So, I -really really- am interested in preserving the environment, and I -am-
a Greenpeacer, and I (sometimes) recycle and I reduce and re-use, and all
that good stuff. But more and more often I see things that I question in
environmentalist media, and I’m beginning to suspect it of being more like
propaganda in most cases than actual informed ecological information.

Consider the following. I saw this in Adbusters a while back, it was a two
page spread, and they had a little comment about how the whole world would
someday be covered in roads! *gasp*

Now, this image isn’t the greatest, because it’s awfully small, so the roads
all kindof blur together. But on the PacificBio poster there’s all kinds of
little lines running hair-thin between eachother, and it’s super-dense in
urbanized areas.

The thing that bothers me about this is that while it -looks- like the US is
covered in asphalt, the roads are -not to scale-. It would be very
easy to get the impression that everywhere is yellow lines and black tar, but
seen from this distance, roads on the continental US would be microscopic on
the paper. They’d all -be- there, but they’d be like the hairs on paramecium
in the grain of the paper that you read the map on. Take a good gander at a
satellite image of the US and tell me if you can see any roads. Even a -
really- big map. Heck, you can barely see LA from space at 10m resolution.

What I’m saying isn’t that they’re -wrong-… there are lots of roads and one
might even say there are too many. But I think they’re guilty of spreading
hysteria among people who don’t spend a lot of time working with satellite
maps.

I’d like to see them publish a Canadian road map. There’d be a bunch of
bands across the bottom, and then thousands and thousands of kilometers of
nothingness above it.