You have to love the optimism of the 1800s . There was nothing people thought they could n’t do , including irrigating the total United States by strategically setting fire to component part of it .
For three decade in the 1800s , the United States governing tried to plant tree . They wanted to plant them in a all-inclusive belt , stretch along from the top of the nation to the bottom , preferably west of the good stretches of farmland . If implemented today , this plan would credibly be a method of carbon seizure , or maintain topsoil , but it was the 1830s , so the program was to plant and maintain the trees only to sporadically set fire to them .
This plan was think of by James Pollard Espy , sleep together on both sides of the Atlantic as the “ Storm King . ” He had some prescient hypothesis , like the melodic theme that clouds make from rising columns of humid aviation . His burn forest be after was the product of one of his less - prescient ideas . He believed that huge fervency could make pelting . It ’s on-key that , because they cast both moisture and particulate matter on which the moisture can concentrate up into the atmosphere , some fires do create what ’s known aspyrocumulus clouds . Still the effect is n’t big enough or sure enough to control the weather . Espy ’s architectural plan would stand for setting fire to county - wide or state - wide stretch of pre - institute forest to create rain swarm which would move east to water the states . He believe that he could irrigate farm states according to a precise schedule , like houseplants .
Espy ’s architectural plan was belike too prominent to be implemented , even if the government had okay it , but that ’s not why it was blocked . By the 1840s , people had the idea that the United States was edging towards war . The southern land were n’t wild about an idea that would allow the Federal Government to control their weather , so the plan descend by the wayside .
[ beginning : Rain , by Cynthia Barnett ]
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