>Pasture is basically the Bureau of Land Management’s default use for the vast swaths of federal land. It’s like “here is this land, you’re allowed to graze on it with a permit.” That doesn’t produce that many cows...

And yet it is an incredibly destructive use of land for so few cows. BLM land is often shrubby desert and is not able to cope with the impacts of the cows and remain a healthy ecosystem.

I have the opposite impression, that the grazing of cows on this land is beneficial as it mimics the role the buffalo formerly played.

If and only if it's done correctly. Both the above statement and yours are true, it really depends a lot on how it's done.

In most cases it's not done well.

To be more specific, the cows should take a bite and move on. This keeps the grass short, but doesn't kill it. With short grass, predators can see prey easier, so birds can eat and deposit droppings to add more nitrogen to the soil.

We can simulate buffalo mob grazing with "managed intensive grazing": many cows in a small area for about a day, then they move. In addition to what you said, it manures the land quite evenly. The grass can stay in its fastest-growing "adolescent" stage. Builds topsoil quickly and sequesters unbelievable amounts of carbon. (This is not how most beef is raised.)

"This is not how most beef is raised."

It's how most beef should be raised, though, IMO.

Unfortunately, if we were to take all the cows stuck in factory farms and turn them loose on BLM land, I somehow doubt there would be enough food out there for them.

Grass-feed cattle farmers tell me it takes almost exactly the same amount of land to graze cows as it does to grow the grain to feed them in a feedlot, so that would be a direction to look: replacing grain farming with ecological grazing.

I think that the point was that only minority of this land is really used for this purpose.

No, the point was that using such land for grazing does not actually produce a high percentage of cattle raised for meat, vs. feedlots where cattle eat corn grown on farmland.

From an ecosystem impact perspective, though, arid land that only occasionally hosts herds of cattle is still going to be significantly affected, compared to similar land that is protected from any commercial grazing.

Isn't that true of pretty much any industrial farming even plants?

I think a better map would be to show how much land is in private hands versus held by Federal and State governments. I bet people would be shocked, see this article from 2016 [1]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/federal...

I bet with more data they would be underwhelmed. Compare the Federal Lands map[0] with a land-cover map[1].

See how much of that BLM managed property is semi-desert? And how much is actually Forest Service land? The first map also includes state lands, which is more apparent in the East, and Alaska. I for one am proud of our reserving of lands for the greater public. It's all of our lands, not just a few greedy landowners.

[0]https://prd-wret.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium...

(above found here: https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/pad-us-land-management-map)

[1]https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/pad-us-land-management-map

I advise Americans to auction empty federal land holdings. having so much of land in state's property is wrong, and very uncapitalist.

Sell your kidneys, too. /s

What useful things does the US federal government do with all that land?

Prevent ecological destruction.

Can you formulate this in a less meaning-amorphous phrase. "Prevent ecological destruction" in this context can mean every thing imaginable.

Yes, I can. But I think it's clear enough already, especially in contrast to the supremely vague assertion about economic ethics.

It is not clear to me.

I've never understood how the federal government holding all of this land has held up in court. What is the constitutional justification for this?

Because the land is owned by the U.S. Federal government after making deals with European countries, Native Americans, and also taking it from Native Americans by force.

No one has yet transfered the property rights to the land to anyone else.

The Property Clause.

https://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/4/essays/1...

Governments can own property too...in capitalist economy government is just one of many market participants.

>much of the land is good for little else besides growing grass.

From an agricultural standpoint perhaps.

Yea, clearly gp has never ventured out into some of this. There are gems here for hiking/backpacking, and preserving wildlife/watersheds, and much more than just feeding cows.

Yes, but some of it... it's really just like this:

https://goo.gl/maps/rQjoQWY9Svu

It doesn't support many cattle, but that's about all you can do with it, and there are better places for 'outdoor activities'. Cattle do need to be managed so as to allow the native species (sage grouse for instance) to thrive.

I'm pretty sure the Oregon high desert is really good at being high desert. Does the Mojave have to be useful to humans to be a valuable thing?

I feel like you're being a little disingenuous to the OP. He's obviously talking about the economic/productivity value of the land, which is to say that the BLM considers large parts of the country to have little economic value beyond growing grass and thus designates it as free range grazing land.

