Studies
The infrastructures of railroad land grants and pivot irrigation set the trajectory for land shape for centuries to come and offera rich historyin understanding theaffect thatchanges in infrastructure have on not only the landscape but also the societies within it.
Railroad Land Grants
Towards the middle and end of the 19th century, the United States enacted twenty-two railroad grants2 to promote railroad construction. The infrastructure of both railroads and federal land grants intended to close the gap in transportation and help to finally settle the expansive West, yet scholars believe that instead, they ended up serving as a fraught source of wealth and power to the railroad companies alone.3 Scholar Sean Kammer establishes that by granting this land to the railroad companies to sellthe companiesbecame notonly infrastructural powerhouses— carrying people and goods— but also landowners. The first grant led by Stephen Douglas in 1850 was to the Illinois Central Railroad. This was followed by the passage of the Pacific Railway Act of 18624 which sponsored the Union Pacific and Central Pacific, subsidizing construction from Nebraska to California by means of land grants. By 1871, 130 million acres of land had been granted to railroad companies.5 While in the middle of the century railroad companies were the poster child for American infrastructure, by the turn of the century the truth and trajectory of most of American infrastructure was being uncovered, that of a monopolistic corporation. It seemed that the growth of infrastructure would go hand in hand with the growth of American land dispute and exploitation.6 The Oregon & California Railroad Act offers a specific case study on how the infrastructure of the railroad produced infrastructures of both rural landform and economics.
In 1866 Congress established a land grant to promote rapid completion of an Oregon California railroad. The land grant, passed under the Oregon & California Railroad Act (PL 39-242), granted 6 million acres of checkerboarded land7 to the Oregon and California Railroad Company (O&C) by
2 Taylor, et al., “Follow the Money.”
3 Kammer, “Railroad Land Grants.”
4 It is relevant to note that within months of one another, two other monumental laws were passed the Homestead Act and the Morrill Act. The three together provided vast expansion of the west: the Homestead Act provided free land, the Morrill Act provided for colleges that taught agriculture and mechanical arts, and the Pacific Railway Act provided the necessary transportation to get there.
5 Wilkinson, “Crossing the Next Meridian.”
6 Legal disputes between railroad companies, settlers, miners, speculators, politicians and even government officials were common among federal land grants and contributed to a shifting reputation of railroad tycoons (Kammer, “Railroad Land Grants”).
7 The checkerboard land stems from two developments. The first being that the Land Ordinance of 1785 created a general system by which the federal government could legally divide, identify, and sell its domain “Specifically, the law directed that land be divided into 36 square mile townships, with each township being further divided into numbered sections of 640 acres (one square mile) each.” Secondly, the government most often granted alternate, odd-numbered sections of land, creating the checkerboard ownership, with the rationale being that they could sell the evennumbered sections for no less than double the minimum priced value, to effectively subsidize the subsidy (Kammer, “Railroad Land Grants”).
means of granting 12,800 acres per mile of track laid,8 providing an incentive to develop the remaining Oregon section of the Portland-San Francisco [Figure 2] railroad and a way for the railroadcompanytomakeprofitbysellingthegrantedland.Thelandgrantwas theseventhlargest railroad grant awarded in the 19th century.9 The O&C land grants were given at every other square mile in a gridded pattern, and unique to the O&C grants, in 1869 congress added a condition stipulatingthatthecompanyselloffthelandas160-acreparcelsataset,affordableratetoqualified settlers. In this sense, one could consider the land grants an aggressive and early version of the infamous US transit-oriented development (TOD) projects we now see today: the provision of cheap or subsidized property with the commitment of providing both transit infrastructure and equitable development around it.
Not that unlike much TOD today, the grants succeeded in completing the transit infrastructure, yet failed to provide the agreed upon affordable settlement. State and federal officials sued the company for violating the terms and in 1916 Congress revested more than 2 million acres originally granted to O&C under the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). However, the revestment of this land took those 2 million acres off local tax rolls, affecting the development of the 18 Oregon counties theywerein. Congress promised the counties thatitwould use receipts from timbersales to pay back taxes owed but payments were nearly non-existent due to several factors. Firstly, the Agriculture and Interior departments were still unsure who controlled the O&C lands. Secondly, federal foresters withheld public forest sales in order to get higher prices from the private sector, and, lastly, the Great Depression caused lumber prices to collapse and stalled the logging industry to a halt10 .
