Acid Rain

           Any form of precipitation (rain, snow, sleet, or hail) containing sulfuric or nitric acid, generally with a pH value less than 5.6 (normal rain has a pH of 5.6 to 6.0 from the weak carbonic acid — H₂CO₃ — in the atmosphere). Sulfur dioxide (SO₂) and nitrogen oxides (NO) are the primary constituents of acid rain. In the US, About ²/₃ of all SO₂ and ¼ of all NO originate from electric power generating plants that rely on burning fossil fuels, especially coal. Other acid rain sources include various industrial processes, especially oil refining and ore smelting and emissions from gasoline engines in motor vehicles. Acid rain results when those emitted gases react in the atmosphere with water vapor, oxygen, and other chemicals to form various complex acidic compounds. Energy from the Sun increases the rate of most of those reactions. The result is a mild solution of sulfuric and nitric acids in the atmosphere that affects the Earth in the form of precipitation. Many of those pollutants can remain in the atmosphere for five or six days and thus can be transported by the winds far from their source regions.

Real World Problem: All industrialized and many developing nations have been affected by acid rain. Among the best-known effects of those kinds of airborne pollution is the acidification of lakes. The higher acid levels destroy fish eggs and also leach aluminum from surrounding areas into the lakes, which proves toxic to adult fish. Consequently, many lakes in the northeastern part of North America and northern Europe are devoid of fish and other aquatic organisms. If that’s not bad enough, acid rain reduces forest and agricultural productivity in North America and Europe (as an example, about 80 percent of all the trees in Germany’s Black Forest have been adversely affected). In addition, since the 19^th Century in European and North American cities statutes, monuments, and other ornamental stonework have been corroded by the acid rain. Marble, limestone, or dolostone structures are especially vulnerable to that attack, literally dissolving stone details until entire sections are unrecognizable. This situation is complicated by the reality of atmospheric transport, which carries pollution from its source downwind, sometimes for thousands of miles. Therefore, Japan complains about pollution from China, Sweden complains about British pollution, and Canada complains about pollution generated in the Midwest. Although long-term human health effects are not known with great specificity, short-term effects include asthma and other lung-related problems, headaches, and eye, nose and throat irritations.

Author’s Note: Since the pH scale ranges from 0 to 14, a pH of 7 is neutral. Normal rain has a pH of ranging from 7 to 5.5 and acid rain can be as much as or even more than 100 times more acidic. It’s important to remember that the scale is logarithmic, meaning that a difference of a single whole integer represents a ten-fold change in absolute value; in other words, a drop of a single pH unit equals a 10-fold increase in the concentration of hydrogen ions, making the substance more acidic. As an aside, the pH scale was originally introduced in 1909 by the Danish biochemist Søren Peter Lauritz Sørensen when he used the symbol pH in the measurement of the acidity or alkalinity of solutions, with strongly alkaline registering at the upper end of the scale and highly acidic at the lower end. The letter p was derived from the German word, potenz, meaning power or exponent or potential of a number, in this case 10, and the H was, of course, hydrogen.

Historical Background: The chemist Robert Angus Smith was England’s first alkali inspector. In the late 1860s and early 1870s he discovered a connection between air polluted by heavy industries over the city of Manchester and the high level of acidity in precipitation in the region. Smith published what is now regarded as a classic study, Air and Rain: The Beginnings of a Chemical Climatology, in which he coined the term, acid rain, and found that building taller smokestacks relieved the situation locally but spread the problem over much larger areas and completely failed to dilute the toxic fumes to a point where they were no longer harmful. In 1959 the Swedish soil chemist Svante Oden and meteorologist Erik Eriksson traced Sweden’s soil and lake problems to emissions from industrial plants in Germany and England and ushered in the first modern awareness of the serious problem of long-distance transport of toxic chemicals. Since the 1980s, tall stacks used in electrical power stations and industrial smelters have grown even taller, with many reaching heights over 1,000 feet. Tests of several industrial smelter stacks demonstrated that the stack gases were as hot as 700° F and exited the stacks at speeds of up to 55 miles per hour. The result of the transformation from short to tall stacks was that local air quality improved but regional and even international pollution increased dramatically, which provides yet another example of the revenge of unintended consequences. See Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, 1996.

Additional Author’s Note: Very high levels of acidity in rain have been recorded in the U.S. in numerous states, but among the lowest pH readings were in Kane, Pennsylvania (pH 2.7 or as acid as lemon juice), and Wheeling, West Virginia (pH 1.5 or about the level of stomach acid).

Introduction to the GEOSCIENCES SOURCE BOOK

Several years ago, when I first thought of creating the GeoSciences Source Book, I was working as an urban and environmental planner for an international consulting firm. A half dozen of the better known reference works defining geological and geoscience terms sitting on my bookshelf were getting quite a workout. Since previously I had been a university professor with regular assignments teaching geoscience courses to undergraduates and graduates, I began thinking about a reference text that would be oriented to students and other readers who were being introduced to the field.

The goal of this highly abbreviated blogspot version of the GeoSciences Source Book is to serve as a more accessible and user-friendly resource that will stimulate and amuse readers with a general interest in science. The terms that will be posted on this blog are those that in my opinion have currency in our world of human interaction. Therefore, they will NOT be tedious or mind-numbing. Readers can even leave a request for a specific definition in the Comment part of the blog and I will search the Source Book and see if I have an appropriate listing that can be posted.

As I began the actual process of researching, assembling, creating, writing, and rewriting definitions, my original concept evolved quickly. I soon realized that certain terms and concepts cried out for the type of treatment found in technical dictionaries or even in specialized encyclopedias. After considerable reflection and soul-searching I realized that what I wanted to write had to be a true hybrid: part glossary, part dictionary, and part encyclopedia. And, in the end, part tongue-in-cheek fun.

To my way of thinking, materials that occasionally contain elements of humor are much less intimidating and therefore more accessible to the average student. For me, the best educational approach is one based on the excitement of discovery mixed with the elixir of laughter rather than one that is intentionally mind-numbing or even punitively obtuse. But despite the occasional introduction of humorous elements, definitions contained in this Source Book are never abridged, changed, or dumbed-down for the sake of a chuckle or two. Here’s an example from the text.