It doesn't mean it has no value as a wild, natural environment, just that from an economic development perspective there's not a lot going on there.

I think the OP probably did mean that and wasn't thinking that much more deeply about the statement, but I also think it is that very mindset that the posters challenging it are targeting. Because that mindset - looking at everything through a lens of economic development, and a very narrow definition of economic development at that - is incredibly destructive.

I don't think its necessarily a knock on OP, so much as it is just meant to be a reminder that we should really try not to just fall into that way of thinking.

Nowadays, an alternative, and possibly greater, source of economic value might be as a carbon sink.

I'm curious if some of this pasture land might be more heavily forested if it weren't being grazed. Out where my folks live in Colorado, for example, it's striking to see how anything that's anywhere close to flat enough for cattle to walk on is scrubland, but the sides of the mountains are well-forested. I'm no ecologist, but I doubt that's because trees just happen to only grow well on steep terrain.

That might be true, but to establish that state we'd have to kill off the native grazers. People tend to forget that before we had vast herds of domestic cattle in the western plains we had vast herds of bison, antelope, etc.

The vast herds of bison is an interesting example.

I read in some book on pre-Columbian history or other that the prairie that existed in North America when Europeans first showed up was a product of human activity. It seems that folks living in the Great Plains started burning down forests to create more grazing land for bison, in order to have larger bison herds for hunting.

re: antelope, I thought they were browsers and not grazers.

Indeed. Above, I mentioned the sage grouse. Those don't do well in areas where juniper trees have encroached. They like the wide open plains of sage.

https://www.earthfix.info/news/article/juniper-trees-sage-gr...

And juniper trees aren't exactly a 'forest' like most people would think of one.

wow that's some whacky camera mount. For a second there I thought this was the world's steepest desert 0_o

It does have to be useful to the owner of the land who is getting taxed on it and has some investment in the land.

Taxed? The BLM? It's an arm of the federal government. They don't pay taxes.

>Does the Mojave have to be useful to humans to be a valuable thing?

Yes, humans are the only creatures we know of with the concept of valuing land.

Territoriality is coded really deep in evolution. Even animals as simple as the fruit fly get aggressive when another fly takes its space.

They don't value anything other than the space they currently occupy. That's not valuing land so much as valuing immediate space.

There are absolutely no animals in Africa that value any land in South America other than some humans.

Well, I value both the Mojave and the Oregon High Desert as unique places in the world. Not everything needs to have a ROI, usefulness, or our permission to be valuable.

huh? do other creatures not inhabit space?

does a creature need to have a concept of value in order to value things?

He’s clearly taking about economic value.

Yes, iff "value" is to have a meaning distinct from other verbs in the opinion of that creature.

Just inhabiting a space does not mean you value it.

Thank you for this comment. This is one of the things I like on HN, people think profoundly.

I believe so. Other organisms don't really seem to have a concept of value, which would imply they're willing to make trades. Any organism that gathers things seems to hoard at best without any idea what it would trade for what it's hoarding.

I disagree. Here are some other people who disagree too. Some animals trade goods and services.

https://www.quora.com/Do-any-non-human-animals-trade-with-ea...

https://www.seeker.com/parrots-barter-with-nuts-1767294582.h...

These are good links, but please see my reply to beambot for what I'd consider a proper response.

> Other organisms don't really seem to have a concept of value.

To first-order approximations, most living creatures seem to value their lives & habitat.

I believe that doesn't satisfy the definitions of the word value. Per https://www.dictionary.com/browse/value?s=t

1. relative worth, merit, or importance: the value of a college education; the value of a queen in chess.

2. monetary or material worth, as in commerce or trade: This piece of land has greatly increased in value.

3. the worth of something in terms of the amount of other things for which it can be exchanged or in terms of some medium of exchange.

The key words here are "relative", "trade", and "exchange". Just because something is mandatory for an organism's survival or well-being, it does not mean that the organism is able to attribute value to it. For example, an animal would be unable to say what they'd be willing to trade for the grass they eat for survival, nor how much grass they'd be willing to give up to make the trade, and vice versa.

