Flowers + Christmas Trees = Maple Syrup
July 31, 2018 8:19 AM   Subscribe

Here's How America Uses Its Land, a graphic presentation by Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby.
posted by Etrigan (33 comments total) 41 users marked this as a favorite
 
Wow this is interesting. I really wish they'd put cemeteries in there!
posted by Hypatia at 8:25 AM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


This is some damn fine dataviz.
posted by DigDoug at 8:25 AM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


Very cool! But ended on a doozy: "since 2008 the amount of land owned by the 100 largest private landowners has grown from 28 million acres to 40 million, an area larger than the state of Florida."
posted by Grither at 8:45 AM on July 31, 2018 [16 favorites]


ended on a doozy

Tiny compared to financial assets.
posted by pompomtom at 9:03 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Really interesting data visualization, but hamstrung by the awful "scroll to change nonmoving elements" user interface. On my computer I couldn't see most of Texas or any of the Gulf Coast or Florida because it was off the bottom of my screen, and the scroll mechanic I would use to look at them had been coopted to advance through a series of nonmoving maps. I wish web developers and data visualization people would just stick with the time-tested standard user interfaces provided natively by the web browser, rather than trying to get cute and roll their own. It's always confusing and often broken.

That gripe aside, I really liked the use of the map rearrangements to show relative sizes of things. It was a great way to get a sense of comparisons from one graphic to the next. The amount of urban land area was actually a bit larger than I expected.
posted by biogeo at 9:03 AM on July 31, 2018 [15 favorites]


My interfaced worked fine, in fact, I was coming in to say how much I liked it.

The data isn't really that surprising if you've driven through much of the United States, there's an astounding amount of farmland, pastures and crops, one winds their way through on highway and interstate. I wish we'd been given the Ted Turner infographic, tho'.
posted by Atreides at 9:06 AM on July 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


I'm assuming this is using land use data from 1958.
Because this map of the United States is also from 1958.
posted by foldedfish at 9:14 AM on July 31, 2018 [6 favorites]


Born in the NE, I had never heard of Weyerhaeuser until I saw that map.
Really eye-opening, too: 127.4 million acres for livestock feed alone.
posted by alrightokay at 9:19 AM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


Just think what you could do instead of parking all those cows!
posted by dowcrag at 9:24 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


foldedfish, it states in the opening:
The 48 contiguous states alone are a 1.9 billion-acre jigsaw puzzle of cities, farms, forests and pastures that Americans use to feed themselves, power their economy and extract value for business and pleasure.
posted by DigDoug at 9:28 AM on July 31, 2018 [8 favorites]


The UK one. (Document) We're 29% pasture used 'often by cows'.
posted by dowcrag at 9:29 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Born in the NE, I had never heard of Weyerhaeuser until I saw that map.

I grew up near what was a Weyerhaeuser pulp mill (they sold off those business and officially converted into a real estate investment trust, apparently). 95% of the time it was fine, but occasionally when the wind was right, the town smelled awful.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:00 AM on July 31, 2018


An interesting accompaniment to this is top 100 landowners in the US. That's attributed to individuals, not REITs, so it's a different list. That site has a lot of details on each individual owner too.

I was surprised to see Jeff Bezos up there at #28 with 400,000 acres. Turns out he owns a whole lot of West Texas ranch land, in part for his Blue Origin spaceport.
posted by Nelson at 10:08 AM on July 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


38.1 mil acres of ethanol, biodiesel. 1/3 of our corn goes to ethanol, apparently. Unless things have changed since I last read about ethanol, it doesn't actually reduce the use of fossil fuels at all. Think if that land was in prairie or other conservation!
posted by Emmy Rae at 10:20 AM on July 31, 2018


For any geo-enthusiasts, you can get this data in a more granular form here.
posted by Sreiny at 10:39 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Unless things have changed since I last read about ethanol, it doesn't actually reduce the use of fossil fuels at all.

It's best, of course, to reduce our usage of fuels altogether. However, biofuels at least have the benefit of not extracting carbon from beneath the earth.
posted by explosion at 10:44 AM on July 31, 2018


The USDA categorizes national parks, wildlife areas, highways, railroads and military bases as special-use areas. And another USDA land classification—miscellaneous—includes cemeteries, golf courses, marshes, deserts and other areas of “low economic value.”

This is fascinating. I never would have imagined that "national parks and railroads and military bases" would be under a single subclass and "cemeteries and golf courses and deserts" would be under another.
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:05 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Woah - near the bottom, there's a bit showing that we lose twice as much timberland to wildfires as we do to clearcutting every year.
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:11 AM on July 31, 2018 [5 favorites]


we need to dedicate more land usage to maple syrup, how else can we close the syrup gap with canada
posted by poffin boffin at 11:14 AM on July 31, 2018 [13 favorites]


what if our strategic syrup reserves were compromised
posted by poffin boffin at 11:15 AM on July 31, 2018 [7 favorites]


Quick bit of googling indicates that alaska has about 120 M acres of forest (mostly boreal), so including it would skew that number to be pretty much equal to that of pastureland.

