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Our Urban State

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A while back I showed off the population of New York State in 2010, based on every town’s population. We looked at population density of various towns, and how it’s very dense in a few towns, and very spread out in most of state. Today, let’s look at a map of the developed areas of NY State.

Craziness at the Early Vote place

Roughly 10% of the state is urbanized… the rest of state is rural.

So what goes on in the rest of state? About 24% of the state is farmed — lots of cows, corn, alfalfa and hay, but an even bigger portion is essentially wildlands, covered with water or forest lands.

Distance to State Parks

It’s not to say people don’t live in other areas — they do. But small rural houses and farm steads are just footnotes, in a largely wild, forested or farmed landscape that makes up most of New York.

Department of Hype and Overreaction

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I slept in this morning. But when I awoke, there really wasn’t much snow at all.

Dog's Eye View

People said the yesterday was going to be awful, but it didn’t snow until after 5 pm.

Barn

And in the evening, it just was a nuisance snow, by 10 AM, mostly all removed.

Heavy Snow Falling

… So I’m just a little annoyed by the hype.

Outside the 2%

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I live and work in an urbanized area. For most of week, I get on a bus or walk from place to place, go to work, go to the library, and otherwise interact with others in an urbanized fashion. People from Albany are pretty urban, by no means is Albany a farm town — although there are certainly many rural areas around Albany.


View Larger Map

Yet, despite all the time I spend in Albany, the city really is just a little dot on the map compared to vast lands around it. Drive less then 20 miles in any direction, and chances are you’ll be in a mountain town, a farm town, or some kind of national or state forest.

Untitled

Albany is a large enough of a metro-area to have a very urban feel to it. It’s cities have all of the regular urban problems, from drugs to gang violence. But your never very far from the rural hinderlands, and truly rural areas that are largely independent from the city’s regular activities.

Sun is Setting

With the cold weather of the past two months, I’ve spent much too much time in city. But getting back up to Vermont I’ve come to realize all I’ve missed, outside the 2%.

As Summer 2012 Fades Away

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The endless summer has shown it must come to an end. I woke up the other day at Moose Plains, and the temperature was only 46 degrees out. It was a chilly morning out, but only a symbol of what is to come as we fade into winter. Daylight is rapidly dropping every day.

Labrador Pond

Probably it would not be as big of deal for me, if I didn’t have to work so much during the fall. But I expect this fall to be a very busy season, where I won’t get to spend much time in the wilderness, camping, hiking, and spending time outdoors until mid-November. You know, I got to work and make money for the toys. And by mid-November, the winter will be well among us.

North Fork Mountain

There is nothing to stop to winter from returning. And as soon as winter comes, winter will be on its way out, as we move back towards April and ultimately mid-May when things finally green up and the endless days of summer return once again. It’s the cycle of life.

Inside the Pine Creek Gorge

… It just seems like summer is much too short.

After 12 Years Have I Abandoned My Blog?

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Recently, I have been posting a whole lot less to my blog. Fewer essays, and I even broke the pratice of posting new content and/or reruns in recent weeks. I keep posting new photos as I go on trips, but I have been doing fewer and few maps. And due to issues with the blog software, some maps just keep disappearing.

I have been doing more reading, less writing. Twitter has filled in the gap, because most of the things I have to say, are best said conservations are really quite short. Often it’s best to just leave things up to the experts, and point to their words more, and mine less.

Grape Farm Along Canal

I continue to work on the next version of the blog software. I swore it would be ready in May or June, yet I still don’t have a functional version. It’s my fault, because the weather has been so nice, I’ve not really wanted to spend much time blogging or writing code. It will probably have to wait for winter now.

But also, I’ve just run out of good ideas for blog posts. I am tired of making up stuff, and the reality is some of my best ideas and posts have already been written, so why rewrite? I also don’t want to duplicate posts that are already done. Why waste my time or internet bandwidth, repeating what is already done.

At any rate, the blog is kind of in low-gear for now. Better stuff will come eventually though, or so I hope. I really hope to have things really back up to speed by Winter 2013.

Still Recovering After Vacation

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I really like Northwest Pennsylvania. It’s so wild and different then anything in New York State, without all of the restrictions applied on the land and people of a liberal state like New York. All things rugged and back country are vastly different then in Albany.

Time seemed unlimited on vacation. Eight days and nights sure seemed like a long time. Every morning lighting the cook stove, cooking up breakfast on styrofoam plates, packing up the gear, tearing down camp, and heading out for the day, exploring truck trails and wild landscapes. Set up campsite, turn on Christmas lights, build a campfire, and burn the day’s garbage, while listening to country music with my cowboy hat on.

Allegheny Reservior

In contrast, the land of work is vastly different. It’s setting an alarm clock, getting up, making breakfast on an electric stove, and catching the bus to work, and sitting in an office all day. Then come home, cook dinner, wash dishes, and sort the trash for recycling. Walk down to the park or the library. No opporunties to burn anything.

Man cities, and my urban reality in the state that best represents liberal statism, sucks.

With Fog Below

In eight days, I managed to burn through 86.8 gallons, travel 1490 miles, and got 17.0 MPG. Those truck trails sure make Big Red burn a lot of gas. And I sure need the $310 to cover the cost of gas, plus the other $90 for beer, food, and supplies. Hell, even the styrofoam plates and paper towels aren’t free.

I also realize that I won’t be up for such an adventure for quite a while. It’s a mix of money and just getting the time off, but the reality is I probably won’t be back in Pennsylvania for a while. Somehow, trips to Adirondacks don’t seem so far or exciting, as Northwest Pennsylvania.

Radio Tower

After looking forward to this trip, all that is left is some pictures, burn out tin cans for recycling, and the hang-over made up of memories.

Exploiting the Drought for Ideological Purposes

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Last week, the Department of Environmental Conservation announced that they would be suspending all controlled burn permits state wide, and banning all outdoor brush burning through October 10th. What they conviently forgot to mention was under the DEC rules created by executive fiat by Pete Grannis’ DEC, that all outdoor brush burning is banned by DEC rule from October 15th to May 15th. Essentially they are banning all brush burning for the next year, but they didn’t want to sound like they were doing that.

It is pretty dry out. The fire danger is “High” in many parts of state, which is the second highest level under “Very High” which is usually reserved for when actual large brush fires have broken out and all outdoor fires — including small campfires and barbeque grills. Those kind of conditions are generally unheard of in the relatively wet eastern states, except maybe in snowless periods of the early spring before things green up.

In previous times, regulating and preventing brush fires was largely a local task based on county decision making, except in the Adirondack Park (where the Adirondack Park Agency had that power). County Executives or County Legislatures would proclaim a high fire danger and ban various types of outdoor burning — camp fires, brush burn piles, trash fires, etc. Counties would typically insitute such bans based on local conditions, not some broad state handed down decree. Such bans would be short lived, until the rains came, and soaked down the landscape.

The reality is at a state level, an unholy alliance of radical environmentalists and solid waste hauling companies have come together to basically ban all outdoor burning. Industry likes it to, because if you blame backyard brush and trash burning for air pollution, you don’t have to look at what’s coming up the smoke stacks. Environmentalists claim to be concerned about the smoke from burning brush, or for that matter anything besides fossil fuels in highly controlled conditions

They have yet to ban campfires due to pollution controls, probably due to the political backlash of outdoors recreationalists, but you know that’s next. They are already after outdoor wood boilers, and fireplaces, due to so-called pollution controls, while ignoring serious environmental problems that are from large industrial polluters.