In 1937, Congress passedthe Oregonand California RevestedLands Sustained Yield Management Act (PL 75-405), commonly referred to as the O&C Act, which put the O&C lands under the U.S. Department of the Interior and classified them as timberlands to be managed for permanent forest and timber production, providing income return to the counties. The exhaustion of private forests and increased demand due to World War II enabled the Department of the Interior to have increased revenue.11 In taking back the land, the Act also provided for protecting the whole ecosystem such as watersheds and stream flows, which not only seemingly promised a sustained forest but also an economic and recreational stability in the community.12
8 U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, “O&C Lands.”
9 Taylor, et al., “Follow the Money.”
10 Taylor, et al., “Follow the Money.”
11 Taylor, et al., “Follow the Money.”
12 Forest ecosystems not only include more than trees themselves, but also sit outside most policy and planning timelines. From planting or natural new growth, to thinning and sustainable forest management, to harvesting and replanting, a forest’s lifescycle can span anywere form 30 yrs (if grown for harvest and milling) to several hundred or even thousands of years (such as ancient Redwood ecosystems). Unlike the built enviornment, where things are built most often with no death in mind, forests, no matter their lifecycle, are constantly moving through timelines, prodcution, growth, and death, all as part of natural and facilitated regeneration.
Center Pivot Irrigation
If railroad checkerboard policies, as infrastructure, determined the fate of Oregon forests and their socioeconomic livelihood, then irrigation technologies, as infrastructure, can be said to have determined the fate of the Great Plains. In both cases, the large-scale roll out of infrastructure— railroads and irrigation pipes— caused both the geometric patterning and large-scale ecological changes we still see today. Prior to the invention of irrigation technologies, the Great Plains, the land between the 100th meridian and the Rocky Mountains [Figure 3] was understood as a wasteland unable to support life.13
Early in American colonization, settlers began diverting water from rivers through canals but surface irrigation was limited: farms needed to be near rivers and were dependent on seasonal and fluctuatingwaterflow.Farmersbegandrawingfromgroundwaterwellsbythelate19th century, powered by windmills and later gasoline engines. These technologies were expensive and limited in scale. The electrification of the rural United States helped farmers power groundwater irrigation pumps that drew from aquifers, and natural gas followed as the primary fuel. However, this water was pumped through long, hand-laid pipes thatranacross fields ofcropswith sprinklers at regular intervals. This technique required the pipes to be moved during planting preparation, cultivating crops, and for harvest which was extremely labor intensive. The 1930s brought extreme drought across most of the country, which is where the southern portion of the region picked up the name “Dust Bowl.” Following this drought, much of the US began to reconsider the Great Plains as unfeasible for future farming.
In 1948 Frank Zybach, a Nebraskan farmer, developed a new type of sprinkler system, the center pivot, which he patented in 1952 [Figures 4 and 5]. The system was designed so that the center of the circular system would be adjacent to a well, and irrigation pipes attached to trusses stemmed from the center and were supported by wheeled towers that circle the center. Sprinkler nozzles sprayed water out along the pipes with larger nozzles towards the outer edge to cover more ground. The circle could cover 133 acres of a 160-acre field and required no disassembly during planting, tilling or harvest. After its initial invention, technological advances were made: powerful motors that allowed the system to scale up to 640-acre farms and positioning the nozzles closer to the ground made for less evaporation.14
It is not just crops that need water, and in fact what revolutionized the Great Plains via the center pivot irrigation was the ability to provide enough water for raising livestock. A farm holding 20,000
13Indigenous peoples depended largely on hunting as the Great Plains were grassy and provided for animals such as Bison to flourish. In addition, indigenous communities sustained life and agriculture in the Great Plain region through containing most farming to floodplain terraces. They also maintained modest family fields that were equivalent to less than four acres. It has also been noted that tribes were nomadic which allowed for trading and shared resources throughout sub-regions of the Plains (Wishart, “Native American Agriculture”).
