A Theory Shot Full of Holes Springhill, Montana 2012
God speed the plow…. By this wonderful provision, which is only man’s mastery over nature, the clouds are dispensing copious rains … [the plow] is the instrument which separates civilization from savagery; and converts a desert into a farm or garden…. To be more concise, Rain follows the plow. –Charles Dana Wilber This is the punchline to a now much discredited climate-change theory that lead to a good deal of unwarranted optimism in the homesteading of the Great Plains a.k.a. the Great American Desert in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and later to the creation of a great number of decaying monuments to that optimism.]]>