Daily Score Blog

From what I hear, the Seattle city council is considering putting an advisory vote on the Viaduct on this November's ballot.  Voters would only get to choose one of two options:  rebuilding the highway along Seattle's waterfront pretty much as it is now, or rebuilding the highway and sinking a portion of it underground.

Why a vote?  And why just those two options?

Following up on Eric's recent post on obesity statistics: according to a nationwide phone survey, about one quarter of the residents of Oregon, Idaho, and Washington are obese, up from about one in ten in 1990.

Surprisingly, that's the good news.

The bad news is that the survey is flawed -- and the real obesity rate is almost certainly a lot higher.

According to a recent study, people simply don't tell the truth about their height and weight (the two ingredients in the obesity calculation) over the phone. Men tend to report that they're taller than they actually are, while women tend to shave a few pounds off their weight. 

I doubt that people are outright lying, really.  More likely, it's a combination of embarrassment and wishful thinking.  I mean, we all like to think of themselves as taller and slimmer than we actually are.  I know I do -- I think of myself as weighing what I did a decade ago.  But I don't.

So the end result is that the actual obesity rate is significantly higher -- perhaps 8 or 9 percentage points higher -- than the phone-only data would lead you to believe.  (This varies by location, sex, and demographics:  apparently, certain groups of people are especially prone to exaggeration. See especially p. 63 of this pdf.) 

So that means two things.  First, the actual obesity rate in the Northwest US is probably closer to 1 in 3.  And second, you should take phone survey data  for what it's worth:  a useful tool for understanding what's going on in the world, but far from the final word.

It seems that wolves are returning home to Oregon.

A little more than a decade ago, Oregon was wolf-less, along with the rest of the American West, a legacy of government-sanctioned poisoning, trapping, and shooting to make the land safe for cows and sheep. [Here's a cool animated map depicting our shrunken wolf range.] But then in the mid-1990s federal biologists reintroduced a few dozen wolves back into their native habitat of Yellowstone National Park and the wilderness of central Idaho. And the wolf population grew faster and healthier than anyone had been expecting.

Barely 11 years later, the US Rockies are home to at least 850 gray wolves, and that number is growing every year. So robust is the wolf population that there's mounting evidence that wolves are now moving west--back into their former home in the rugged mountains and canyons of northeast Oregon.

The wolf success story is a bright spot in restoring endangered species. Unlike some other species, restoring wolf populations is comparatively cheap and easy. In fact, all they really need is to be left alone.

It's not exactly rocket science (or salmon restoration, for that matter) to leave them alone and let them return to their former homes, as they appear to be doing in Oregon. Better yet, easy as it is, allowing wolves to recover in the west can yield outsize benefits to native ecosystems. So here's to doing absolutely nothing--except maybe a little monitoring so that we know what's up.

UPDATE 9/14/06: A new article in the Oregonian says it's official. Biologists have identified at least one wolf hanging around the Wallowa Mountains. They're hoping to fit it with a radio collar so that they can easily monitor its movements.