14 Anderson, Joe. “How Crop Circles Saved.”
pigs uses more water than a community of 20,000 people.15 Where 160 acres of land could previously support just one steer, hundreds of animals could now be kept per acre. Aside from providing water for crops and livestock, the water access revived communities that were dependent onagriculture. Small towns and laborers thathad struggled fordecades to getbycould now shop at local farms and retailers, use local banks, and were paying higher property and business tax that sustained local governments and economies. However, Joe Anderson, an agricultural and environmental historian, calls the pivot irrigation system an “infrastructure trap”: an intervention or invention that thwarts alternative visions for developing specific areas, with the belief thatcapital investments in specific infrastructures makeit difficultto transitioninfrastructure types.16
Provocations
With the understanding of these two infrastructures, one can begin to question their future affects. Much like the way checkerboard forests seem inevitable today, crop circles are a ubiquitous part of modern agriculture. Similarly, in the same way railroad grants are the backbone to the checkerboard patterning, the center pivot irrigation epitomizes the American infrastructure trajectory: a technological triumph that enabled a production revolution and lasting land pattern. And, much like the exploitation of the forest land by the railroad companies and the government’s attempt to make up for it, the exploitation of water as a resource climbed at an ever-increasing scale. These infrastructures have shaped our modern economics and land politics today and leave us wondering what future infrastructures are on the horizon to combat today’s infrastructural and climatic challenges.
Modern Economics of Checkerboard and Crop Circle Landscapes
From the perspective of economic policy, both the railroad grants and pivot irrigation systems affect modern economics in their regions, beyond the strict financing of crops and land development.
Inthe1980sand90s,threemajorshiftstookplaceinOregon’sforestryindustrythathadsubstantial effect on the economy: firstly, the BLM reduced logging on the federal forests, secondly, and in response, the federal government instituted a set of patchwork programs to financially sustain the rural counties in lieu of logging, and thirdly, the taxation of privately managed timber essentially stopped, driving a surge and consolidation in the private industry. These effects, the pullback of cutting onfederal land and the increased cutting onprivate land,amplified the checkerboard.After Congress revested the O&C lands, the logging of the federal property between 1937 and the 1990s bolstered the budget of the 18 Oregon counties, but that flow depended on the sustained cutting of federal forests. Michael Blumm, professor at Lewis and Clark Law School, states that
15 Anderson, Joe. “How Crop Circles Saved.”
16 Anderson, Joe. “How Crop Circles Saved.”
“congressionally created management structure… supported local county governments through the over-harvesting of lands for a half-century”.17 Beginning in the 1980s, the forestry industry shifted with advancements in timber infrastructure, the resurgence of the private sector, and extreme environmental concerns over shrinking old growth forests and the species in them18. In 1994, the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) was implemented to guide the management of 17 federal forests in the Pacific NW with the hopes of conserving old-growth forests and certain wildlife species by creating a regional monitoring program through multi-agency efforts.19 Logging on federal property drastically decreased.
In response to the decreased funding to the counties as logging on federal property drastically slowed,Congress implemented a patchworkprogram in 1993 to securecontinued payments to the counties as in-lieu tax payments to make up for the amount of lost tax revenue. In 2000, the patchworkprogramevolvedintotheSecureRuralSchoolsand CommunitySelf-DeterminationAct (PL 106-393) and provided the counties with payments for general funds and specific Title II and Title III projects. In 2020, as part of the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act was reauthorized for the fiscal years of 2019 and 2020 and provided direct funds for “trail maintenance, culvert replacement or removal, soil improvement, vegetation/density management, wildfire hazard reduction, stream channel enhancement, control of noxious and exotic weeds, and opportunities for youth training and employment.” In 2021, BLM announced the issuance of over $25.4 million in payments to the 18 counties in western Oregon, going directly towards education, infrastructure, safety, health, and other critical county expenditures20. The legacy of government agencies having to (re)pay tax on land that they originally stole, irresponsibly granted, scrambled to take back and now haphazardly manage clearly lives on today.
Thedecreaseinthefederalloggingand hugegrowthofconservationmovements areoftenblamed for decimating rural Oregon counties. State tax records, however, suggest that Oregon counties mayhave lostmoremoney from tax cuts on privately owned timberstands thanfrom the reduction of logging on federal lands21, flipping the script on which part of the checkerboard is to blame. Running parallel to the shifts in management of federal forests, private timber economics underwent its own transformation. From the 1960s and 1970s (in different parts of the state) until early1990s,privatetimberhadbeentaxedthroughaseverancetaxbasedonthevalueofthetimber harvested. The logging industry began lobbying politicians to reduce the severance tax, arguing that since the industry had cut nearly all the existing forests and that the state required them to plant new trees, the logging companies were essentially farmers. In 1993 the severance tax was
17 Blumm and Wigington, “The Oregon & California Railroad.”
18 The most famous of these species is the Spotted Owl, which was listed as a threatened species in 1990 under the Endangered Species Act, spurring timber lawsuits and halting harvest on federal property.
