by Synapsid » Thu 05 Jun 2014, 19:08:49
ROCKMAN,
The state is quite a mix. It's largely rural but there's an urban corridor along the east side of Puget Sound that's about sixty miles long, from Everett (US Navy, sawmill, Boeing) in the north through Seattle and environs (world-class port, US Navy at Bremerton shipyard, Microsoft the Evil Empire, Amazon, Boeing, fishing, and on and on--oh, and Starbucks) to Tacoma in the south (major port, oil refinery, don't know about the smelter.) There's also McChord AFB and Fort Lewis Army base (tanks!) south of Tacoma--these are large bases and host out-of-area operations--and what used to call itself the most scenic ground zero in the world: Bangor nuclear-sub base a ways on the other side of Puget Sound, with a beautiful view of the Olympics and security that is really scary. There's a US Navy air station (recon) on Whidbey Island, to the west and north from Everett and south from Anacortes. Spokane, on the east side of the state next to Idaho (Famous Potatoes) has a large Air Force presence but I'm not familiar with it.
I don't know the head count but the DOD has a huge presence here, and it's famously thirsty for petroleum products.
West of the Cascades and outside that urban corridor most of Washington is farmland and forest and small towns, in my experience, until you get up to the big refineries at Anacortes and near Bellingham, almost to the Canadian border; south near Vancouver (the one on the Columbia) is a small urban conglomeration that is to some extent a suburb of Portland, Oregon, which is just across the river.
East of the Cascades is the West (we're in the Northwest on the west side.) There are two ways to tell once you crest the range and begin to descend: The trees begin to be Ponderosa pines, and your radio begins to twang ("Momma nearly died when Paw burned the house down in a drunk but it saved us from foreclosure, Praise be!") Much of it is sparsely populated semi-arid range land and farmland until you're almost to Idaho and the forest starts, except about the northern (at a guess) third, south of the border with Canada, which is forest. The Palouse wheat country is over toward Idaho and south of Spokane; China buys a lot of the wheat for noodles, bless their hearts. The Army is out near Yakima with a large firing range, and nearby is the Hanford nuclear reservation, where we keep the leaking waste casks so the radioactive ground water makes it to the Columbia where no-one will much notice. One of the local high school football teams has mushroom clouds on their helmets, unless they've abandoned that telling little touch.
The upshot is that there's a surprisingly large Federal presence here, in the form of the DOD and the Department of Energy. (The Bonneville Power Administration dams along the Columbia produce a lot of electricity and Grand Coulee Dam (the locals call it Disney Dam,) the top tourist destination in the state, uses some of it for a sound and light show. A lot of the remainder is exported.) East of the Cascades distances are long and pickup trucks numerous--well, you know what it's like. It's the West. And it votes conservative. Not a lot of them tree-huggers; (not a lot of them trees, in much of it). Pretty conservative in the forests up toward Canada, too, what with lumber and farming, but I've worked a lot in the West to the East of here and haven't encountered a lot of narrow-mindedness. Idaho is there for that.
I'm not surprised that the state produces a lot of GHG--those are your tax dollars and mine, helping to keep us safe and prosperous.
Praise be!