"That was true in 1936, when she wrote 'The Geographical History of America,' and it remains so today. The numbers are startling, and not only if you live someplace like the Upper East Side of Manhattan, with your hundred thousand neighbors per square mile. Add up all the developed areas in the fifty states—the cities and suburbs and exurbs and towns, the highways and railways and back roads, the orchards and vineyards and family farms, the concentrated animal feedlots, the cornfields and wheat fields and soybeans and sorghum—and it will amount to a fifth of our nation. What is all the rest? Forests, wetlands, rangeland, tundra, glaciers, barrens, bodies of water of one kind or another. If you don a blindfold, throw a dart at a map of the country, and commit to living where it lands, you will most likely end up alone, in the middle of nowhere...."
Writes Kathryn Schulz in "What Going Off the Grid Really Looks Like/In 'Cheap Land Colorado,' Ted Conover hunkers down in a valley that has become a magnet for dreamers and the dispossessed alike" (The New Yorker).
"That was true in 1936... and it remains so today" — In 1936, Alaska wasn't a state. But the population was 39% of what it is today. The addition of all that Alaskan land would offset the population increase, so that even after the clustered populace sprawls outward from the cities, I would expect the empty places to continue to dominate. Stein's sentence is sublime, even as it understates the emptiness. Only 1/5 of the land is populated.
Anyway... I just quoted the beginning of the article. There's much more at the link! And you can buy the book — "Cheap Land Colorado/Off-Gridders at American's Edge" — here.
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47 comments:
This is why we value gas-powered cars and air travel.
We’ll soon fill up all that emptiness with solar panels and windmills!
It really is a big empty country.
I was surprised when I read that something like a third of the land in the US is owned by the federal government. I've also heard the settling of the plains states described as a failure--that there were more Indians living there 250 years ago than there are people living there today. (I haven't checked that stat and I'm sure it's based on estimates, but the point holds--even many areas that we think we've spread out to remain largely empty.)
Well, the San Luis Valley is not really the middle of nowhere. Lots of tourists moving through around the Great Sand Dunes. Getting there, especially from the East is a great drive. Recommended to Althouse, if she hasn't been to that part of CO.
Owen said...We’ll soon fill up all that emptiness with solar panels and windmills!
Don't give them any ideas! Many species and natural wonders that survived our earlier rapacious expansion are doomed to be wiped out by the environmentalists.
And thank God for that.
Interesting piece of obscure history most people may not be aware of regarding real estate. Most people would be familiar with the Indo-Europeans, but a lot of people may not be familiar with how they pretty much took over the world.
See, all human ancestors share a common pre-historic Neolithic behavior of cannibalism and probably human sacrifice, including Indo-Europeans. But the IEs invented a unique adaption prior to their migration from the central-asian highlands, and which may have even been the impetus for those migrations into new lands (and which carries over culturally in our voracious exploratory behavior to this day). We only know of this innovation by the Roman and pre-roman conception of it, the ver sacrum, or "sacred spring"...an IE holdover from the European aboriginal times involving the mass sacrifice of everything born, plant or animal, in the following year's spring during times of great crisis.
See, ancient people sacrificed humans...a lot of humans to the gods in exchange for favorable outcomes. But the concept of the Ver Sacrum (practiced much earlier by IEs than the term ever existed) morphed from sacrificing humans to sending the 'child sacrifices' out of the community to found new lands. To our ancestors (if you're IE descended) this was practically a death sentence. Usually this would involve an animal guide or totem (in Rome's case, an eagle, as Romulus and Remus were probably such a sacrifice, and for which legions had animal totems...something that follows us to the present day) that would lead the boys and girls out of the community to a place the gods had willed for them to start a new life.
Long story short, while most of the rest of the world was killing their kids (like Phoenicians) or staying put (like Egypt and the far east), Indo-europeans sent colonies of sacrificial youngsters as far south as the Ganges, as far north as Scandinavia, and as far west as Spain and north Africa (and later the Americas...) to found new lands. And we like our land, and our wide open spaces, in many ways it is a legacy and an inheritance to future descendants, whether they settle in Florida, Yellowstone national park, the middle of Alaska, or someday mars, the sacred spring will continue...
It's always funny to speak with Europeans visiting the US for the first time. They have absolutely no clue how big this country is.
