Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 230

Here is an excerpt from a newspaper article I recently read, "When Manhattan Was Mannahatta: A Stroll Through the Centuries," in the New York Times:

Ecosystems, actually. Manhattan is something like one percent the size of Yellowstone. Yellowstone is 2.2 million acres and it has 66 ecosystems. Mannahatta had 55.

It’s an interesting thought exercise to imagine what might have happened had the United States been colonized from the West, instead of from the East. We might have decided to make Manhattan a national park. We would be coming to New York for an entirely different sort of wildlife.