Trends in Land Use History on the Colorado Plateau

Photograph of ruin at Chaco Canyon courtesy of the National Park Service.

Trends in biotic communities and processes, human land use, and cultural change on the Colorado Plateau occur on a variety of temporal scales. Use the hotlinks in this sentence to access timelines representing both short- and long-term trends in Land Use and Biota.

In the last hundred years the most significant trends are a function of exponential growth in human populations occurring both on and off the Plateau. Today, some of the most  direct impacts to the landscape are the results of increasing demands for recreation and tourism, particularly in national parks and in areas near growing metropolitan regions on the periphery of the Plateau. Once vast wilderness and roadless areas are now a fraction of their former size. Employment on the Colorado Plateau is shifting from a resource extraction economy based on livestock grazing, mining, and logging to those related to construction, retail trade, and services.

The direct impacts of human populations which lived and worked on the Colorado Plateau are significant, but land-use historians will cite the last hundred years for the indirect impacts from burgeoning human populations surrounding the Plateau. The significance of the immense resource extractions that occurred and are still occurring in this ecologically fragile region is considered in The GRAND PLAN, a Special Essay by Colorado Plateau activist and photographer Ray Wheeler. A counter movement to the Grand Plan is The Drive for Protection, a second Special Essay by Wheeler.