Chatter Mark            Erosional feature typically associated with alpine glaciers; small, curved gouge mark or scar on bedrock made by rock debris contained in the base of a glacier with each mark being roughly transverse to the direction of flow. However, since these crescentic marks may point in more than a single direction, analysis of the fracture plane from which rock materials have been removed may be required to determine the direction in which the ice mass moved. Similar percussion fractures/marks can be found on beach pebbles and stones. The term may be written chattermark, especially in references produced in the British educational tradition. Daffynition: Non-fatal lesion on a male brain that develops after the victim has been exposed to a group of women in spirited conversation.

Having studied geology and physical geography as an undergraduate and graduate student and later having taught geoscience courses at the university level, I decided that certain building-block ideas that were created by dedicated and inspired geoscientists cried out for more detailed treatment than could be afforded if I stuck with the type of approaches typical of several well-known glossaries or dictionaries. Describing concepts like plate tectonics or mantle plumes in one or two paragraphs proved an impossible task if I wanted to do more than offer a bare-bones summary. And how could I possibly pay tribute to people like Norman Bowen, Harry H. Hess, or Alfred Wegener if they were only accorded a highly forgettable line or two?

The scope of the fields covered in this Source Book includes the geosciences that struggle to create an understanding of the physical processes that shaped and continue to shape the Earth: geology, physical geography, glaciology, hydraulics/hydrology, volcanology, geophysics, geochemistry, meteorology, climatology, oceanography, geodesy, limnology, and atmospheric chemistry/physics.

Several critical elements that make this Source Book very different from other reference works include editorial attention paid to details, especially the listed elements described below:

Author’s Note

Real World Example

Real World Problem

Historical Background

Warning

Fun Stuff

Daffynition

Author’s Rant

The most common editorial-type element in the Source Book is the Author’s Note, which is precisely what it seems and contains a variety of information concerning a specific topic, individual geocientists, or other information that may be relevant only in the twisted mind of the author. For example, in New Mexico, Texas, and other Southwestern states soils commonly called “adobe soils” actually are not well-suited to brick-making since they contain far too much clay and thus tend to shrink and crack severely while drying. Or, that the justly famous Charles Lyell believed that extinct organisms would reappear in the future, a reminder that heroes and great scientists all have feet of clay and are prone to human error. Or that the term rheology was coined in 1920 by Lehigh University’s Eugene Bingham, who was inspired by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus’s famous aphorism, panta rhei, meaning everything is in flux, or everything flows, or everything is changing constantly; take your pick.

The Source Book is also chock-full of what are labeled Real World Examples of various natural features or processes. Those examples take important and interesting concepts from the theoretical to the actual and involve students in hands-on, real-life applications of what may at first seem to be abstract concepts. From my point of view as a former university professor, concepts are always improved by citing as many specific examples as possible to excite the readers’ natural curiosity and demonstrate how ideas relate to what’s happening on the ground, in real life situations. The underlying objective is to excite the interests of readers’, stimulating them into stepping outside and discovering the real world, no matter where it is: the Midwest, the Atlantic Coastal Plain, the mountains of Idaho, northern Canada, central Mexico, or Eastern Europe. Personal discovery of the many marvels and mysteries of the real world is what geoscience is all about.

A similar category, Real World Problems, discusses specific difficulties and challenges associated with various geoscience topics. Examples include acid rain, asbestos, lead poisoning, lahars and mudflows, nuclear waste storage, and open pit and underground mining.

In somewhat the same vein is the category, Historical Background, which provides depth and additional detail for a scientist who has contributed to one or more of the geosciences or for a critical concept. Examples include the backgrounds given for Archimedes and Evangelista Torricelli, or that cloud forms were first classified in 1801 by the well-known French botanist, Jean Lamarck, who today is largely remembered for his rejected theory of evolution.

On occasion, an inherently dangerous situation will prompt a Warning that advises readers to exercise caution in specific on-the-ground situations, as is provided in the definition. For example:

Rip Current          Relatively narrow (normally ten to 30 yards wide), strong surface ocean current commonly called rip tide, and erroneously known as undertow, that flows away from the shoreline through gaps in the surf zone at intervals along the shoreline, usually but not always cutting across a longshore bar; it is the seaward return flow from longshore current cells. Warning: If caught in a rip current, never try to swim against it back toward shore. Stay calm and try not to panic. Swim parallel to the shore across the rip current until you’ve worked your way out of the strongest part of the current and then head back toward the beach. Whatever you do, do not fight AGAINST the rip current or you may become exhausted and drown. This warning is extremely serious, even for the strongest and most experienced swimmers.

The category Fun Stuff introduces information that is sometimes relevant and other times totally off the wall; those sections are characterized by a frequently brash, irreverent attitude that pretty much sums up my entire life. Examples include: racy graffiti preserved on the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum by volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius; the first golf courses laid out in Scotland on glacial topography; teaching students the right way and not the wrong way to taste mineral specimens; and the differences between the fictional “ice-nine” created by the American novelist, Kurt Vonnegut, in his book Cat’s Cradle and the real Ice IX.

A closely related category, Daffynition, which you saw above in the definition of chatter mark, is typically a good deal more push-the-envelope and gets a lot closer to the earth in its tongue-in-cheek definitions. An example is the Daffynition provided after the definition of Wind Chill: What you feel when a former significant other flies past you in a bar without a glance. Or the Daffynition provided after the definition of Coastal Plain: Unattractive, drab-looking person at the beach.

Another major difference between the Source Book and other geoscience references is that I purposely do not shy away from injecting personal or point of view comments. Whenever I express a strongly held personal opinion in the Source Book about any topic, I label it Author’s Rant, since most if not all of that material is quite subjective. I specifically do not want readers to mistake deeply held personal opinions for objective fact and therefore have identified those sections accordingly. Although a conscious effort has been made to avoid polemicizing this work, if only through labeling my heart-felt opinions clearly as such, in numerous other instances my personal viewpoints can be found in the text (some might use the phrase, intrude into), especially in the choice of examples used to illustrate key concepts, processes, or physical features.

On a philosophical basis, I simply do not believe in the so-called vaunted superiority of scientific objectivity. To me, so much of science is colored by who the researchers are, how and where and by whom they were trained, their personal and professional backgrounds, individual personalities and ways judgments are formed, and the nature of their personal epistemologies* that all too often the quest for “objectivity” is academic posturing or, far worse, self-delusion. Otherwise, how else could the widely differing opinions of Rollin T. Chamberlin and Arthur Holmes, two outstanding geologists, concerning Alfred Wegener’s Continental Drift Theory be explained?

