See Here

The world passed a big demographic milestone this week. On Wednesday, May 23, the earth’s population became more urban than rural. From now on, the average human will live in a city instead of a farm or village.

While the date is symbolic, the trend couldn’t be more important. Sociologist Ron Wimberly at North Carolina State University and two colleagues began with United Nations estimates predicting that the world will be 51.3 percent urban by 2010. They calculated the average daily rural and urban populations from 2005 to 2010 and the tipping point came last Wednesday, when an estimated 3,303,992,253 people lived in urban areas and 3,303,866,404 lived in rural areas.

This transition happened in the United States between 1910 and 1920. Our growth since then has been almost completely urban. Between 1950 and 2000, U.S. cities gained 127 million people, while rural areas gained just 4 million.

The lesson in all of this is interdependence. In the US and around the world, small towns and open spaces provide cities with clean air, water, food, and other natural resources. In return they get urban garbage, air and water pollution, and have higher rates of poverty. “Cities must depend on rural resources,” said Wimberly. “The question is, what can the urban majority do for poor rural people and the resources upon which cities depend for existence?”

If all of this makes your head hurt and you just want to get out into the country to think it over, the majority of the U.S. population is still rural in Vermont, Maine, Mississippi, and West Virginia.

Chuck Woodbury is a good travel companion for people who like small towns and freebies. He was a blogger ten years before blogs were invented, and his web sites are loaded with local insider information. If you prefer two-lane highways to Interstates, you’re one of his people.

Twenty years ago, Chuck sold a small business in Sacramento and used the cash to buy an 18-foot motor home and some early desktop publishing equipment, plus a laptop that could run on batteries. He loaded the camper with the tech gear and several large boxes of Cheez-Its, filled the gas tank and his travel mug, and the quarterly newspaper Out West was born. For the next 13 years, Woodbury drove on the roughest roads his rig could handle to the smallest towns he could find. He wrote about potato ice cream, a popular dessert in Idaho Falls, ID; a general store in Ferndale, CA that still stocked items it carried 98 years ago; and the early years of Laughlin, NV, a low-rent Las Vegas where the average age of visitors is 57. He also wrote a lot of funny, engaging columns about pit toilets, aggressive chipmunks, and the things that go through a person’s mind when he’s spending the night alone in the emptiest part of the continent. Subscriptions were $5. He never made much money, but by the time he retired the camper in 2000, he had produced a lot of good writing and made a lot of friends. You can see some of his favorite columns at the website outwestnewspaper.com.

Chuck is still looking for humor, inspiration, and bargains in out-of-the-way places, but now he’s delivering the information through several web sites. His biggest is RVtravel.com, which mostly contains practical information on such topics as how to keep a portable toilet smelling fresh. But the site also contains new dispatches in the Out West tradition, such as a campground in Sutherlin, OR that offers free drive-in movies. My favorite Woodbury effort is freecampgrounds.com, which is built and maintained by users. As the title implies, it’s a list of about 1900 places across the U.S. where you can sleep for free, with updated reviews. Most of the places are parking lots of the Wal-Mart variety, but some are really intriguing – such as a free campground run by Canon City, CO that gives you a half price ticket to the Royal Gorge Bridge, and a free 23-hour parking area one mile from the ultra-exclusive beach in East Hampton, NY. The parking lot next to the beach is for village residents only, but the beach itself is public and the walk will do you good.

Energy analysts are arguing over whether or not gasoline will reach $4 a gallon this summer. The industry association for gas-guzzling recreational vehicles says that most Americans who own RVs plan to take them out more often this summer than they did in 2006, no matter the cost. But an small independent publication for land yacht owners came up with a different result, and the official forecast for the travel industry agrees with the little guy.

Much depends on who turns out to be right. About 330 million “person trips” will happen in the U.S. in June, July, and August of this year. A person trip is one person traveling 50 miles or more, and a big chunk of the economy depends on what the overall number turns out to be.

On May 3, the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association reported that 76 percent of RV owners intend to use their rigs more often this spring and summer than they did last year. Only 4 percent said they were planning to go out less, and 20 percent said there would be no change. About half said that higher fuel prices would affect their plans, either by staying closer to home or staying longer in one place. The findings were based on a regular survey with 479 respondents, and a margin of error rate of 4 percent either way.

“I don’t see how they can say that,” says Chuck Woodbury, editor and publisher of RVtravel.com and related sites that attract about 750,000 visitors a month. Shortly after the poll appeared, Woodbury asked his readers how $4 a gallon fuel would affect their travels. About 3,700 responded, and three quarters said they would cut back on their driving. Only one-quarter said it would have no effect.

This week, Woodbury asked the exact question the RVIA had asked to get a better comparison. With about 1,200 respondents, 42 percent say their travel will be about the same, 30 percent plan to travel less, and 28 percent plan to travel more. “It’s just common sense. I don’t see how people can just keep paying whatever,” he says. Filling a 75 gallon tank at $3.50 a gallon costs $262.50, and at 12 MPG that tank takes you about 900 miles. It isn’t as much as a plane ticket and a motel, but it’s getting close.

