Talkin' 'bout an Infestation
As if drought and fire aren't bad enough, Cascadia's eastern forests are beset by yet a third plague: bark beetle infestations.
Similar to the scourge of British Columbia's interior forests, the mountain pine beetle, the bark beetles are poised to take America by storm. Higher than normal temperatures have led to beetle proliferation--they're reproducing twice as fast as they used to. The beetles can kill millions of trees, leaving behind standing dead timber that is vulnerable to fire.
And forest fires are particularly likely this year, the fifth year of an epic drought across the West. The one-two punch of fire and insects leads some researchers to predict radical changes to forest ecosystems in the Rockies.
The Weight of Sprawl
University of British Columbia researcher Lawrence Frank has documented the sprawl-driving-obesity connection more rigorously than anyone else, with his massive new study of Atlanta. (Pdf of study here.)
The gist: The more you drive and the less you walk--and the more sprawling your neighborhood--the more likely you are to be obese.
Among other findings, as summarized by AP:
How much time a person spent driving had a greater impact on whether a person was obese than other factors such as income, education, gender or ethnicity.
Frank will soon release a similar study of King County, Washington. He hinted at some of the findings in a recent interview with Seattle P-I's columnist Bob Condor (who also pointed out that Washington's poor record on energy use shouldn't make us feel too superior to Georgia).
A growing body of research on obesity, activity, and sprawl is accumulating; other key contributors include the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Richard Jackson of the CDC.
A Costly Oil Leak
Some back-of-the-envelope figures:
Northwesterners buy about 20 million gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel a day.
The price of that fuel has increased about 75 cents a gallon since the year began. (See the trend here.)
That's an extra $15 million a day. And almost all of it drains right out of the region, because we're an oil-importing region. Aside from slightly higher margins retained by the region's few oil refineries, the money is lost from our regional economy-a giant oil leak.