What made Chamberlin a contemptuous scoffer of Wegener’s concepts and Holmes a true believer? Both men were first-class geoscientists; both were meticulous researchers and scholars; and both had access to the full thrust of Wegener’s ideas. Yet, the supposedly objective method of science failed to establish common ground. Chamberlin died believing he was correct and that Wegener was little more than a well-educated charlatan. Holmes lived to see his positive evaluation of the controversial drift theory and convection currents upheld in the work of such great geoscientists as Keith Runcorn, Edward Irving, Harry Hess, Robert Dietz, and J. Tuzo Wilson among many others.

Chamberlin nit-picked several of Wegener’s obviously incorrect points to death while Holmes became enchanted with Wegener’s mind-expanding vision and, by proposing massive convection cells in the Earth’s crust, even identified the correct mechanism for continental (plate) movements. Would it have made a difference if Chamberlin had admitted his personal biases (that Wegener’s ideas were nonsense simply because he was a meteorologist and not a professional geologist and therefore should not even be thinking about geological issues) and had made an effort to look beyond them? It didn’t work out that way because Chamberlin refused to admit to any such so-called scientific error as subjectivity.

My point is simple. As humans we are inherently subjective. If we acknowledge that salient fact and work to control the adverse effects that that condition may bring to our work, or even try to use that subjectivity as a strength (through addressing it directly as a source of insights, intuition, hunches, ideas, etc.) rather than as a weakness and pretending that it doesn’t exist, wouldn’t science be all the better for that effort? Incidentally, my belief is not that objective reality doesn’t exist or shouldn’t be the goal in science but that discrepancies between subjective individual judgments and objective reality must be factored into the picture. Recognizing truth in geoscience or metaphysics requires selflessness. The objectivity part comes in the conscious struggle to leave yourself out of the research so you can determine the way things are in themselves, not the way you feel about them or how you wish they would be.

My personal subjective position that has informed the materials presented in the Source Book this is that of an environmentalist who firmly believes that every person has an obligation to live as sustainable a life as is practically possible. Only then will we as individuals and as a collective be able to adapt the Earth’s resources and inhabit environments in ways that are not destructive to our future and that of our children and grandchildren.

That said, I admit to having very little patience for positions that seek to prove a point of view by picking and choosing evidence that has been prejudged to fit a topic and then arguing as if no other valid data exist. In this case, I am specifically referring to creationism and so-called intelligent design. Science is by its very nature a messy endeavor of fits and starts. No attempt to clean up the clutter will ever change the nature of the hesitant, faltering steps toward what is hoped to be clarity and increased understanding of complex variables. But, unlike creationism or intelligent design, science has no previously conceived end state toward which people are working. If creationists are determined to argue the situation logically, let them go back to the discoveries of Lyell, Hutton, Darwin, Becquerel, Marie and Pierre Curie, Rutherford, Thompson, Soddy, Boltwood, Holmes, J. Tuzo Wilson, and Edward Irving and demonstrate the precise nature of their scientific errors. If not, I wish they would shut up and spare us their specious nonsense. And that, dear Readers, is what an Author’s Rant is all about.

---

 * In other words: “How do you know what you know?” That’s a question philosophers have been agonizing over for well over two thousand years, with a tremendous amount of heat and considerable light but no definitive resolution. It is also a question that directly confronts scientists but is all too frequently ignored.

Key Marco: A Tale of Mindless Destruction -- EATING FLORIDA

All too many people look at whatever landscape is in front of them and have little curiosity about why it appears the way it does or how it got to be like that. Many of us are likely to think most of the Midwest was always deforested. Or that the land now constituting most of the Miami-Dade metropolitan area was always relatively dry. We have little appreciation of the role of human agency in shaping our landscapes and how we see the “natural” world.

The following materials are a short primer in human agency. They are meant for Readers who are curious about what all central and southern Florida not controlled by the Federal government will look like if sharp-eyed developers, their pet politicians, and ineffectual State and Federal regulators get their way. The destruction of Key Marco is a metaphor for what is in store for the rest of the State if existing conditions and trends prevail.

Key Marco is the largest island in the archipelago known as the Ten Thousand Islands. As recently as the early 1960s, Key Marco was south Florida’s crown jewel, a masterpiece of habitats singing a multi-voiced chorus of natural splendor and astounding cultural resources with minimal modern development. Human presence weighed lightly on the landscape in the small fishing villages of Old Marco, Caxambas, and Goodland.

The area surrounding Key Marco is part of what geologists call the South Florida Terraced Coastal Lowland, an area characterized by an interconnected land-water complex of streams, estuaries, bays, lagoons, low-lying islands, mangrove swamps, salt water marshes, and wetlands of incredible diversity. The elevated wave-built terraces on Key Marco and other nearby islands, quite the surprise in abysmally flat south Florida, are a result of the ocean’s periodic rising and falling in response to glacial fluctuations. For nearly 6,000 years, the chain of barrier islands, extending from just north of Tampa Bay to Cape Sable, protected the coast from severe storms that pounded Florida’s southwest coastline with regularity.

Those islands and their gracefully terraced shorelines, among which are the remarkable sand dunes on Key Marco, at least one of which rises over 50 feet in elevation, marking the highest natural height above mean sea level in southwest Florida, are a result of two interrelated geomorphic processes. The first consists of the relatively recent landward transport of both clastic (broken rock fragments) and organic sediments previously discharged by rivers associated with the Tampa Bay and Charlotte Harbor estuaries. The second process is the erosion and consequent deposition of indigenous marine materials (shell fragments and other organic detritus) related to waves working the coastal margins. Combine the effects of those processes and you get south Florida barrier islands, specifically the Ten Thousand Islands.

Key Marco and adjacent areas were settled by several waves of peoples, beginning sometime around 4,700 BCE, when Archaic hunting and gathering groups lived on elevated dune ridges surrounding Barfield Bay and on the nearby Horr's Island. About 500 BCE, a critical transition occurred when, for reasons lost in the fog of time, that society turned from its previous emphasis on terrestrial resources and began exploiting marine life. As a result, settlement patterns shifted as new villages became established at water’s edge. Much later, nearly 250 years before the first European contact, the Calusa spread across the Glades and onto Key Marco as part of their domination of southern Florida. Until a combination of warfare and disease, both of which were Spanish versions of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, wiped them off the face of the Earth. Forever.

