Friday, April 16, 2010

The New Primitiveness

Though this might be strange for many of you to think about there is one good side to the last two years. It has reduced the amount of people traveling by car or pickup truck worldwide. So this has tended to allow more birds and wild animals to survive and breed and not so many of them will be hit accidentally by cars and trucks.

I was driving from the San Francisco Bay area recently down Interstate 5 towards Los Angeles County and realized just how much traffic had reduced in the last few years between Lebec before you enter the Interstate 5 Grapevine and the San Francisco Bay area. Mostly now it is either business trucks like Semis or smaller or pickup trucks or upper end cars like BMW, Lexus, Upper end Toyotas, Mercedes etc. What surprised me the most was the speed at which many of these cars traveled at which was between 85 to 90 miles per hour. The other odd thing was that I didn't see one Highway Patrol or any other police vehicle at all for at least 200 to 300 miles until about Lebec.

So, I guess animals, birds and bugs and all life might be happier now that there are less people traveling everywhere. This is one of the only good things about the incredible traffic reduction between big cities in California and everywhere else.

The only problem is that likely people are poaching animals more just so they can survive everywhere too in the country and around the world. So I guess all this has it's good and bad points. The main point is just that how different everything is the last couple of years. It seems like more Earthquakes (big ones) more small quakes(so many everwhere). However, I'm not a volcanologist so all I see is the weekly statistics at the USGS interactive Earthquake site.

No comments: