Amazing Facts

From Discover's brief review of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt (Knopf):

In the mid-19th century, horses struck and killed pedestrians in New York City more often than car accidents kill people today. (August 2008, page 74)

I want to read Vanderbilt's book. It sounds very interesting, and his How We Drive blog has some acute commentary, which makes me think the book must be even better.

From Jared Diamond's book Collapse (yes, I am still reading it, but I'm getting pretty close to the end!):

Average blood lead levels in Chinese city-dwellers are nearly double the levels considered elsewhere in the world to be dangerously high and to put at risk the mental development of children. (page 368)

Also from Collapse:

Until about 20 years ago, the Australian government not only subsidized land clearance, but actually required it of lease holders. (Much agricultural land in Australia is not owned outright by farmers, as in the U.S., but is owned by the government and leased to farmers.) Leaseholders were given tax deductions for agricultural machinery and labor involved in land clearance, [and] were assigned quotas of land to clear as a condition of retaining their lease.... Farmers and businesses were able to make a profit just by buying or leasing land covered with native vegetation and unsuitable for sustained agriculture, clearing that vegetation, planting one or two wheat crops that exhausted the soil, and then abandoning the property. (page 393)

"Land clearance" is also known as deforestation, which leads to erosion and, in Australia, salinization of the soil. And this was an official government policy until the 1980s.