My neighbor and a buddy would trailer his horses every year to some desolate place in CO and ride around for 3-4 weeks. He finally purchased a chunk of land and built a shack. No amenities. Hauled water, outhouse. Left one horse with a caretaker. Caretaker disappeared, along with the horse.
I have heard European acquaintances comment on America: It's so empty! Driving such distances without coming across a town or village is unimaginable.
Owen said "We’ll soon fill up all that emptiness with solar panels and windmills!". And we still won't have enough reliable and affordable electricity.
Flying a long distance across the US on a clear day will demonstrate to anyone
that while vast tracts of land are unpopulated, most of those tracts are also touched by the hands of humans. From mile-wide circles of irrigated crops to patchwork patterns of sparsely populated properties, there are few areas without set boundaries and marks of human impact.
One need not live where one grows crops or pastures livestock or mines the earth. Visiting for work leaves a visible record.
This main point is painfully obvious to anyone who’s ever looked out of a plane at 20,000 feet or so. Now the nitty gritty, the “what is life like” way off the grid part, is easily summed up as “it’s fucking HARD,” that’s what life without conveniences is, hard.
I knew as soon as I saw "not only if you live someplace like the Upper East Side of Manhattan" that this was a New Yorker article. They assume everybody lives there. Or else on the Upper West Side.
Stein's sentence is sublime, even as it understates the emptiness. Only 1/5 of the land is populated.
How to define "populated" statistically? And does it really feel that way? If you live east of the Mississippi, or east of the Appalachians, it feels like the country is full enough already.
We have National Parks that are bigger than most European countries. We have multiple states that are bigger than any European country.
Was it PJ O'Rourke that quipped about pissing off a back porch in one Eurocountry and the stream landing in another?
John Henry
I live in the Northern Virginia suburbs of DC, at the south end of the East Coast megalopolis. If you drive south from here, it's astounding how quickly Virginia turns into empty space.
Idea. Put Biden’s illegal alien invaders in some empty part of the US as long as it isn’t Nebraska.
BTW, Cherry County is bigger than the state of Connecticut.
who-knew @ 8:54: “…enough reliable and affordable electricity.”
That’s the whole point. Put all our chips on an inherently low-intensity intermittent form of electrical generation, which must destabilize the grid and drive costs up and up even as it drives reliability down and down.
But it’s worth it to keep the planet from boiling away, which it will surely do in only another decade, I mean fifty years, I mean several centuries…trust me on this. And send money!
It's a big country. Big enough when you have a non-stop window-seat from JFK to SFO. Bigger yet when you hop on I-90 for a coast to coast drive through the national parks. Biggest when you stick to two-lane-highways and get to know the people who live and work here.
Owen, a friend of mine in Indiana just sold lots of acres of family inherited farmland to a solar company. I asked him if people had to eat and they certainly can't eat solar panels. He says the land sold for way more for solar than it ever would for food production. Our future.
My wife and I took a tour of Ireland this spring. A wonderful experience. But after three days I developed (mild) claustrophobia whenever we entered a town / city. Everything was jammed together, cheek-by-jowl.
Reading the book now. Highly recommend it.
Actually the American frontier is larger these days than it was in 1890. Frontier is a government definition from the 1880s or so. A frontier county is one that has less than 100 people per square mile. And using that definition, there were more frontier counties in 2010 than there were in 1890. Probably still true today. Much of that hollowing out occurred west of the 100th meridian (and west of enough rainfall to make a go of it farming).
And yes my European friends are amazed by the distances we drive to get anywhere. You can see it graphically out the window of a transcontinental flight from the East Coast to Los Angeles. Once you get across the Mississippi River most of the ground below is dark at night with just a few isolated patches of light--other than when you pass over Las Vegas or Phoenix.
I always tell my East Coast friends the truth. The last of California's emptiness exists only in Hollywood. The rest is all filled up. Esp the deserts and mtns near the Nevada border. Don't waste your gas, airline miles or time moving out here. Check out Arizona.
Mr Wibble said...It's always funny to speak with Europeans visiting the US for the first time. They have absolutely no clue how big this country is.
I have a friend who moved here from Israel and his idea of a vacation is to rent an RV and just drive. Even after years here, he's still wowed by the ability to just drive all day and no borders, hours between cities, same language, basically same culture. It just keeps going.
It would be nice if in the coming depression we used some of the abandoned real estate for solar energy rather than wasting farmland on solar panels.