19 Spies, et al., “Twenty-five Years of the Northwest”
20 U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, “O&C Lands.”
21 Schick, et al. “Big Money Bought Oregon’s Forests. Small Timber Communities Are Paying the Price.”
cut nearly inhalf,loweringthe taxes garnered to roughly $30 million a year.The industrycontinued to lobby against the tax. As Oregon Public Broadcasting reports, the industry simply argued that “since Oregon didn’t tax crops, it shouldn’t tax trees”22 Their efforts were successful and in 1999 the severancetax was eliminated altogether,withexceptionto small-scale timberownerswho can opt in to the severance tax as a means to reduce property taxes. Essentially overnight, the state lost its annual severance revenue, which its peak of the 1990s, brought in close to $100 million per year. From 1991 to 2020, nearly thirty years, Oregon cities and counties received roughly $871 million total. It is estimated that had Oregon not repealed the severance tax, they would have received nearly $3 billion.23 With the repeal of the tax, the private sector surged as big investors jumpedattheopportunitytoownmoreland andcutmoretimberwithouttheprevious taxburdens. It should be noted that adjacent states Washington and California still tax large timber companies for the value of the trees they log.
Though the federal payments through the Secure Rural Schools and Community SelfDetermination Act do help sustain the Western Oregon counties, small rural towns in them continue toseepublic service closures and dwindled job markets from the dried upindustry. Large private timber owners continue to lead Oregon as the top lumber-producing state, and they are more likely to employ fewer workers due to technology advances as well as export timber to be milledoverseas.Inregardstothesethreelargeshiftsintheindustry—decreasedharvestonfederal property, patchwork payback programs, and the end of the severance tax— at the turn of the century, it becomes evident that both the public and private squares of the checkerboard continue to play a large role in shaping rural life and economic livelihood.
The geography of the Great Plains has also had a massive impact on politics and economics in the United States. Some historians argue that the divide between the humid east and the arid west had a major influence on early and pivotal moments in the US economy,24 one of which is the creation of crop insurance. Though first tested in 1938, the insurance was not officially created and formally distributed until 1980, when congress passed the Federal Crop Insurance Act. The Act was reformed in 1994 and 1996, requiring farmers who wished to receive other benefits to either purchase the insurance or waive their eligibility for federal disaster benefits. Also in 1996, the Risk Management Agency (RMA) was created to administer the crop insurance.25
Around the same time, center pivot irrigationwas skyrocketing, increasing by more than 50% from 1986 to 1996.26 When it comes to economies of scale and infrastructure as a market, irrigation equipment sales skyrocketed again in 2011, increasing by 69% overa two-yearperiod. Much ofthis
22 Schick, et al. “Big Money Bought Oregon’s Forests. Small Timber Communities Are Paying the Price.”
23 Schick, et al. “Big Money Bought Oregon’s Forests. Small Timber Communities Are Paying the Price.”
24 One example is the theory that the east-west divide helped to speed up the end of slavery as plantations could not expand into drier climates, therefore weakening and setting limits to the South’s economic power (Krajick, “The 100th Meridian, Where”).
25 United States Department of Agriculture, “History of the Crop Insurance” 26 Evans, “Center Pivot Irrigation”
growth is due to eastern states entering the irrigation market as climates shift. Southern senators lobbied successfully for an amendment to the 2014 U.S farm bill that allows for non-western states to apply for federal irrigation grants for the first time.27 Research scientists Parton, Gutmann, and Ojima study the Great Plains economic patterns via three types of counties: metro counties, dryland nonmetro with minimal irrigation, and nonmetro counties with substantial irrigation, clearlyseparatingsocieties thataresustainedthroughirrigationandthosethataren’t.Census data show continued regional growth for the Great Plains, but a closer look at rural and metropolitan data reveals the socioeconomic effects of advanced irrigation infrastructure: that people are leaving the most agricultural counties and migrating to metro counties, reflecting the change in agricultural labor demand.28 It can be expected then that as pivot irrigation infrastructure grows, county demographics and economics will also continue to shift.