The first trained archaeologist to excavate Key Marco was Frank H. Cushing, who arrived in 1896. Several carved wooden objects that were obviously very old had been unearthed in 1895 by William Collier while digging in his garden. Collier , one of the first permanent white settlers on the island, immediately recognized them as Native American artifacts and notified several friends in the East, who contacted the well-known Cushing. As a result of a spectacularly successful dig on the island in 1896, Cushing concluded that the peoples living at Key Marco were what he called Pile Dwellers, building platforms on wooden piles driven into the sand and muck.

Author’s Note: Analysis by later investigators indicated that the Calusa in Key Marco lived on mounds or shell middens rather than piles. However, later archaeological investigations in 1964 and 1995 discovered several large houses that had used piles in their construction. Either way, Key Marco had been a major permanent settlement, established and used by a people known as the Muspa, who after 1,300 BCE became associated with and perhaps absorbed by the Calusa.

Cushing’s illustrated monograph on the Key Marco site on Florida’s Gulf Coast was first published more than 100 years ago. His report detailed Florida archaeological discoveries that have never since been duplicated. At one time work at the site was considered among the most important excavations in the world. Until as late as 1970 it was considered the most advanced archaeological investigation anywhere in the United States. Cushing, a researcher of great stature in the burgeoning disciplines of anthropology and social science, was the first professional American archaeologist to interpret artifacts and archeology from a cross-cultural ethnographic perspective and was the first to use the term chiefdom to characterize one of the primary organizational elements in prehistoric aboriginal culture, a term that wasn’t reintroduced to the literature until the 1970s. Equally amazing for that time, Cushing attempted to explain the emergence of the Calusa’s sociopolitical complexity based on the ruins and artifacts that he had excavated, another idea well in advance of its eventual acceptance by the academic archaeological community.

What Cushing found at the Key Marco site was a veritable treasure trove of marine and terrestrial artifacts and also structural evidence of a major Calusa ceremonial center. His research demonstrated that the site had been physically separated from the ocean by a massive human-built sea wall constructed behind a mangrove coast that protected the interior settlement from raging storm surges. Cushing also located numerous drainage canals leading from the coastline to the interior and elevated ceremonial areas constructed on shell mounds (which he had interpreted as piles).

His discovery of an abundance of usually perishable materials that consisted of both marine and terrestrial artifacts established Key Marco as an archaeological site unique in the history of Florida and the American Southeast. Actually, the spectacular Calusa artifacts have no counterparts in prehistoric objects found anywhere in North America. The numerous hooks, harpoons, netting, weights, and floats combined with nearly ubiquitous fish bones indicated a flourishing fishing economy. But, shell hoes and other agricultural implements pointed to at least relatively sophisticated use of terrestrial resources for food production.

Although the numerous shell implements (dippers, spoons, decorative pendants, beads, picks, hammers, chisels, awls, etc.) were remarkable in their variety, Cushing’s major discoveries served to demonstrate that carved wooden tools and objects used in daily life were also common in Key Marco. The incredible array of wooden artifacts Cushing found included trays, cups and bowls, mortars and pestles, ear buttons, plaques and tablets painted with realistic animal representations, carved amulets featuring fish and dolphin motif, adz handles, war clubs, and shark toothed knives.

Of the three-dimensional wooden artifacts, perhaps the most intriguing is a group of fourteen carved and painted masks and figureheads that were found by Cushing in pairs and that merged or transposed animal characteristics on human features. Two carved wood artifacts stand out in that collection. The first is an elegantly carved mask featuring the head of a deer with remarkable lupine attributes, including a wide open mouth in a threat display of large, sharp teeth. The mask was probably designed to be worn at ceremonial functions. Perhaps the most famous of Cushing’s discoveries was a small, strikingly beautiful, half-feline half-human figure posed kneeling that is known as the Key Marco Cat. Today, as sophisticated as we modernists think we are, its elegance and grace literally steal your breath away. It was a find of incredible significance. From the sand and muck he also recovered wooden carvings of indigenous animals: woodpeckers, turtles, wolves, deer, alligators, and pelicans. All rendered in a realistic style.

Subsequent digs proved unsuccessful in locating other artifacts. Today the site of the Calusa village center has been destroyed by extensive construction and urban development around the village of Old Marco. No further investigations are possible owing to the indefensible failure of the State of Florida to protect the site from urban encroachment, development, and eventual destruction. The State twirled its thumbs and stared vacantly into space while developers ripped apart what was Florida’s most important archaeological site for yet another residential subdivision and commercial area.

For interested Readers, the approximate location of Cushing’s dig, which he named the Court of the Pile Dwellers, is in the northern section of the island today known as Old Marco Village. The site is located at the southern end of Vernon Place bordering the cul-de-sac, on lots #7, #8, and #9 (as counted on the west side of the Place from its intersection with Palm Street).

For over 4,500 years, Key Marco had remained practically untouched in terms of human development. Even the early American settlers on the island were primarily fishermen or traders supplying smaller settlements in the Ten Thousand Islands; their occupancy altered the land in ways inconsequential. Their modest landscape changes were confined to limited areas settled by the William Collier and George Cuthbert families at Old Marco, the James Madison Barfield family in Caxambas on Barfield Bay, and the Pettitts on Goodland Bay. Then came Barron Gift Collier Senior, a visionary whose eyes only beheld opportunities to make ever more millions and moved, where else, to southwest Florida. He swooped down and bought the greater majority of Key Marco in 1922 and the possibility of change loomed large.

But, owing to the severe financial climate created by the Great Depression, little of import happened on Key Marco for many decades. Barron Gift Collier Senior died in New York on March 13, 1939, at the age of 66, a disappointed man even though at the time of his death he was Florida’s largest landowner. All land and no money must have been his final bitter lament. Then, in the 1960s, the cash-strapped Collier family sold 20,000 acres on and around Key Marco to the Mackle brothers’ Deltona Corporation, one of south Florida’s largest land developers. Not long after that $7 million sale, the Key was transformed from a sleepy, minimally developed fishing community into the modern-day Marco Island, a water recreation-oriented residential resort and retirement community. That “planned” community offered a subdivision heaven of single-family homes, golf courses, and finger canals to provide pleasure boating access to the surrounding Gulf of Mexico from what had been landlocked parcels.