I've heard it said that Americans think 100 years is a long time and Europeans think 100 miles (~160 kilometers) is a long distance. I say this to both Europeans and Americans, if you have not traveled out West, you have not seen America. There are major cities and vast, open spaces. I lived in Colorado for 27 years and traveled as much as I could throughout the West. There are still plenty of places I didn't have time to see.
There are counties in Colorado with less than 1000 people and a population density of around 1 person per square mile. Some of those counties are very mountainous and others are near desert conditions. Your nearest neighbor may be miles away. You have to want to live there. You also have to find water, or you will not survive.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/states/colorado/counties
About 36% of all the land in Colorado is owned by the federal government. That percentage is almost 61% in Alaska and 80% in Nevada. Even if you want to go offline and be on your own, you might have difficulty finding land to buy.
https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state
Ten years ago, I met a German tourist at Yellowstone who was doing it right. He had rented a small RV and spent a month traveling across America. He still didn't have time to see everything (that would take a lifetime), but he learned far more about the US than those people who just go to a major city like NYC or LA.
“I was surprised when I read that something like a third of the land in the US is owned by the federal government. I've also heard the settling of the plains states described as a failure--that there were more Indians living there 250 years ago than there are people living there today. (I haven't checked that stat and I'm sure it's based on estimates, but the point holds--even many areas that we think we've spread out to remain largely empty.)”
Not even close. East coast tribes had some population, but the Indians in the Plains and Rockies were extraordinarily sparsely settled. Average tribe size before 1800 was maybe 4K, and with a dozen or two tribes, that roughly translates to 50k-100k. The critical thing to remember is that they were for the most part highly nomadic hunters and gatherers. Then, they got horses and guns, and the first tribes that got them were able to build up their numbers quickly by being able to follow their prey (notably Bison) instead of waiting for them to come to them, once or twice a year. There was a lot of tribal migration at that point, where bigger, stronger, tribes pushed out smaller, weaker, tribes, who did the same for even weaker tribes. We had a Canadian fur trading fort near town in MT between maybe 1810 and 1830, thanks, in part to friendly relations with the Salish tribe living there. The fort had to close when the Salish were pushed west by the more numerous and warlike Blackfoot, who had effectively been pushed over the mountains by by the Sioux, whose population had, essentially, exploded, after they could follow bison herds on horseback. Even the mighty Sioux (and their west central plains allies) were conquered after being pursued by multiple Army contingents larger than their entire tribe.
But, yes, it is phenomenally sparsely populated through much of the west, in particular. You get out of the big cities, and it is pockets of farmland surrounded by federal land. East of the Rockies is mostly farmland, all the way to the Mississippi. Traditionally, that meant 1/4 or 1/2 sections of homesteaded farm land, which translates into 2-4 farms per square mile. The county that we legally reside in, in NW MT, is roughly 3k sq miles, with a population of less than 15k, for a density of 4.4 people per sq mile. That translates into maybe two houses per square mile. It’s actually higher, because much of the western half is federally owned (mostly USFS), and the eastern half has a Bison Reserve and part of an Indian Reservation.
There's a reason why land is "empty" in places. No water, no minerals, no way to earn a living. Rest assured that the 26 million illegals in this country will head for cities and welfare as soon as they get away from the border. Especially this Biden era group. Mexicans were hard workers.
Tom T. said...
"I live in the Northern Virginia suburbs of DC, at the south end of the East Coast megalopolis. If you drive south from here, it's astounding how quickly Virginia turns into empty space."
And when you add to that the space between a Democrats ears it nearly doubles in size.
I once read we could put 500 years of all the US garbage in a square mile plot 500 feet deep. I could be wrong on how deep they wrote.
DC would be a great place to start. Or Chicago, center of the country and all.
Water, cool, cool water. That's the dividing line. The video linked below discusses this line running from Winnipeg to San Antonio with most of the population living to the east of the line. And if you cut off the West coast, more people live in the NYC metropolitan area than from the Coastal Range to the line
Then you add in the many maps showing the sparse isolated metro areas were half the population lives compared to the massive ocean of continent that the rest find restful lives in.
I was watching a Nebraska farmer (LEAAD Farm) as he worked on his irrigation in the evening. Where he opined as he gazed over miles of corn and soybean, how he loved it out there, just him and the food.
https://youtu.be/6u3KZSgPf7w
Even in densely populated New England, all you have to do is get up in a plane to see that it's mostly forested.
