my line

Doulas Tomkins, the man who brought us North Face, allowing us to have wonderfully warm clothing that was either fuzzy on the outside, or makes little zip-zip-zip noises when you move, has been buying land in South America, piece by piece, as a private ecological preserve. At last count, he owns around a million acres in Argentina and Chile.

This is something like .15% of these two countries combined. This may seem small, but it is also over 1500 square miles, much of it in a long skinny squath about 35 miles across, next to the ocean. So there is a wee bit of controversy, not only for reasons of access, but because the land also happens to be on top of a very large resivoir.

All of this aside, I wonder what it would be like if someone purchased a long, skinny piece of, say, Utah, piece by piece, until they had bisected the state completely. All of a sudden, you would have a new datum, a Mason-Dixon line of the 21st century. Not to mention that you could now feel free to start a whole series of linear enterprises, from a linear accelerators to speedways for land-speed records, and, maybe, in the future, magnetic space launch facilities.


UPDATE: speaking of strategic reserves in the desert, this just appeared on archinect.