I am reading an interesting book about the American West and water called Cadillac Desert. This week I embarrassed myself in a busy cafeteria by audibly laughing...alone with a book...when I read this passage. Evidently, I thought it was funny, so I thought I might share:
"[The] enormous gush of humanity pouring into a region still marked on some maps as the Great American Desert was encouraged by wishful thinking, by salesmanship, that most American of motivating forces, and, most of all, by natural caprice."
"For a number of years...a long humid cycle brought uninterrupted above-average rainfall to the plains."
"A new school of meteorology was founded to explain it. Its unspoken principle was divine intervention, and its motto was "Rain Follows the Plow." Since the rains coincided with the headlong westward advance of settlement, the two must somehow be related."
"Professor Cyrus Thomas, a noted climatologist, was a leading proponent. 'Since the territory [of Colorado] has begun to be settled' he announced in declamatory tones, 'towns and cities build up, farms cultivated, mines opened, and roads made and travelled, there has been a gradual increase in moisture...I therefore give it as my firm conviction that this increase is of a permanent nature, and not periodical, and that it has commenced within eight years past, and that it is in some way connected to the settlement of the country, and that as population increases the moisture will increase."
"Exact explanations varied. Plowing the land exposed the soil's moisture to the sky. Newly planted trees enhanced rainfall. The smoke from trains caused it. Vibrations in the air created by all the commotion helped clouds to form. Dynamiting the air became a popular means of inducing rain to fall. Even the Secretary of Agriculture came out for a demonstration in Texas. 'The result,' he reported, 'was- a loud noise!"
-Mark Reisner
I actually laughed, not out of derision, but I guess out of a realized human kinship. Ironically, I wonder how many comparable false correlations form a part of western 21st century philosophy.