One small difficulty surfaced as the plans were being prepared. To transform plans into saleable lots, Deltona had to totally trash the existing environment and replace it with a sterile human crudscape. No problem. Not with the corporation’s heavy-duty political contacts and the added clout of the Collier family greasing the way. The developer slithered up to Collier County officials and easily obtained the required zoning and building permits. Next, Deltona approached the State and was handed without hesitation all the dredge and fill permits they desired. Big surprise there. All Deltona had to do was turn over title of a few small, low-lying, undevelopable islands to the State as wildlife sanctuaries. A total of 4,000 acres out of 20,000. That might sound like a lot until you take a good look at those properties. In one fell swoop, Deltona got rid of all the tidal-influenced, seasonally flooded, mosquito-infested islands that would have been extraordinarily difficult or impossible to develop for the right to build higher densities on the choice pieces. Can you spell sweet deal? You bet.

Truth time. The State of Florida didn’t give a wood rat’s ass about a lousy 2,000 or 3,000 acres of premier and biologically productive red mangrove swamp forest and thousands of acres of bay bottoms that would have to bite the development bullet if Deltona got its way. And why would it care? The State had been granting developers the rights to destroy every single natural system in Florida well before that time without blinking an eye or giving negative environmental consequences a single thought. That was, ho-hum, business as usual.

So, with Collier County and the State firmly behind them, what possibly could stop the Mackle brothers from ripping up and raping practically all the Island’s natural habitats and replacing them with paved roads, finger canals, retail strip centers like thousands of others, golf courses, and one terminally boring and architecturally worthless residential subdivision after another? Surely, as a State and a nation we are in absolutely desperate need of more of those exceedingly rare commodities. And, of course, so many sensitive natural environments can be found from coast to coast that they simply cry out to be replaced by one cash-generating retail center or subdivision after the other. Hey, Joe-Bob, in the U.S. property rights be King. Especially if you donate money to the right political campaigns and know the right people in Tallahassee, grease being an essential ingredient in the land development business.

Then again, the relatively substantiveless concept of sensitive natural environment, especially to powerbrokers and their pet pols, fades immediately from the picture when it comes to flint-eyed financial reality. More houses mean more profits in developers’ pockets, a situation that translates into more donations to the election campaigns of fat-cat politicians. And certainly that's the most important consideration in Florida where big business has held the collective testicles of the State Legislature in its ruthless grip from the get-go. A good question is why would anyone want to save Key Marco's complex ecosystems, including shallow bays, miles of uncluttered and undeveloped beaches, the highest natural dune ridges in the State, highly productive estuarine environments, superbly healthy mangrove forests that were vital nurseries for many dozens of species of sport fish and crustaceans, not to mention the unmatched Calusa archaeological sites. Why indeed?

The truth is reality dealt cards from a stacked deck and the ecosystems collectively known as Key Marco and the Ten Thousand Islands were never in the game. Start them bulldozers, boys. Rip out those damned mangroves so the new homeowners have unobstructed views of the water as they kick back on their screened-in porches and attach their margarita and daiquiri IVs.

The Deltona Corporation never hesitated. It rolled up its sleeves and turned that fancy master plan into phased construction projects. Within several years more than 50 percent of what had been Key Marco was developed into the meretricious reality of strip centers, hotels-resorts, and subdivisions of vacation and retirement homes marketed as Marco Island. Fertile and productive ecosystems be damned. Shallow bay bottoms, marine grass beds, and mud flats were dredged and pumped on shore to form new land. Remember, creation of new land equals piles of money in the developer’s pocket. Mangrove forests were literally ripped from the land-water margins. Priceless and irreplaceable wildlife habitat was destroyed without a thought. Finger canals were dug to increase the value of property that had previously been landlocked so the soon to be happy homeowners would have motorboat access to the bays. It didn't matter that many of those canals would ferment in the summer because their gradients were too low and the water too shallow, meaning they couldn't flush naturally before the Sun cooked the organic material into a noxious stew that stunk to high Heaven. Bet your sweet ass that awkward fact wasn't highlighted in the fancy sales brochures. No sir.

All in all, it was typical Florida oceanfront/bayfront residential development. No worse and one hell of a lot better than dozens of similar crappy residential developments anyone could point to in the nearby communities of Naples, Ft. Myers, and the eternally butt-ugly Cape Coral. So, what's the beef you might ask. What Deltona created was a just another Florida retirement-vacation home subdivision project. As was written previously, ho-hum, business in Florida as usual. As Billy-Ray loves to remind me: "Hey, bud, landowners got every legal right to develop their property any way they damned well please."

But several groups of environmental activists in Collier County were understandably appalled by the Deltona Corporation’s intent to develop even more subdivisions in close proximity to natural systems of extraordinary beauty and irreplaceable environmental value. The specific biological treasure the activists were determined to protect was the nearby Rookery Bay (they knew Key Marco was already burnt toast twisting in the wind). Instead of the all too common and ineffectual weeping, wailing, and hand-wringing so characteristic of environmental groups of that time, the angry environmentalists started pounding on the newly formed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, demanding that they do their jobs and enforce provisions of the National Environmental Protection Act and Section 404 of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act.

That's when the totally unforeseeable and almost unthinkable happened. Surprise of surprises, in 1971 the Corps, without doubt deathly afraid of being dragged into the national spotlight by their then chief nemesis, the President’s Council of Environmental Quality, and correctly identified as the environmental vandal it has always been, issued a stop order. Deltona was forced to cease all development activities until the Corporation applied for and was granted the Federal dredge and fill permits that had previously been conveniently overlooked. Or thought not to apply to their Marco Island construction projects. Isn't it always better to be blissfully ignorant of the law than knowingly culpable?

Months earlier Deltona had requested permits to dredge over eighteen million cubic yards of underwater materials (better start thinking total bay bottom destruction), build 70 additional miles of canals, and destroy 2,200 acres of mangrove forest in order to construct 5,700 more single-family houses in its next construction phase. With the stop order, those permits, plus others, hung in the balance. After a very bitter and protracted public battle between Deltona and environmentalists, the Corps refused to issue the required permits.

