-than the energy crisis. The failure to head it off, despite loud...
Because the semiarid region is ecologically fragile, reports AID, "mistakes in the use of soil, water and vegetation are magnified." Trees have been cut down for fuel, savannah grass has been replaced by seasonal crops, and available ground water has been squandered. Most damaging of all, the inhabitants have allowed their huge herds of livestock to denude the land through overgrazing. These practices, combined with the drought, have killed off the natural vegetation and allowed the Sahara to creep southward-in some places, says AID, by "as much as 30 miles a year...
...company has regraded the land and planted trees and several species of grass for a total cost of $700 an acre, which adds only pennies per ton to the total cost of obtaining coal. But local farmers and ranchers are not convinced, because reclamation is extremely difficult in the semiarid region (average rainfall: 14 in. per year). "If I used as much fertilizer as they did on that test site," says Rancher Wally McRae, "I could grow grass on the roof of my house...