The big dogs listen to the Travel Industry Association, which surveys 60,000 traveling households a year and maintains an error margin of 0.4 percent. TIA’s research director, Suzanne Cook, predicted this morning that summer travel in 2007 would be 1.4 percent higher than it was in 2006, because most people still have enough money to pay the higher fuel cost. However, she added that things could change dramatically if gas goes above $3.50 a gallon. One-third of those surveyed said they would cancel their trip if the national average price for gas reaches that point. About ten percent said they’re changing their summer plans at $3 a gallon.

“People who to take their RVs out are going to be staying closer to home this year,” predicts Woodbury. That might be good news for 19th century resort towns like Lake Geneva, WI, about halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee. But if you’re visiting Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada, more than 200 miles from either Salt Lake City or Las Vegas, you’ll probably find things especially desolate this year.

Spring is busting out all over New York’s Hudson River this week. Trees are leafing, wildflowers are blooming despite the mostly dry weather, and lilacs scent the air. Sit on the riverbank for a half-hour and you might hear the calls of rose-breasted grosbeaks, wood thrushes, northern orioles, and scarlet tanagers. This is also the time when newly hatched eagle and falcon nestlings get their first taste of river fish, delivered to their tree-top nests by attentive parents.
Peregrine falcon and nestlings

Shad, herring, striped bass, and Atlantic sturgeon are coursing up the Hudson by the millions this week, each seeking its preferred spawning habitat. The fish become fast food for ospreys that float over the water surface until they spot the silver flash of scales, then dive-bomb their way to a meal. The water travelers include blueback herring, which swim all the way up to Albany, turn left at the Erie Canal, change lanes into the Mohawk River, and continue nearly to Rochester before they spawn — an inland journey of more than 300 miles. Lower down, you can still find a few aquatic monsters. Atlantic sturgeon can grow to ten feet or more and weigh more than 400 pounds. They are now coming in from the sea to their spawning grounds in the deep water above the Hudson Highlands. For reasons unknown, these strange fish occasionally leap clear of the water and then reenter with a monumental splash.

Commercial shad fishing on the Hudson peaks and concludes in May as the fish make a 150-mile run from New York Harbor to above Albany. Shad eggs are hatching on the river spawning grounds north of Kingston, and the lucky adults who evade a gauntlet of hooks, nets, teeth, and talons will return to the sea. Some of the less lucky ones become the property of the Hudson River Foundation, which has been sponsoring public shad bakes along the estuary for nearly 20 years. They’re having one this Sunday, May 20 at Croton Point Park in Croton-on-Hudson, NY. For more information, check the Foundation’s web site or call (914)739-3222. And if you want regular correspondence from a careful observer of the river, check out Tom Lake’s Hudson River Almanac, from which this post is adapted.

Las Vegas, NV has the nation’s highest per capita rate of vehicle theft, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau’s annual ranking of 361 metropolitan areas. It may not surprise you that Sin City would win this title. But things get a little more interesting when you dig into the details.

The other nine places with the highest per capita vehicle theft rates are pretty much where you’d expect them to be. Four are in California’s San Joaquin Valley (Stockton; Visalia-Porterville; Modesto; Fresno), and the other five (Sacramento, CA; Phoenix and Tucson, AZ; Seattle and Yakima, WA) are also western towns where homeless people are still called “drifters” and there are plenty of young men who know how to hot-wire an engine. Men were 82 percent of those arrested for motor vehicle theft in 2005, according to the FBI, and 53 percent of thieves were aged 15 to 24.

The lowest rates of vehicle theft were all in smaller places – only one metro area in the bottom ten, Appleton, WI, had more than 200,000 people. Five more on the list have populations that are aging rapidly, with relatively few young men (Elmira and Glens Falls, NY; Owensboro, KY; Fond Du Lac, WI; Lewiston-Auburn, ME). Now here is the surprising thing — four of the bottom ten are places dominated by state land grant universities, including #361, State College, PA (the home of Pennsylvania State University); #360, Logan, UT (Utah State); #358, Ithaca, NY (Cornell); and #352, Ames, IA (Iowa State). These four places are loaded with young men who are prone to misbehave. So why aren’t they stealing cars?

Maybe the answer is something a cop said to me years ago when I was a beat reporter covering the annual street riot that used to happen in Ithaca right around Cornell’s graduation. The cop was standing on the sidewalk placidly observing frat boys who were having shouting matches, urinating on lawns, and engaging in several other forms of drunk and disorderly behavior. He told me he wouldn’t do anything unless someone threw a punch or broke someone’s property. No matter how drunk they got, he said, the guys usually didn’t do that. “They’re good boys who know not to cross the line,” he said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be here.”

The expense and backlash from the Dover, PA court case seems to have scared creation science advocates away from public education, at least for now. The National Center for Science Education, which defends evolution as the foundation of biological science, maintains a list of news stories on local controversies. A review of their web site shows the trend.