The Deltona Corporation had no choice but to fold its tents and move on to other areas to create unique subdivisions the likes of which had never seen before on the face of the Earth. Sure, and like my friend Billy-Ray, don't we all believe in the absolute right of property owners to develop their land as they see fit without interference from the state? No matter what beautiful, unique, and sensitive environment gets ripped and raped in the process. Property rights do be King in the good, ol' U.S. of A.

One stunningly clear but not fond memory of my first visit to Marco Island in 1977 won’t seem to stay pushed back in the corners of my mind so I'll share it with you. As a university professor teaching a course that combined land use and environmental planning, I had taken a group of students to a construction site near Smokehouse Bay in the northern part of the Island. We had driven into the site on a rough sand-gravel track that is now paved and identified on maps as Tigertail Court.

It was a beautiful morning in early June, a few minutes before 7:00 AM. Most of the construction crew was gathered in some sort of meeting in front of the project manager’s trailer and paid no attention as we climbed out of our cars and wandered around the site. After a few minutes we came to a bayshore area where a group of undisturbed red mangroves (Rhizophora mangle for the botanically inclined) stood a few feet out in the water. Their characteristic reddish arched prop roots gave the mangrove a very distinctive appearance that can be recognized even by botanical neophytes like me. The trees were adjacent to a patch of heavily disturbed sandy ground that had recently been completely denuded of landside vegetation. The scars appeared painfully fresh, as though the trees and bushes had been ripped from the earth only the day before, which, we later learned, was exactly what had happened.

In a hushed tone a sharp-eyed student called our collective attention to a bald eagle perched high in a nearby baldcypress. Larger and far bulkier than I had imagined, it sat without moving, its eyes glaring intently at the water, not at us, as it searched for breakfast. We all froze, speaking in soft whispers since we were standing much closer to the eagle than I would have believed possible. It was a spellbinding, magical moment.

Suddenly the morning's serenity was shredded by a ferocious explosion as a nearby bulldozer roared into action. The eagle turned and stared dyspeptically in our direction for the briefest moment, then lifted off, heading for some unknown and obviously more peaceful vantage point. It took a few minutes before we were able to catch our breaths and articulate individual and shared feelings about the sharp disconnect between urban development and indigenous wildlife. It was a distressing but, at the same time, unforgettable moment in the revealed meaning of modern life.

Another reflection. Today there sits on my desk, not more than a foot away as I type at my computer, a treasured artifact retrieved from Marco Island those thirty years ago. It's an old seashell, a Busycon contrarium according to one of my marine scientist friends, or a left-handed whelk in everyday language (also known as a lightning whelk). Thousands are found on beaches throughout southern Florida every year. What makes this one so special? It is a Native American artifact. Some unknown Calusa took a rock and knocked a hole in the wide, upper body of the shell, into which she stuck a branch an inch or so thick and created a rudimentary hoe for digging in the sandy soil. Handling it now, I feel an ineffable connection to that unknowable person. This simple implement is even more treasured since I retrieved it from a rubbish pile at a home construction site on a vegetated Calusa mound in the Indian Hills neighborhood of what had been the old fishing village of Caxambas, where it was waiting for the trash man to haul it away.

Remember the old saw? One man's trash is another's treasure. And so it is with islands, only what had become one corporation's profit center might have functioned as an environmental and cultural preserve of world-class significance, providing any number of insights into Florida's complex past for many thousands of visitors each year. But in the great scheme of life it was not meant to be. Thanks to hard-eyed men like Barron Gift Collier Senior and the Mackle brothers, the incredible treasure that had been Key Marco was bastardized into the profanity of Marco Island.

More than ten years ago, on our way to catch a plane in Miami, my wife and I stopped in Marco. I was unable to resist the lure of revisiting old memories and re-opening old wounds. I spent so much time wandering around, cursing developers and the State of Florida, that my patient and long-suffering partner suggested we stay overnight on the Island instead of driving to Miami. Initially, and quite indignantly, I refused on the grounds that staying there would somehow sanction the desecration of Key Marco. But in the end I was persuaded by her calm rationality. We were both too tired to drive so stayed the night at a large, well-known (but unnamed to protect the guilty) Beach Hotel and Resort.

While unpacking I ordered cold refreshments to be brought to our room. A little toddy for our weary bodies. While waiting for the drinks I gazed down at the swimming pool, to check out the water quality, to be sure. We were seven stories up and almost directly overlooked the pool area. I noticed some sort of animal activity high in one of the palm trees at the edge of the concrete sunning deck. Thinking it to be a bird's nest, I retrieved my well-worn but reliable binoculars from a carry-on and focused on the tree top. Low and behold, it was a nest of rats. Yes, rats. I'm not exaggerating. Nesting right there in the palm tree no more than 30 feet from the pool. I was delighted. In spite of all human attempts to wipe out every creature within miles, the one animal that managed to survive, and to thrive judging from the number of pups I counted, was the common roof rat, which is of course an exotic in southern Florida, another juicy irony.

When I called the hotel manager to share this pleasant piece of news, he was singularly unimpressed, either with my sincerity or my powers of observation. I couldn't tell which. He flat out refused to believe my tale and was only a half-tone away from outright rudeness. Until I suggested that a call to the Rodent Control Division of the Collier County Health Department might take care of what could prove to be an infestation dangerous to the health and safety of his guests. I told him I would be more than happy to meet the County's Health Department personnel at the pool the next morning and point out the tree in which the nest was located. He declined my gracious offer of assistance and instead sent the Stoli and tonics to our room at no charge and promised to remove the nest from the tree. So, now when I think of the development of Marco Island I remember the rats in paradise, two-legged and four-legged. Somehow, the memory feels refreshingly appropriate.

Implications

Although some environmentalists regarded the Corps's action on Key Marco in stopping the continued destruction as a major victory, most believed it was hollow and meaningless. Myself included. By that time most of the damage had been done. More than 60 percent of the Key had been developed rather than Deltona Corporation's desired 96 percent (not counting the 4,000 acres proposed to be set aside as a "nature" preserve). If you travel to Marco Island today, most of it looks exactly like dozens of similar residential oceanfront, vacation-home destinations throughout the State. And, your friend Elrod might ask, "Why all the fuss over one relatively insignificant island? So what if it was developed? Ain't no big deal, eh? Besides, don't people need nice places to play golf and retire in comfort and drink themselves into oblivion?"