A frontier county is one that has less than 100 people per square mile. I checked an almanac for the population density of the western Kansas county where my parent's retired. Reported in inhabitants per square mile. Sorted in order, the big numbers at the top of the list, going down... about 1/4 of the way from the bottom of the list the numbers started getting bigger again. With an asterisk...
The number for my parents' county was so asterisk'd.
Turns out that at some point, so save reformatting, the stat was inverted to square miles per person.
Had my parents owned their "fair share" of the county they'd have had about sixteen square miles shared between them.
My great-grandfather purchased 160 acres in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma. It's 3 1/2 miles outside of Okemah. There are two houses, with around 6-7 people living in them.
The neighbor to the north, who owns 80 acres and a house, uses part of the family property for grazing their cattle. That's pretty much all the farming taking place right now.
If the nation went into civil war mode, and Oklahoma were to secede along with Texas, my family would have a place to gather. It's not easy living there, but you can grow chickens, horses, goats, and cows.
Sort of a microcosm of this whole idea of "wide open land". Hardly anyone lives out in the Oklahoma farmland area. The nearest "big town" is only 25K people.
Blogger Michael K said...
“There's a reason why land is "empty" in places. No water, no minerals, no way to earn a living. Rest assured that the 26 million illegals in this country will head for cities and welfare as soon as they get away from the border. Especially this Biden era group. Mexicans were hard workers.”
Mexicans still are, or at least 1st and 2nd generation here. After they become sufficiently Americanized, maybe not so much. That’s one of the advantages of living this part of the year in AZ. They all have side gigs, and that translates into great prices for semiskilled labor.
But what you skip over is that there are a lot of minerals, coal, gas, and forests, that were being exploited until maybe a generation ago. We used to have a couple coal trains running through town in NW MT (the other half the year from when we live in AZ). They disappeared about the time that FJB was installed as President. And the town used to have 3-4 lumber mills. They mostly disappeared under Clinton. One is left in town, and another 25 miles east of there. Instead of the trees being selectively harvested, the forests just burn down now. We’ve had two big fires north of town over the last 5-6 years. And most of those good lumber jobs are now gone, as well as many of the mining jobs east around places like Butte.
Size matters, and yes, Europeans generally have no concept of the enormity of this place. When my wife and I Eurailed around in '78, one of our compartment mates talked about his teenage daughter's plan to ride the US rails in similar fashion.
I admit that I've never traveled any distance by train in my own country, but we recommended against that, or at least cautioned them to get serious about how big the place is and how limited and limiting our rail system was.
On our recent trip to KC and back, both the settled and the empty spaces were worth noting. One thing that struck me was how every little 'edge city' convenience store/truck stop offered an array of world cuisines hot or cold, and you can take a fine imported wine or beer with you to the faux chateau or trailer home, as it might be.
Way out in uninhabited California is the town of Ridgecrest, which supports China Lake Naval Air Station. It's where the Navy tests missiles and such. I was staying a motel. A van pulled in full of 20-year old Danish girls. No, they weren't the Bikini Team. I talked to one. They had breakfasted in Salt Lake City, and the only two towns along the route were Wendover, UT and Ely, NV. Over ten hours on the road and the last 400 miles were uninhabited.
They were impressed.
“Affectations can be dangerous.”
Google Earth is interesting. You can get right down to street view. The similarity between towns in the flatter sections of Ohio--west of the Alleghenies--and farm towns in North Dakota and Iowa and Kansas and...... Got the school. Got the library--maybe 90% of the time. Lots of small colleges you never heard of. Health center or hospital. Churches. And grain to the horizon.
All this talk makes me want Greenland even more.
We used to have a couple coal trains running through town in NW MT (the other half the year from when we live in AZ). They disappeared about the time that FJB was installed as President. And the town used to have 3-4 lumber mills. They mostly disappeared under Clinton. One is left in town, and another 25 miles east of there. Instead of the trees being selectively harvested, the forests just burn down now. We’ve had two big fires north of town over the last 5-6 years. And most of those good lumber jobs are now gone, as well as many of the mining jobs east around places like Butte.
This is absolutely correct and we all know who is responsible. I remember Clinton, in one of his last acts as president, declaring as a national monument an area of Utah full of coal. Of course some Indonesian coal czar was a big donor to the Clinton Crime Family.
