wasteland boogeyman
( permafrost )
A "wasteland" is a waste of land, "empty, desolate" + "unfit for use"1
to imply: That land is unsuitable for a particular set of uses, those uses being the building of sedentary human settlements. The cultivation of wheat is a hallmark of "civilized" lifestyles2 and a backbone of what-became-cities (until recently3, considered a necessary precursor to humans-building-anything).
therefore: Land incapable of supporting a very narrow definition of human use was waste-land. Swamps, steppes, tundra, and of course deserts — these are waste-lands, to be "improved" away from being waste, restructured into something "useful". This is rhetoric long used to devastate landscapes, destroying their ecosystems and the self-sufficiency of the humans and non-humans alike that do, in fact, live there.
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Deserts are routinely propositioned as places for massive solar and wind-power infrastructure, completely disregarding the pastoralist peoples who have grazed their animals there for thousands of years
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sometimes the land is too dry or too wet, too hot or too cold, and does not support many trees, cannot grow wheat or tomatoes or sugar without moderation, care, and caution. Pastoralism, tree-fodder, tree-crops, algae-farming at the coast-rocks. This brown-land belongs in the eco-future, too, and so do those that call it home. The wet-land too, the bog, undrained.
no land is waste-land. It is not a tool being left un-used. It is the substrate of life that can be respected or poisoned but not wasted.
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1 ) Etymonline
2 ) Pyrophytic Futures
3 ) Tolga Ä°ldun, Discovering a new Neolithic world
4 ) eds. Miriam Lang, Mary Ann Manahan, and Breno Bringel, The Geopolitics of Green Colonialism
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