To provide an intelligent response to the question about Key Marco's development, we need to establish a few rudimentary facts, especially how many similar residential vacation/resort developments are in Florida today. Surely, we could count many hundreds if not many thousands. But how many large barrier islands in Florida have widely varying elevations; sensitive marine, estuarine, and upland habitats; and priceless, world-class cultural resources like Key Marco? A precious few have one or two very weak similarities but absolutely none come close to the same combination of world-class features that characterized Key Marco. No comparable island existed anywhere in the Sunshine State or in the entire United States. That fact is absolutely beyond debate. Key Marco was a truly unique natural and cultural environment in all the United States. One of a kind. Irreplaceable. Pristine. Breathtaking. And that’s exactly what the fuss was about and what was lost forever. To developers intent on creating more subdivisions and strip centers and state regulators who, frankly, didn't give a shit about pristine and irreplaceable natural or cultural environments. Profit is KING in our land of the blind, indifferent, and greedy.

A question with far greater implications is how difficult would it have been for the State of Florida to step up and preserve that unique island for posterity? Obviously, given the hard reality of history, that task was far too difficult, much too expensive, and pregnant with political risk. You must remember the fundamental rule of Florida realpolitik: mangroves, sub-tropical barrier islands, wetlands, sensitive ecosystems, and archaeological sites once inhabited by dead Calusa do not vote. And, far more importantly, they do not contribute to politicians' campaign chests at election time. So, who speaks for them? Almost no one with political clout, if you must have the truth. And those who do speak are usually dismissed out of hand as simple-minded (meaning deranged or stupid beyond belief) tree-huggers or off the wall enviro-radicals who deep down think that we should all be happy living without fossil fuel consumption in a new Stone Age.

In the struggle to preserve something of Florida's truly unique natural and cultural environments for the public, the State of Florida and its regulatory agencies proved monumentally incompetent and callously indifferent. And Federal agencies with jurisdiction stepped up to the plate far too late, and then only with the greatest reluctance and precious little appetite to make a difference. What happened was the applied definition of too little, too late. The development of one-of-a-kind Key Marco into the run of the mill subdivision community today known as Marco Island is a low-water mark even in the bleak history of environmental stewardship by the State of Florida.

The sad truth is, if conditions do not change dramatically, what happened to Key Marco is an excellent guide to the future of the Green Swamp, Big Cypress, the those sections of the Everglades that are not incorporated into the National Park, and the State's remaining quasi-natural environments. Because America is all about putting money into political campaigns so that the politicians elected will be easily controlled and manipulated for the benefit of their contributors. Period. Anyone who thinks that either the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has been a tool of Congress since its inception, or the U.S. EPA will step up to do their legislated jobs are naive or delusional. Congress, as currently constituted, is deep in the pockets of the large campaign contributors so nothing that is close to environmentally friendly has a chance in Hell of becoming law. That is the hard reality in which we now live. Get used to it.

Global Warming — Who Owns the Risk?

Many environmental consequences of the recent global warming trend are evident. Examples include images that everyone who has read a newspaper in the last few years or watched a TV news show has seen. Melting Arctic sea ice and Antarctica ice shelves. Melting glaciers throughout world. Gradual decline of numerous species including polar bears, Edith’s checkerspot butterfly, Adele penguins, polar sea birds, and numerous amphibians. All of those effects and numerous others will continue into the foreseeable future as additional, currently undetected conditions arise.

But what if the world changes the existing conditions wherein CO₂ and other heat-absorbing greenhouse gases (GHG) are injected into the atmosphere? Would we have sufficient time to get those emissions in control and avoid the worst potential effects? The answer is a tentative affirmative, not because the technologies are unavailable but because we lack political will.

James E. Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies believes that we have ten years (starting from 2006) to enact national and international policies and procedures to control those harmful emissions. He doesn’t mean we have ten years to think about doing something but ten years of focused action before climate change turns ugly. As Hansen wrote in an essay on November 28, 2007:

Ignorance is no excuse for us. There is overwhelming scientific evidence of global warming, its causes, and many of its implications. Today’s generations will be accountable, and how tall we stand remains to be determined. There is still time, but just barely.

According to most atmospheric scientists, continuation of the status quo will result in doubling the current rate of poleward movement of climatic isotherms (temperature lines used to mark the boundaries of climate types) to about 70 miles per decade. Several centuries of that movement will result in the extinction of between 40 and 60 percent of the species on Earth and will transform the Great Plains, Southeast, Midwest, and perhaps the Mid-Atlantic states into arid and semi-arid deserts, eviscerating the heart of agricultural America.

The status quo scenario also results in an increase of about four to six degrees Fahrenheit of global warming during the 21^st Century, which may cause the disappearance of polar ice sheets since the temperature rise at the poles would be in the range of about ten to twelve degrees higher than at present, translating into an eventual sea level rise (after several centuries of melting) that may be as high as 80 feet. That gradual rise would inundate all the world’s coastal cities and low-lying islands, displacing perhaps a billion people and drastically altering the socioeconomic fabric of modern civilization.

Under that scenario, it is conceivable that by around 2200 sea levels may have risen as high as 20 feet, perhaps more if glaciologists are correct about the rate of melting of the Greenland Ice Cap. And, as peak summer temperatures rise, the resulting heat waves could push the annual number of heat-related illnesses and deaths to the hundreds of thousands, especially in light of the record heat wave that devastated Europe in August 2003, killing an estimated 35,000 people.

The big question is whether the status quo scenario will play out or governments and individuals will act to control the emission of GHG. Although at this point no one knows, several indicators may be identified. First, awareness of the threats of global warming characterizes much of the general public, though that doesn’t mean either agreement with the science or appropriate actions are close at hand. Second, well-known and wealthy individuals and foundations are using their clout and money on both sides of the issue, to deny anthropogenic climate change and to make a difference in the movement to control the warming trend; so, at this time it’s a toss up. On the other hand, large coal-fired electrical generating plants using current technology are being planned and permitted in several states. Those plants do not employ the most efficient anti-pollution designs and will generate more pollution over their projected 30-year lifespans than if the cleaner and more advanced Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle technology had been used. Therefore, current conditions are characterized by indicators that point in opposite directions, meaning that the situation is balancing on a fine edge.

