The 100th Meridian divides America.
(Actually it is the 98th Meridian, but 100 is a round number, and in 1878 John Wesley Powell said the 100th was the divide, and that has stuck.)
Here is a map of the night-time sky of the U.S. It shows the people and economic activity happening in a place, so it combines population and industrial activity.
Pioneers trekked their way 2,000 miles from Independence, Missouri to bypass all that semi-arid land to get to Oregon's Willamette Valley. Western Oregon and Washington have rainfall from moisture from the Pacific dropped into the valleys west of the Cascades.
The relationship between rainfall and population density made intuitive sense back when the primary occupation of Americans was agriculture, but the maps show the pattern persists. The bright spots of population density in the West are places with water, either from rainfall in the Northwest or from irrigation projects, primarily from the Colorado River and from water moved from Northern California into the California Central Valley.
People live where there is water.
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10 comments:
In one area, your “people live where there’s water” theory breaks down. The population density over the Oglala Aquifer is very low, but there is almost infinite water available. I wonder if that’s because it’s mostly large farms, which have few people per square mile living on them.
I am surprised there's not more industry in this water rich area.
People also live where there is no water. For example, the current metro area population of Las Vegas is close to three million.
The East often gets more water than they know what to do with. You'd think we could figure out a way to pipe it where it's needed. We pipe oil and gas all over the place. At least water isn't toxic.
For about 10 years I had a large Alaska map in my office and had inmates put their initials on where they called home. It became very striking that Alaskan residents live by water. It was all around the coast lines or along major rivers. The interior of Alaska has a very low population except when a major river runs through it. Survival depended on fish and hunting. Rivers allowed easier access. Alaska lives in Anchorage, Juneau, Seward, Nome, Barrow- all on the coast. Fairbanks is in the interior,but has a major river.
Dave, I think people in mountainous areas live by rivers because there are often relatively flat floodplains adjacent to them. Easy to build shelters and especially easy to build roads and railroads.
Mike Steely, ironically, Denver (and others?) have been piping Colorado River water eastward, UNDER the Rockies, in order to keep overpopulating themselves.
If I were more interested in supplying dried out areas than concerned about overpopulation, I’d be working to take water from right near the mouths of some Oregon rivers, right before it mixes with saltwater, and sending it south to supply the socal water pigs.
The Oglala Aquifer is drying up.
As I'd the Aquifer under The Columbia Plateau, because if unregulated pumping and ever deeper wells, just like the Oglala.
Not so fast (chuckle), DW! Some locations show it getting better, I wrote a thesis on the Oglala in 1966. The data showed it going dry below the Texas Caprock country in 50 years, on average. My geology prof will probably change my grade from A to F!
Some years ago a Congressperson I believe from SoCal floated the half baked idea of selling Columbia River water to SoCal before "it went to waste" in the Ocean. Even decades ago they were absolutely clueless as to how the Earth works, and the symbiotic relation ship between hairless apes and the Mother.
Hey, Ed, I’m half baked, too. I’d suggest that, since most sizable rivers flowing into the pacific could put unwanted water (floodwaters, and excess irrigation water from dams), it isn’t so terrible to use it before it mixes with saltwater. Most these rivers are discharging water that wouldn’t be there had it not been stored in dammed reservoirs during winter flows.
And Mother and I have seen eye to eye since 1968, when I became an environmentalist, possibly before you were born.
And Ed, my inner capitalist dog says that sending water south from Oregon could have two benefits to us. First, californicators could stay in (now adequately watered) California, where most oregonicators want them, and also, we could charge them big bucks, provably enough to eliminate all our school taxes.
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