* The Board of Education in Cobb County, GA voted in 2002 to put stickers into science textbooks that described evolution as “a theory, not a fact.” Parents filed suit to remove the stickers; the case was decided in their favor in January 2005 but then remanded for retrial. Twenty thousand stickers were scraped off with razor blades, and everyone elected to the county board in July 2006 went on record as opposing them. The case was settled out of court in December 2006 with the School Board agreeing permanently not to take any action that “would prevent or hinder the teaching of evolution.”

* The Ohio State Board of Education adopted state science standards that were critical of evolution in 2002. The ensuing fight was settled in 2006, when the Board fixed the standard and dissolved a committee that had been considering further revisions. Voters added an exclamation point in the 2006 elections, when four Board seats and the Governorship went to candidates who rejected creationism as science.

* The Kansas State Board of Education adopted standards in November 2005 that misrepresented evolution as scientifically controversial. After intense criticism, they reversed the decision in February 2007.

* Anti-evolution bills were defeated in the Florida Legislature in May 2005, the Utah Legislature in February 2006, and the Alabama legislature in April 2006.

The few Creationist proposals that remain active in state legislatures now have a different tone. South Carolina legislators are considering a bill that would require instructional materials to “emphasize critical thinking and analysis in each content area.” A citizens’ group called South Carolinians for Science Education opposes the bill because its sponsor, Rep. Robert Walker (R-Spartanburg), is an avowed creationist. The group suspects that if Walker prevails, he would use the law to make another run at the state standards.

In Tennessee, state senator Raymond Finney (R-Maryville) introduced a resolution in February 2007 that would formally ask the State Education Commissioner whether the universe “has been created or has merely happened by random, unplanned, and purposeless occurrences.” When he introduced the bill, Finney said that his long-term goal was to bring creationism to science classes. But a month later he said, “I’m not sure I’m going forward with that . . . I probably made a mistake in approaching it from a creation aspect. People get so sensitive about whether children might be exposed to any sort of religious thing.”

“Creationists aren’t going away,” said Dave Thomas, President of New Mexicans for Science and Reason. “They’re just getting sneakier.”

Dr. Harold Varmus has a Master’s in English from Harvard and an MD from Columbia. He is author of over 300 scientific papers and four books, including a general-audience introduction to the genetics of cancer. He has a wall of scientific prizes, including the Nobel. He was head of the National Institutes of Health during a time when its budget doubled. He is currently CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. So when he says the barbarians are at the gates, you’d better listen.

During a recent talk called “The Future of Science in America,” Varmus recited a long and familiar list of problems scientists have been having with Federal politicians. Funding for research is flat or declining, evidence of climate change is being ignored, stem cell research is endangered, and on and on. He said that the difficult situation in Washington isn’t all the fault of George W. Bush, but reflects a divide in the opinions Americans hold about science. Then he showed a slide titled “Top 10 Places Where Science Education Is Under Threat,” which came from a report issued in September 2005 that describes local efforts to introduce the doctrine of Biblical creation into science courses at public schools. A busy guy like Dr. Varmus probably hasn’t had time to catch up on what has happened in these places in the last two years, so we will do it for him in the next few posts.

The big news comes from the number one town on Varmus’ list, Dover, PA. Back in October 2004, Dover’s school board voted 6 to 3 to require all ninth-grade biology teachers to read a statement before teaching lessons on evolution. The statement said that evolution is a “theory…not a fact,” and that “gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence.” Teachers were also required to refer to a book called Of Pandas and People that promotes a doctrine called intelligent design, which argues that the vast complexity of natural systems is proof that they were created by a divine being. The Dover board members who voted against the change resigned, and the rule was soon challenged by a group of parents in Federal District Court. A year after the school board’s ruling went into effect, Judge John E. Jones III reversed it. His opinion attracted wide attention because it held that teaching intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in a public school classroom violates the separation of church and state clause in the First Amendment and is therefore unconstitutional.

The decision in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District was a serious blow to intelligent design activists, who had hoped that cross-examining scientists in court would squeeze the truth out of them and prove evolution was non-scientific. The spectacular failure of this “vise strategy” was particularly embarrassing in Dover, because the district’s legal bills totaled about $2 million. Three of the six board members who had supported the rule resigned during the controversy, and two more supporters were voted out a month before the judge’s decision. The new board voted 8 to 1 in January 2006 to remove the rule and not appeal the court’s ruling. The “no” vote came from Heather Geesey, the sole survivor of the 2004 board, who is up for re-election this year. The whole story is ably told by reporter Edward Humes in a new book, Monkey Girl.

Maybe Dover doesn’t deserve reputation for science-bashing any more, but it’s going to be stuck with it. The Kitzmiller decision reverberated across the country and might have been the high-water mark of the campaign to put the Bible into public schools. So is Varmus just an alarmist? Not hardly. Only 48 percent of Americans agree that “the scientific theory of evolution is well supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community,” according to the Newsweek Poll of March 31, 2007. Just 25 percent of evangelical Protestants believe that evidence supports evolution, along with 57 percent of non-evangelical Protestants, 58 percent of Catholics, and 73 percent of agnostics and atheists. And last year, a poll by the Pew Research Center found that 58 percent of those interviewed support the idea of teaching creationism along with evolution in schools. It ain’t over.