Owens Valley Tragedy :: Environmental California Essays

Earths Seemingly Irreparable LandscapeTime and age again it has been seen that human interaction with his/her environment and its ecosystems has shown to be progressively arrogant and self-serving. These endless accounts ar proven by the amount of outstanding biological diversity that is being lost to the surrounding environment imputable to these threats of human development and population growth. There argon two forms of these losses of diversity by human hand direct and indirect. Direct losses would be the destruction of an scope needed for human requirements be it sociable or economical. Examples of these losses would be housing, kitchen-gardening, and others. Indirect losses would be those caused by the destruction of an area also needed for the same requirements but the areas commodities which are valued, water, food, land in general, is needed elsewhere. These losses are few in number compared with those of direct losses yet they are of the greatest importance. They ar e important because they involve the removal of resources of an area in which other inhabitants are dependent upon. A great example of this too bad indirect expansion is the loss of the rich habitat of the area know as Owens Valley. Owens Valley HistoryOwens Valley lies to the east of the Sierra Nevada potbelly and west of the White-Inyo mountain ranges, just to the west of the U.S.s Great Basin. premature settlers to this area, as all other immediate surrounding areas originally, were Indians, atomic number 53 of the Paiute tribes. This tribe lived by a simple and direct policy in terms of living with the environment. Their food supply was derived from seasonal crops of rattling(a) seeds and roots, fishing, and hunting of the deer, antelope, mountain sheep, jackrabbit, and waterfowl which flourished along the valley floor and hillsides. They took exactly what they required for food and trade. Unfortunately, pioneer expansion soon took precedence with the legal age of them b eing miners who migrated to the region from the east following the Western mines (Sauder, 1994). With this colonization came verdant expansion as well, which included cattle production and various country crops. Of course, confrontation, the beginning of a lifetime of fight over Owens Valley, was spurred with the Paiutes over self-control of this rich valley abundant in usable resources. Due to the Paiutes simple and peaceful attitude, the early pioneers took over the valley and every one of its resources, placing the Paiutes out in the cold, where they continued urbanization and agriculture of the landscape.