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The 20 Farming Families Who Use More Water From the Colorado River Than Some Western States
(projects.propublica.org)
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this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Farming in the desert is as old as humans writing shit down.
That doesn't mean keep doing it.
Yes but taking so much water from the river that it no longer reaches the fucking ocean is not.
You're right about that; that is an industrial era issue.
That's an appeal to tradition; a logical fallacy.
it's just a statement of fact. it made no argument at all, and is not, in itself, fallacious.
It is a statement that growing crops in a desert is something humans have done since humans developed agriculture.
The alternative is removing a ton of food from the market, spiking inflation.
I'm not invested in this topic argument. I was just interested in highlighting your logical fallacy.
Critical thinking and logic has been on a decline in modern societies, and I believe it's important to point it out so that hopefully people learn to refine their beliefs/illogical thinking tendencies.
I'm sure you can make logical points in an argument advocating for farming in the desert. But that doesn't change the fact that your previous argument explicitly used a logical fallacy and therefore is invalid.
Again, I'm not interested in debating this subject, so you'd be wasting your time trying to convince me of your perspective. I was just trying to help you improve your arguments/promote logical thinking.
For those not OP, it is still good to analyze new ideas against standard practice as a way to refine the argument further.
The argument that "people shouldn't live in deserts" may sound good on the surface, people need water and therefore people should live next to a water source. However, this neglects the fact that rivers still flow through deserts and a lot of cradles of civilization came from deserts, in part due to the coordination required to water crops. It also doesn't address that people no longer need to grow crops to make an area economicly productive. Some industries that don't require water can be more water efficient, and therefore settlement may not strain as much of the limited water resources as possible.
A refinement of the argument to "the water resources of a desert shouldn't be stretched to the point where rivers commonly run dry" is a better argument. It gets further to the issue at hand, using a limited resource isn't a problem until you are using so much of the resource that you can't handle shortages.
This isn't an argument to OP, but for others reading.
So, not that old.