[lit-ideas] Re: Sunday Wotsit

No, actually, you are NOT one great big highway. Have you ever been to
Montana? Wyoming? Idaho? Kansas? North Dakota? Minnesota? These are
HUGE states in area and they have no population.
As of 2006, Minnesota was the 21st most populous state. Granted that northern Minnesota is sparsely populated, relative to the rest of the state, the Twin Cities metro area is densely populated, and has all of the trials and joys of any US metropolitan area.
For that matter, MN has a larger population than OR, which is thinly populated east of the Cascades. This side of the Cascades we have all the pollution, fouled streams, rapacious developers and despoiled wetlands one could want. Even the Willamette, which runs right through Portland is a toxic sewer.
That a state is thinly populated says nothing about the air and water pollution generated there. Montana (935,670) and Wyoming (last, with 509,294) have mines and refineries that would make a sultan blush.
There are no freeways in northern Michigan or northern Minnesota; but in each case the rest of the state makes up for that, where despoilization (a word I learned from JL) is concerned, and I believe that it wasn't the mere existence of freeways (or toll roads) that Irene was concerned with, but the environmental damage to which they contribute. 

Robert Paul

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