Current and Future Infrastructures for Forests and Agriculture
If the railroad development was to combat a lack of mobility on the west coast and the pivot irrigation was to combat a lack of water and production in the middle of the nation, what is our response to today’s prolific landscape crisis: geographic climate disruption? In the context of infrastructural developments of the last two centuries, we must analyze current innovations and imagine what infrastructure we need for this century.
While much of Oregon’s forests remain in a checkerboard pattern today, with every other square mile still switching betweenprivately and publicly owned forests [Figure6], and county economies continually shift, the Northwest Forest Plan remains an important part of forest management. Running parallel to the federal payback plans at the turn of the century was the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) implemented in 1994. The NWFP guides the management of 17 federal forests in the PacificNWwiththehopesofconservingold-growthforests andcertainwildlifespeciesbycreating a regional monitoring program through multi-agency efforts.29 One of the main objectives of the plan was to balance two specific goals: conserve old-growth forests to maintain and heal ecosystems and strengthen timber production as a means of local and state economy but the challenges proved to be more nuanced. In order to address these issues, the plan set forth integrated research and technology infrastructure at the scale of ecosystems. Spies, et al suggest that rallying trust in the federal management of forests is a high priority for maintaining programs like this and points out that “Minority populations are growing within the NWFP area and finding ways to engage diverse populations in collaborations may improve federal forest management for a range of ecological (e.g. restoration) and socioeconomic (e.g., community well-being) goals.”30 This community engagement provides a social infrastructure that could help manage forests moving forward. In addition, Spies, et al believe that monitoring at the scale of large ecosystems,
27 Walton, “U.S. Irrigation Pushed Eastward”
28 Parton, et al., “Long-Term Trends in Population”
29 Spies, et al., “Twenty-five Years of the Northwest”
30 Spies, et al., “Twenty-five Years of the Northwest”
such as the forests included in NWFP, is one of the most important strategies for proper forest, science-based management. It is believed that the NWFP, though set up with an extensive monitoring program, needs to do more in this effort. Monitoring, in the sense of data collection and technology infrastructure, is part of forestry’s future.31 Organizations across the globe are beginning to monitor forests or even individual trees, such as Singapore’s National Parks Board, which models individual trees along public boulevards to monitor wood strength, physical dimensions, and changes in shape to best predict the lifespan of a tree.32
The long-standing debate over the feasibility of extensive harvesting in the Great Plains is also continual even after seemingly game-changing infrastructure. The crop circles seem a set part of the landscape but the ever-changing climate calls for a constant analysis of agricultural infrastructure. As previously mentioned, it has been noted that warming climates are pushing the east-west Great Plain divide east. In the north, rain patterns have not changed much but notably higher temperatures increase soil evaporation; in the south shifts in wind patterns are causing less raintofall.Thesefactorscombinedexplainhowitisestimatedthatsince1980thedividehasshifted about 140 miles to the east. Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University, predicts that this climatic and geographic shift will not only affect crop margins and the types of farming suitable but will force small farmers to consolidate in order to remain viable or close farms all together, drastically affecting the socioeconomic infrastructure of the region. In addition to the effects on small-town and rural spaces, changes in water supply— both a decrease in rainfall and a stronger amount of water diverted to farms to make up for dryer soil— could be problematic for urban areas, too,33 making water a more highly competitive resource between rural and urban populations. This competition is being reflected in legal battles between states as well, such as State of Florida v. State of Georgia (2021).34 Specific policies and sharing infrastructures may also be needed as water continues to be more scarce. In addition, center pivot irrigation is moving eastward as states such as Illinois and Georgia, which are east and south of the traditional Great Plains,aregettingdrier.Droughts in 2007 and 2012 in the Southeastand Midwestrespectively cost farmers billions and revealed their precarity in changing modern climates.35 Several states are
31 It is worth noting the connection of forest monitoring to issues of maintenance, which is directly related to forest lifecycles. 84% of forest fires between 1992 and 2012, not including controlled burns, were human ignited, many of which were due to lack of forest maintenance and adjacency to electrical utilities. California’s Pacific Gas & Electric, for example, has been sued to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars due to negligence in regard to utility maintenance and the direct causation of forest fires (University of Colorado at Boulder, “Humans Sparked 84 Percent of US Wildfires”).
