• troybot [he/him]@midwest.social
      6·
      15 days ago

      That’s the federal wildfire sanctuary established by president William McKinney. While most fire has been domesticated, the remaining feral fire is allowed to burn free in Utah.

      • kautau@lemmy.world
        0·
        15 days ago

        I heard that even though the fire was born here, it has illegal flameborn parents so they’re going to put it on a cargo ship with a bunch of pallets and deport it and that’s how we’ll solve the wildfire issue. Saw it on Joe rogan

  • litchralee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    15·
    16 days ago

    It’s quite interesting that “rural highways” is one of the categories identified, but not any other sort of improved road. The data source has a base granularity where one square is 250,000 acres (~100,000 hectares), and then additional state data is factored in for increased precision. It supposingly being USDA data, they might primarily care only about those highways used to connect farms to the national markets.

    That said, I would be keenly interested in the land used for low-volume, residential streets that support suburban and rural sprawl, in comparison to streets in urban areas. Unlike highways which provides fast connectivity, and unlike dense urban-core streets that produce value by hosting local businesses and serving local residents, suburban streets take up space, intentional break connectivity (ie cul de sacs), and ultimately return very little in value to anyone except to the adjacent homeowners, essentially as extensions of their privately-owned driveways.

    It may very well be in USDA’s interest to collect data on suburban sprawl, as much of the land taken for such developments was perfectly good, arable land.

  • aphonefriend@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    11·
    15 days ago

    So nice of the 100 largest land owning families to have the same amount of land as the entire urban or rural housing population of the rest of the country. I assume it’s to fatten themselves up for the rest of us just like the cows.

    When do we get to eat them again?

    • Yozul@beehaw.org
      1·
      15 days ago

      What? There are lots of legitimate complaints about the meat and dairy industries, but almost all that land being used for them is arid, rocky wasteland that has a cow wander over it twice a year. That’s not actually even on the list of problems with those industries.

  • TehWorld@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    15 days ago

    I have certainly heard of Weyerhauser, but had no idea they were that big. They’re the only ‘individual’ owner shown. The land-owning families is odd as I’m sure it overlaps a lot with pasture and private timberland.

  • str82L @lemmy.world
    5·
    16 days ago

    Can’t figure out why the 100 largest landowning families aren’t using their land for any of the other reasons. Surely some of them are having it farmed for them too?

    • TehWorld@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      15 days ago

      OIL. There’s a LOT of land that might be considered cow/grazing but won’t really grow anything worth it. See West Texas.

    • Move_to_mars@lemmy.world
      21·
      16 days ago

      Swamps don’t make good farms, but some people try to farm in FL, it’s just inefficient and heavily pollutes or eliminates wetlands

    • kersploosh@sh.itjust.works
      10·
      16 days ago

      I expect a substantial portion of that cow pasture/range land is dry grasslands and shrub steppe out west. It’s rough terrain and not good for much else. A lot of it doesn’t even have cows on it most of the time.