Government always plays the key role in high home prices with restrictions, zoning, protecting “farmland”, charging high prices for building permits, NIMBYs, delays etc. This “shortage” too, what with 2 years of shut down home building due to COVID. Move to Texas, other than Austin, Texas has few restrictions on home building. The only restriction where I live is commute time to downtown Houston which keeps getting longer the more urban sprawl. Lots of available land for development here in Houston exurbia.
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Some restrictions I get like making sure the house is steady. A huge reason housing or rent is so high is because everyone wants to move there. I can move to a house a few hours north in Wyoming for 4x less but the wind is so bad there and it is so cold there. I can go one state to Kansas but farmland is not even close to as pretty as our mountains. Texas is not the most attractive location because of hurricanes and there is little scenery there.
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When I was visiting Ireland, I was told repeatedly by various guides that during the famine, England forbade other countries to sell grain to the Irish in an attempt to subjugate them. There was more to it than just failure of a potato crop. The human heart can be very cruel.
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Most people don’t know that snow never melts in Wyoming. It just blows around until it wears away…
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It was worse than that northwoods. Ireland was producing wheat the entire duration of the famine. It was almost all exported to England. Poor people couldn’t afford to purchase food so they wound up at the poor house which was basically charity handouts.
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Yup people have a hard time driving in snow and freak out in CO. Can’t imagine the freak out sessions the Californians and Floridian transplants have moving to Wyoming
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Chestnut blight in the US? Staple native food for many. Probably not well documented in its impact to natives
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not a famine but, the Romans (I think) had a contraceptive plant that they used. They used it so much they drove it to extinction.
the Romans and the Greeks used it. I was close.
the effect of losing that plant changed history for that entire region, you can see societal changes almost immediately after they no longer had access to it
@Jujube the chestnut blight killed the passenger pigeon, and affected indigenous people’s food source heavily
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Silphium is a classic example of a drastically over-harvested plant. They grazed livestock on the plants because the meat was worth so much in the market.
What you don’t often read is that it is thought to have caused abortions/miscarriages. This was a very valuable trait 2200 years ago.
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Chestnut blight was first detected in the USA in 1904 (but may have been here as early as 1892). Last passenger pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, at ~ age 29. Passenger pigeons and indigenous peoples were mostly ‘out of the picture’ in the eastern US by the time the blight fungus began its rapid march through the eastern deciduous forest.
The claim that the American Chestnut was the predominant tree throughout the entire eastern USA (1 out of every 4 trees, etc.) is a myth. Yes, they predominated in certain mountainous locations, but were not as widely distributed and predominant as we’ve been lead to believe by romanticists.
Did American Chestnut Really Dominate the Eastern Forest? | Arnold Arboretum.
Even more surprising to me was the revelation that in the early colonial period, unregulated logging actually INCREASED the predominance of chestnut in forested lands in the Northeastern US…at least, until the blight fungus arrived.
While I’m throwing out that debunking of ‘commonly accepted knowledge’… here’s another one to consider… https://www.nacdnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/bisoncollapse.pdf
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Thanks for the article re Bison Lucky. I’ve known for a long time that there were not enough hunters to have killed that many animals. That is a pretty good analysis showing that disease was the major culprit.
Bozeman isn’t any better. Used to live there with my husband. My colleagues who are still there said it’s getting to where you have to pony up about $700k to live in Bozeman proper, and outskirts start around $500k. We had moved down to Wyoming for a couple years for his job and are now priced out of going back up to Bozeman. Now we’re in Arkansas where it’s definitely much higher cost of living than it was even 5 years ago. When we left Wyoming, all you saw were west coast license plates. Our house got purchased by some folks from California.
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YES! The part of Arkansas I’m from is lots of forest and farmland. So many trees and it stays green so much of the year. We lived in Casper, and it was like a whole new world.
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Rwanda “smaller and smaller plots of land” due to population growth. Disaster followed.
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Their lack of crop diversity no doubt did them in, which is why I am planting as many different varieties as I can get my hands on. Sweet potatoes are a very good survival crop that thrives even in poor soil.
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I’m wondering why there weren’t community gardens set up for those who didn’t have access to land. No one should starve, seeds are abundant and methods of growing are plenteous as well.
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The Irish people had land though it was limited. They grew potatoes because they produce the most calories for the area where planted. Nothing else that can be grown in Ireland would have fed the people except potatoes. What most don’t realize is that Ireland was exporting food (mostly wheat) the entire duration of the famine. Why? Because the rich English landowners produced the wheat. They weren’t about to give it to the poor Irish people. There is a long story in this that goes back to the English conquest of Ireland. It is worth reading to see just what a bunch of “s****y” people the English can be.
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Are you sure about that? I’m pretty sure that beans grow in Ireland. I’m not trying to be obstinate, but surely the people of that country made a deadly mistake by not planting in a diverse way and by expecting “farmers” to grow most of their food.
If we are to learn from history, we must analyze the situation and figure out what we can do differently. Unless the government purposely starved its people by not allowing them to grow food, some of the issue must have been that people, everyone, should have been growing diverse groups of food, but they weren’t.
We are in the same situation in America. A lot of people around me grow grass and expect the farmers to grow their food. I hope it won’t be a deadly mistake for them.
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The plots were so small, that the potato was the only crop that generated enough calories per acre to sustain a family.
The English kept the best land for grazing and raising their crops while the Irish made do with the marginal ground.
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I won’t pretend to know all about this topic, but my instinct is that their government had more to do with this than is commonly known. Grow food, people.
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