why we say the deserts are natural if we can proof they were cover of trees before?

Question

when i ask the same question in french language the moderators remove it imediatly, that means they have instructions to do it because to talk about desertification is not bad but it means the underground resources make money for some compagnies and if the result is the climat change , htey don't want poeple can accuse them to do it . this proof also that this compagnies have long arms to ask yahoo moderators to remove the sujet in asks &answers

Answer 1

We say the are natural, at least in terms of the U.S., because they occurred pre-European settlement. We have now learned that Native Americans had strong influences on the natural world, but natural in this country is tied directly to the conditions of the land before Europeans arrived.

Also, just because an area was covered with trees is not indicative of whether the desertification was not a natural succession of the area. People too often define 'natural' in a picturesque sense. In fact, there are areas called oak savannas that have been overrun with trees due to fire suppression, where the areas with less trees is in fact more natural.

Answer 2

Deforestation and desertification have resulted from human activity (i.e., non-sustainable agriculture) in the past.

I recently read James H Kunstler's _The long emergency : surviving the converging catastrophes of the twenty-first century_ (a bit gloomy). The author suggests that, after oil takes more energy to extract than it contains, we will be forced back on burning wood for energy. In that scenario, North America would soon be deforested. Although I don't think Kunstler says so (he is conservative), we can be even more gloomy and speculate that desertification might follow.

Answer 3

Not natural would imply man made change, and environments were changing long before man existed. Where I live now has been seabed, under glaciers and probably tropical forest at some time in the past. Just now it is semiarid open grassland with a few trees.

Answer 4

The nature of things is to change. Mountain tops were once ocean floors, deserts were forests, and forests were deserts.

Answer 5

Natural = not man made