The other day a friend who works for a regional environmental group asked me if I had been doing any environmental restoration projects recently. I replied that I hadn’t been doing much lately because it had become obvious to me that damaged, desertified, land is so much more valuable than healthy land that there’s not much demand for changing the former into the latter. He looked extremely puzzled at that. As an environmentalist, he’s absolutely convinced that his job and his life work is to make unhealthy land healthy. What’s a green piece of land here in the southwest (restored or otherwise) worth? If it’s the kind of remote land which we typically call “rangeland” and, if it’s green enough to be called “healthy”, most likely it will produce a few burgers of the sort that sell for a buck or two at a fast food joint and that’s about it. How valuable is that? But what about a piece of land we would call...(Read Full Article)