On Thu, 02 Dec 1999, EvMick@aol.com wrote:
>
> As I've mentioned...I travel on the order of a hundred thousand miles a year
> via the highway. There is unbeleivable emptiness....hiway 50 across Nevada
> and Utah for example....or Texas between San Antonio and El Paso........
I second this. I own several large tracts of "worthless" land, including some off of the above mentioned Highway 50 in Nevada. There are marked state highways (albeit single lane dirt road "highways") in Nevada whereyou can drive 50-100 miles without seeing a single building.
And much of the "worthless" land is extraordinarily well endowed with natural resources. For example, I own one large (640 acre) tract of partially forested, rich volcanic land in Nevada that contains springs producing around 100 acre-ft of water a year (1 acre-ft = ~8 person-yrs of water in a modern society). Farms in the area produce high quality potatos, beef, and other agricultural products in large quantities. This land is neither unique nor expensive. And to top it off, the nearest piece of civilization is a ranch 15 miles away; the nearest town (population 50) is 25 miles away. Talk about under-utilization...
I have been to many, many other places in North America that fit this description. I always grouped the "over-population" crowd with the "endangered species" crowd; they erroneously extrapolate a local phenomenon to cover the entire planet. (For those unfamiliar with the topic, there are many "endangered species" that were listed as endangered because they no longer lived in an environmentalist's backyard. Nonetheless, many of those "endangered species" are fluorishing by the millions in other, less visited, regions of the planet. See Alaska or Canada for several examples of over-populated "endangered species" in North America.)
> Or Canada....Canada is larger than the contiguous 48 yet has only approx one
> tenth the population (as I recall...i may be in error)....of which the
> greater percentage live within 200 miles of the US border...
Canada has roughly half the population of the U.S. Somewhere in the range of 125-135 million.
> I think that "over population" is another successful meme which has little
> relation to reality....
Agreed. Over-population is largely a local phenomenon.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com