I am not one to do much breast-beating about environmental change or even environmental destruction. The human species is clearly a species that uses up its habitats, recklessly and greedily, just as big agriculture is now using up this desert and the finite waters that can make it flower. What feels wrong about it as one crosses from El Centro to Yuma is the scale. The tribal peoples of the desert, the Piman peoples, have always found ways to water the desert, else they couldn’t have survived in it. As desert agriculturalists they worked with great skill, but on a modest, intimate scale,
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