EliRivers shows a few links that present examples where various animals demonstrate ability to attribute value. I'm not sure that it's "value" that they're contemplating when they make their decision though. In the first link, all the examples are 1-for-1 trades, albeit displaced by time. In the second link, the parrots may come close to doing what's described, though I wonder if it's simply a case of the parrot not preferring to eat pecans anymore after having tasted cashews.

I once adopted a street cat and the first thing I fed her was some sausage snack I bought from the convenience store right by where the cat was. She ate the sausage snack voraciously and happily. A few years later after feasting on various types of the best cat food, I went and bought that same sausage snack for nostalgia's sake. My cat would not even touch it. After having a long conversation with my cat about me thinking that she didn't appreciate the early days of our relationship and her thinking that I was being condescending and inappropriate, I threw the sausage snack out and gave her proper cat food, which she promptly ate. I am very sure that the one that was not in her mind was what value the sausage snack had to her. I venture that if I starved her, she'd eat the sausage snack out of desperation, but I don't think that has anything to do with how much she values the sausage snack.

Or maybe the parrot is able to attribute different amounts of value to different nuts, who knows?

Your cat example is perfect. Your cat clearly makes value judgements about food options by rejecting one type in favor of other offerings -- ones that may not even be immediately available. That you cannot speak 'cat' for her to explain why the sausage is not ideal is not her failure...

I'm not quite sure about that. The point is that because she rejects one food in favour of another shows a preference, but it does not necessarily show an understanding of exchangeable value. To say it shows she understands how to attribute value I think is jumping to conclusions. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying let's not jump to conclusions about what's going on in her mind. She could say that she prefers cans of tuna. That doesn't mean she is able to think that one can of tuna is worth 200 sausage snack packs to her.

edit: I suppose we could claim that the cat is making judgements on value, but is unable to actually measure the value they're thinking due to complete lack of mathematical prowess. I guess it's possible in that way for cats to understand value, but not actually use or express it in any way, except for choosing whether to eat what's in front of them, due to lack of cognitive capacity. Perhaps I was guilty of thinking value judgements require mathematical understanding.

How about crows who, without having been trained to do so, collect items that they have no inherent need for and cannot eat - small pieces of metal and such - and then gift them to humans who feed them?

That's a much better example, gotta agree with that. Counterexample accepted.

This was my first response to "animals have no sense of value", that what is valuable to the animal is what helps it to survive and reproduce. The animal may not know that grass helps it survive and reproduce, but the individual whose instincts draw it towards places where there is grass (the individual who "values" grass) will do better than one who does not "value" grass.

Man, people have really jumped on the worst habit of Reddit here lately, downvoting people they disagree with.

Downvoting for disagreement has always been ok on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16574021

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

That's pretty fascinating, because as I understand it, downvoting pushes comments down a page and makes it harder to see, it functions as an added method along with flagging and moderating of enforcing community norms and removing unwanted behavior. I'm surprised that extends to valid but unpopular opinions, as well. Thanks, that's interesting.

>but that's about all you can do with it, and there are better places for 'outdoor activities'

there are better things to eat than shitty meat from cows grazing in a desert. i'll take the outdoor activities and the preservation of these ecosystems

That stretch of highway seems like about 95% of the way to the place where you buried the bodies, or the barrels full of cash and/or guns. Or a good spot to pick up a supernatural hitchhiker of some sort, like your own father, but 5 years before you were conceived.

Also, that Street View vehicle needs to readjust its camera mast to vertical.

If I managed a beef herd out there, I wouldn't expect it to gain much weight out there. I'd actually worry a bit about waking up one morning to find a bunch of cow mummies, still standing up, just about where I left the live cows.

Seems like a good place for solar power plants, though. Or anything that doesn't depend on water, unlike most of human civilization.

Also,

> shitty meat from cows

Ribeyes are delicious

A Twitter thread making a similar point:

https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/102439440363551539...

> much of the land is good for little else besides growing grass

I wonder how much about that could be changed with a large scale permaculture [0] approach?

There must be something useful able to grow there? From there you can maybe bootstrap a long-term ecological change of the region into something with lusher vegetation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture

Not even that hard to do, basically add some swales on contour and some trees along those swales, then graze in between the rows of trees. This guy is doing it in Wisconsin: https://www.acresusa.com/restoration-agriculture