I moved to Utah and a lot of towns cities straddle mountains like this where the town is in the valley next to the mountains. It’s very cool, but Id take forests over a view. I find being surrounded by woods much more comforting than high desert with a view but I guess that just depends on where you grew up.
Yeah I can’t help but feel so frustrated seeing people develop places like this. In order to support wildlife they need valleys as well as mountains. You can’t just build on every strip of usable land because a lot of animals need to graze and nest there too.
I’m glad to hear that’s not the case! I was speaking on my own experience living out west in the US where there is still a lot of public land. The attitude in the western US is unfortunately pretty bad. They want more and more public land to develop into low density single family home markets like Phoenix. It’s pretty infuriating hearing the locals moan about BLM and concoct conspiracies about how they stole land from them and show zero interest in the health of the local wildlife.
There’s still quite a bit of untouched land in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Navajo, basically anywhere that has large amounts of BLM land, but this unfortunately is getting pushback from locals who want everything to be developed.
Santiago, the capital of Chile, and the Andes Mountains (lemmy.world)