I wonder how they calculate mining and mineral resources? An awful lot of land seems to for petro-production these days
posted by OHenryPacey at 11:19 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


I was surprised to see how much timber is in the east. As a urban-dweller, I forget about all the national forests here.

I was also surprised to see how little goes to tobacco. That's encouraging. It used to be huge in the southeast. In my part of North Carolina, I only see four crops: tobacco, corn, soybeans and occasionally cotton. Oh, and Christmas trees.
posted by corvikate at 11:22 AM on July 31, 2018


It makes me angry that enough of the country is dedicated to golf courses that it makes its own category. 2 million acres of resource-intensive land for the mostly exclusive use of the few who own an area the size of Florida to boot.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 11:23 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


DigDoug, then the headline shouldn't be "Here's How America Uses Its Land". It should be "Here's How the 48 Contiguous States Use Their Land".

This isn't a map of how "America" uses its land any more than it would be if the map included Alaska and Hawaii, but excluded California and Missouri.
posted by foldedfish at 11:26 AM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


However, biofuels at least have the benefit of not extracting carbon from beneath the earth.

I think the problem is biofuels are more energy-intensive to process than fossil fuels, and that extra energy generally comes from fossil fuels. Biofuels would be great if we could get from corn to ethanol without burning petroleum to get there.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 11:28 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


I wish there were higher resolution available!

I'm in an area that has a lot of former mill towns. So we've got relatively small, dense urban cores surrounded by (1) suburban housing on former farmland and (2) farms, which gradually transitions into (3) more farms, and (4) former farms that have reverted to woodlands. Apparently, there's enough woods around to tilt the whole area to "forest".
posted by damayanti at 12:03 PM on July 31, 2018


biofuels are more energy-intensive to process than fossil fuels

Yeah, for U.S. ethanol it's a matter of adding up a large benefit and a large cost, and whether the balance comes out positive or negative in terms of energy, or CO2 emissions, or whatever you're trying to measure used to depend on complicated decisions about where to draw the line as to what gets included. For instance, did you remember to count the energy used by the bus that took people to work at the chemical plant where the fertilizer that helped grow the corn was made?

It's gotten more efficient than it used to be, so I'm guessing it probably does come out to be some kind of beneficial these days, in terms of energy. Lets be optimistic and say the ethanol saves 20% of the gasoline it replaces (I'm not sure if biodiesel is statistically significant). It's blended into gasoline at 10% by volume, replacing about 7% of the energy. So that's a one-time reduction of 1.4% in the gasoline-equivalent consumed, in a country where the amount used typically grows by that much every year or two (it's up 5% from the post-financial-crisis low). And all it costs is some huge percentage of every year's grain crops.

It's incredibly inefficient, but that has some advantages. Lots of slack in the system for when food becomes scarce.
posted by sfenders at 12:04 PM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Biofuels would be great if we could get from corn to ethanol without burning petroleum to get there.

Not only that, tilling the soil releases carbon. Every time a field is tilled to plant corn we're sending carbon into the atmosphere. It would be very complicated to calculate but I find it unlikely that ethanol is positive from an environmental perspective.
posted by Emmy Rae at 12:45 PM on July 31, 2018


Bezos also owns the 5 acre Lake Washington estate, previously owned by the patriarch of the Weyerhaeuser fortune.
posted by humboldt32 at 1:28 PM on July 31, 2018


I was surprised to see how much timber is in the east

it looks like the majority is right along where the Appalachian runs, and spreads out from there. there's a great many beautiful hikes to be had in those forests and the mountains.
posted by numaner at 2:34 PM on July 31, 2018


I was surprised to see how much timber is in the east

I always find it easier to fall for the dystopian fantasy that we've deforested the planet down to the pavement when I haven't flown for a while. From the air, even appallingly built-up areas turn out to be astonishingly green.
posted by sonascope at 3:04 PM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


The problem I have is that it makes sense to exclude Alaska only if it didn't really include any categories that are significant in the other 48. But forest in general and divided into a few subcategories makes a large and important part of the mapped distribution. And Alaska's forests would nearly double that. It's also not economically insignificant in that regard. (Hawaii isn't unimportant in this, but Alaska is by far the bigger problem.)

At the very least, they could have included a separate map of Alaska divied up into the biggest categories and placed it side-by-side with the other, providing a sense of scale before they go on to the analysis excluding Alaska and Hawaii.

This is all assuming that all of the data they used for the 48 was sanitized of Alaska/Hawaii, of which I'd have liked to see an explicit assurance. As it is, their wording is consistently "the US" which doesn't inspire confidence.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:22 PM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


The 48 contiguous states alone…

…cropland would take up more than a fifth of the 48 contiguous states.

…urban areas make up just 3.6 percent of the total size of the 48 contiguous states…

I thought they were at least fairly clear about it.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:38 PM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


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