Trees, Trails, and Bunnies
In honor of the start of the outdoor season, a trio of articles on things natural.
Tree size matters. Washington boasts a bigger Sitka spruce than Oregon. The record-holding Quinault Rainforest tree is actually 13 feet shorter than the giant on the Oregon coast, but it has a bigger girth and "crown spread." Turns out, calculating tree size is tricky--and controversial.
Rabbit redux. In another story of the sister states, biologists at the Oregon Zoo are busy breeding Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits for release into the wild. Washington's last remaining population became functionally extinct this year. The captive-bred rabbits will actually be borrowing 1/4 to 1/8 of their genetics from the similar Great Basin pygmy rabbit.
Unhappy trails. A great op-ed from Washington Trails Association in today's Seattle Times, detailing the pathetic state of funding for the trails that help us explore the Northwest's awe-inspiring natural heritage. I've harped on this issue once or twice.
Fuel's Gold
No regional angle here, really, but astonishing nonetheless -- according to a new report by Environmental Defense, American cars and trucks gobble up about 45 percent of the world's highway fuels.
Time and again, I've heard that the United States accounts for less than 5 percent of the world's population, but consumes about a quarter of the world's total resources (lumber, minerals, energy, etc.). When you do the math, this means that we Americans consume roughly six times as much stuff, person for person, as the remaining 95 percent of the planet's human inhabitants.
But for personal car travel, the situation is much more stark. Between our large, low-mileage vehicles, our sprawling urban areas that make driving a necessity rather than a choice, and our great wealth, Americans' daily travel habits consume more than 15 times as much highway fuel as the average for the other 95 percent of the planet.
