A Big litter box ....too much sand!

No need to search the web for "WTW" to see the reach of WTW. Just look at the bottom of a WTW page and find something like the following:


165 users are online (in the past 15 minutes)
5 members, 160 guests, 0 anonymous users

This is a typical mix of members and those that are just looking for something.
About 96% of people viewing the site are not members. WTW content is valuable for many. One might wonder why?

Paul

DavidGraves said:

Turn off the internet until it gains some sense of responsibility for its impact.

Click to expand...

Hear, hear. It used to be guidebooks, magazines, or word of mouth was how places got popular. But the internet really changed that. I've seen wonderful places overrun. It's hard to keep a secret any more. That got a lot worse with social media.

But long-gone old timers really complained in the 1970s when hiking proliferated with numerous guidebooks, and ruined their secret places. And remember when nearly all vehicles were rear wheel drive only? I wonder what it will be like in future generations?

I don't think Pandora's Box can be closed.

Agree. Us old timers were lucky to have traveled when places were hard to get to and the communication was non existent. I was in Katmandu in 1983. It was hard to get there and once there it was like being in the 15th century. My nephew went a few years ago and he said the wifi wasn't fast enough at the espresso bar.... yikes. Same ... Terra Del Fuego in 1979... I hopped a freighter!

Our generation has been lucky having been at the end of and witnessed one era and swooshed up into a new one faster than linear... more like exponential. Change is happening crazy fast. My hope is that we value the wildlife enough not to destroy what little they have left to survive. Bird populations are plummeting and the oceans......

My hope is that the discovery of the trillions of tons of hydrogen gas will lead to a boom where we can walk a lot more gently. Hydrogen can be used easily in all our vehicles with small adjustments and zero air pollution. Here is a hopeful article:

https://newatlas.com/energy/geologic-hydrogen-gold-rush/

It's great for us to look back at all the places we have been and now see the changes.
The younger gens don't have that "look back" so to them it's the "cats meow".
Boy I sure dated myself with that one.
I like the Hydrogen idea.
Frank

Oh one hand, I grieve for many of the lonely places I loved when younger that are now overrun and irrevocably changed. A result of modern humanity's insatiable fixation on growth and development, I suppose. On the other hand, I can still find many wonderful places that are off the beaten path. I am old enough to be sure that the last wild place I can find will be there after I am gone. How much longer, I don't know. But in the end we humans will pass away and be forgotten. Maybe just showing up in future sediments as a streak of enriched metals and organics. We are not as important as we fear we are.

I do wonder if that charming fool Edward Abby was right -- will the west be populated, at least to some extent, by blue-eyed Bedouins. I suppose so -- for a while, anyway.

Probably with the much lower birthrates, things won't be that bad in the future. Most developed countries aren't sustaining their population. Maybe there's hope for the many of the developing ones.