California has destroyed its timber industry as it prefers to see the timber burn rather than be harvested for lumber.
Only 1/5 of the land is populated... by human life. Also, a compelling interest to mitigate Green deals to flatline and the [catastrophic] anthropogenic sardine effect favored by the elite in a forward-looking pass through social model.
All 8 billion of us could live in Texas with a population density that would fall between that of Queens and that of Brooklyn.
Plenty of space.
Gordon Scott @ 3:48
I thumbed that route (80) one summer on my way to the Tetons. That's the kind of van you dream about pulling over.
"That winter we went to Spain to see Manolete fight. And he looked to me 18, and Gertrude Stein said no he was 19, but that he only looked 18, and I said sometimes a boy of 18 will look 19, and other times, a 19-year-old can easily look 18, and that’s the way it is with a true Spaniard. And we laughed over that, and Gertrude Stein punched me in the mouth.” - Woody Allen from his only stand-up album.
I always tell my East Coast friends the truth. The last of California's emptiness exists only in Hollywood. The rest is all filled up. Esp the deserts and mtns near the Nevada border. Don't waste your gas, airline miles or time moving out here. Check out Arizona.
But that isn't true. California's a huge state — larger than Germany, bigger than Montana. Plus, the large bulk of the (40 million or so) people of California live in one of three metropolitan areas: Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco (San Jose/Sacramento). Much of the rest of the state, in many areas, has low density, or is even nearly empty.
Now, many of those relatively unpopulated areas — particularly in the (unirrigated) Central Valley and (especially) eastern part of the state — are in essence desert, but that's only part of California. And it's true that folks have flocked to the Sierras (mountain range in central-eastern Calif.), and especially the Lake Tahoe area, for their vacation homes. Why? Because it's become stylish and a fad! Even the “high desert” above and outside L.A. is now popular to live in.
But there's lots elsewhere in the state — in the west and north, for instance (San Francisco isn't really “north”) — that have never been “faddish” places to live, and beyond that are far from being desert. In Siskiyou County where I live, for example — located in farthest-north California, just south of the Oregon border, straddling I-5 — precipitation across (e.g.) the county's sizable Klamath National Forest rises as high in places as 115 inches (9.5 feet) of rain and snow [rain equivalent] annually.
Siskiyou County's (land) area is 6,278 square miles (16,426 sq. km), making it the 5th largest county in the state, area-wise. In Siskiyou County, according to the 2020 census, 44,076 people reside.
Let's compare the situation of Siskiyou County versus other similar-sized world exemplars one might choose to look at such as 1) the State of Israel, 2) the “country” of Wales (part of the U.K.), and 3) closer to home, the U.S. state of New Jersey. More particularly, while Israel, Wales, and New Jersey are all similar sized area-wise, Siskiyou County taken alone encompasses “only” about 75% of the foregoing trio's areas. Making Siskiyou actually closer in size to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad [Oblast] — the former [pre-WWII German] East Prussia — positioned ominously like a gigantic aircraft carrier just north of Poland.
On the other hand, if Siskiyou is considered in combination with the two (much smaller and even less populous) California counties to Siskiyou's immediate east and west: Del Norte and Modoc — in conjunction with Siskiyou, these counties stretch across the far north of the state from Pacific Ocean to Nevada state frontier — then their combined area is about a third-again greater than the foregoing (separately regarded) trio of Israel, Wales, and New Jersey.
Anyway, as noted before Siskiyou County incorporates a population of 44,076. Israel, contrariwise (discounting Gaza and the West Bank), hosts 8.91 million residents [2022 est.] — even though much of the south of that country [the Negev] is nearly empty! Wales, too — regarded by the U.K. as a backwater, largely empty though scenic mountainous district — nevertheless incorporates a population [2022 est.] of 3.27 million. Finally, the American state of New Jersey's resident population [2020 census] is 9.29 million.
These figures (in concert with their land areas) mean that 1) Israel hosts a population density of 1,074.08 people per square mile; 2) Wales' density is a “mere” 407.28 persons per sq. mi; while 3) New Jersey's density is an astonishing 1,263.08 people per sq. mi.!
Compare that with Siskiyou County, whose population makes for a population density of (wait for it…) 7.02 people per square mile. A “frontier county” indeed!
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