32 Tay, “Inside Singapore’s Plan for Climate”
33 Krajick, “The 100th Meridian, Where”
34 Though this lawsuit is not specifically about irrigation, it highlights the political and legal nature the climate crisis is taking on. In 2013 the State of Florida filed suit against the State of Georgia claiming that Georgia was using more than its share of water in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River Basin, causing insufficient water levels to reach the downstream Florida panhandle. In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously dismissed the suit. Legal battles over river basins and water use are not new or modern, yet they will be exacerbated as water levels shift at an everincreasing pace (Walton, “U.S. Irrigation Pushed Eastward”).
35 Walton, “U.S. Irrigation Pushed Eastward”
approving tax credits that incentivize farmers to build localized infrastructure for rainwater collection on their property.36
In recent years, precision irrigation has brought the ability to not only disperse water across great amounts of land but fertilizers as well, calibrating when and exactly where to run based on things like soil conditions and topography.37 This technology goes hand in hand with advances in center pivot irrigation infrastructure itself, as today a farmer can control the system through their smartphone, tablet, or computer. In addition, soil moisture sensors, GPS, and GIS— all technological and spatial infrastructures— aid in determining more exact irrigation. Many scientists arelooking toprecisionirrigationas thesaviorofthe centerpivotirrigationinfrastructure with the hopes that accuracy will make the irrigation system that much more efficient and reduce overall water consumption.
Concluding Thoughts
Infrastructure is inherently geometric: it does have shape and it also shapes. Infrastructure has a spatial affect that changes the societies, politics, and economics it operates in. In this sense, infrastructure has a double-down affect: the instantaneous and practical result, and a regional affect over time. The designer tends to synthesize problems in an attempt to draw tight relationships and offer a single solution to our greatest and most complex problems. To this point, I am tempted to propose infrastructures that can begin to imagine a land reconciliation and path forward for both patchwork, exploited forests and extractive farming methods (a redistribution of tenure to consolidate resource management, grey-water irrigation systems that keep forest floors from drying up and offer water needed for crops, for example). While this paper has drawn out many similarities betweenthe two as land, geopolitic, andsocioeconomic shapers, Iresistthe urge to set forth specific suggestions and instead emphasize the need for localized and flexible solutions. Both cases— the land grants and the center pivot irrigation— were quickly counted as a success and distributed at mass, only to now—one and two centuries later— be still grappling with the results. Perhaps what we need moving forward are solutions that are less fixed and more adaptable to the changing climate. Both in the case of extreme temperatures and wildfires as well as exhausted aquifers and water shortages, these two landscapes will continue to shift shape in our time.
36 Alabama approved a $10,000 tax credit for farmers who install small reservoirs or new wells to store rainwater from storm surges. Additionally, an irrigation district in Arkansas built 243 reservoirs on farm properties to hold rain and eventual river flows (Walton, “U.S. Irrigation Pushed Eastward”).
37 Sinobas, “Environmental Benefits and Concerns”
Figure 1. Technology infrastructure imaging (capitalizing on) agriculture infrastructure. @centerpivotsprinkler Instagram feed.
Figure 2. The first spike for the Oregon Central Railroad is driven at E. Washington and 1st Ave. Portland, Oregon.
Courtesy Oregon Historical Society Research Library
Figure 3. Great Plains as defined by U.S. Department of Agriculture 38
38 United States Soil Conservation Service. Great Plains Conservation Program, designated counties. Lanham, MD: The Service, 1981. Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/84690377/.
Figure 4. The first center pivot irrigation system, erected by Frank Zybach near Strasburg, Colorado. Courtesy of University of Nebraska Lincoln.
Figure 5. Frank Zybach’s “Self-Propelled Sprinkling Irrigating Apparatus” U.S. Patent Number 2,604,359
Figure 6. Bureau of Land Management map of forest land southwest of Eugene, Oregon.
Anderson, Joe. “How Crop Circles Saved the Great Plains .” Zócalo Public Square. Arizona State University, September 10, 2018.
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Past, Contentious Present, and Uncertain Future: A Century of Conflict.” Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review 40, no. 1 (February 1, 2013). https://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/ealr/vol40/iss1/2.
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