But, all is neither hopeless nor lost. One of the key conclusions of the United Nations IPCC 2007 Assessment Report was high scientific agreement that all of the CO₂ stabilization levels that were assessed can be achieved through application of technologies that are either currently available or expected to be commercialized in coming decades. Although that conclusion assumes effective governmental policies and economic incentives are in place, we all know what can happen when financial carrots are dangled in front of hungry entrepreneurs. Conclusion: if we start now, sufficient time is likely available in which to turn things around in terms of CO₂ production.

The point everyone must realize is that science has determined that the world is facing a situation (global warming) that is fraught with risk but is also characterized by considerable uncertainty. The resulting ambiguity makes reaching decisions a difficult process, both for individuals and society. So, what to do? I strongly advocate focusing on who owns the risk. Here’s how it works.

a.      If the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory is false (meaning that global warming is a natural trend) and we wrongly control GHG by regulating industry and economic development, society and individuals will likely suffer adverse effects until the regulations are revoked.

Implication: We’re producing GHG and own the risk.

b.      If the AGW theory is false and we take no actions to control GHG by regulating industry and economic development, society and individuals will continue to experience the existing status quo with respect to climate change with adverse effects being about what we have today or becoming slightly worse over time.

Implication: We’re producing GHG but push a negligible risk into the future.

c.      If the AGW theory is true and we correctly control GHG by regulating industry and economic development, society and individuals may suffer adverse effects in the short-term but the mid- to long-term climate change problems will be much less severe and shorter in duration, as will negative socioeconomic effects.

Implication: We’re producing GHG and own the risk.

d.      If the AGW theory is true and we fail to control GHG by regulating industry and economic development, the status quo climate change will continue and accelerate over time, causing society and individuals to suffer a wide range of progressively severe negative effects that over the mid- to long-term will most likely become catastrophic.

Implication: We’re producing GHG but push an enormous risk onto future generations.

Although I am neither a moral philosopher nor an ethicist, it seems clear that dumping the risk of progressively severe climate change effects onto largely unborn generations that have not caused the problems would be repugnant and reprehensible. Therefore, whatever we do to avert the adverse effects of global warming must arise from our owning the risk and acting responsibly.

Change

In the past year Tea Party enthusiasts have been seen on practically every national TV news program claiming through raised voices and signs that the U.S. today is NOT the same country in which they grew up. A number of Tea Party supporters in my home made the very same claim. The following list presents the way the U.S. was when most of those Tea Party activists were born and in which they lived as children during the late-1940s through the 1950s and into the 1960s. All these facts can be checked and verified through a minimum of searching online or in libraries.

• Annual Federal income tax rates ranged from 16 percent to 92 percent graduated in steps based on earned income.
• Trade unions constituted the dominant force in labor.
• Segregation and discrimination against blacks, Hispanics, and Orientals was legal; the Federal government enforced de jure segregation through regulations of the Federal Housing Authority and other federal agencies.
• Red lining (designating areas where people could not obtain loans or insurance because of race or other socioeconomic factors) by banks and insurance companies was commonplace and not prohibited by law.
• Land covenants prohibiting ownership and occupation by blacks, Orientals, Hispanics, and Jews were common in every state.
• Every southern and border state prohibited racial inter-marriage.
• All southern and most western states prohibited or sharply restricted voting rights for blacks, Hispanics, and Orientals.
• Race riots in major cities were common from the 1920s through the 1970s.
• In the South from the 1900s through the 1960s, lynching and murder were common means of repressing black people and resisting civil rights activism.
• Women and Jews were widely discriminated against throughout the country.
• Surgery relied on relatively primitive techniques when compared to those of the late 20^th and 21^st Centuries. Cancer was basically untreatable. Many infectious diseases were rampant, including polio and TB among others.
• Syphilis and gonorrhea reached epidemic proportions in many large cities, such as St. Louis, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago so that in most major cities across the country a blood test was required of all marriage license applicants to demonstrate they were free of sexually transmitted diseases.
• Dentists treated cavities with primitive friction drills; fillings were made with toxic dental amalgam materials like mercury.
• No state had effective anti-pollution legislation or regulations that protected the water or air. Air pollution from industrial sources adversely affected every major U.S. city, annually killing thousands of people with lung, heart, and other health problems. All American cities dumped raw or mostly untreated sewage into streams, lakes, and the ocean.
• Few cities had malls or suburbs until the early 1960s.
• We had few large medical research centers like Washington University Medical School, Johns Hopkins, or M.D. Anderson.
• The Republican Party was a centrist party of mostly moderate conservatives.
• The Democratic Party included virulent racists and segregationists bent on repressing black Americans.
• The political systems of most large cities were controlled by powerful political machines and bosses like Richard Daley in Chicago, James Curley in Boston, and Thomas Prendergast in Kansas City.
• Virulent Anti-Communism was the prevailing sentiment in the United States throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, causing many Hollywood actors, writers, and directors to be persecuted and blacklisted by right-wing bullies like Senator Joseph McCarthy for real or imagined political beliefs specifically protected by the U.S. Constitution.
• Organized crime was largely ignored by the federal government (from the 1930s through the 1950s) owing to the dictates of the FBI’s J. Edger Hoover.
• The U.S. Department of Defense was testing nuclear weapons in air and ground bursts and required many thousands of military personnel to be on the ground within the radiation zone between three to five miles from the blast site, resulting in thousands of unnecessary cancers and premature deaths; thousands of those soldiers were subquently refused medical treatment by the Veterans Administration after their records mysteriously disappeared.
• Millions of Americans in Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and Colorado downwind from the nuclear blasts were irradiated by nuclear fallout.
• In the decade of the 1950s, the U.S. population was 151,684,000, life expectancy was 71.1 years for women and 65.6 years for men, and the average salary was $2,992.
• Two-term Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower supported the era of big government by expanding the Cold War, maintained high income taxes on the rich, made expensive nuclear weapons a high defense priority, launched the very expensive Space Race, signed legislation that greatly expanded the Social Security program, supported and signed the first Civil Rights Acts, and initiated and spent billions of taxpayer dollars on the Interstate Highway System that was funded by higher gasoline taxes.
• By the early 1960s, all states participated in Federal welfare programs with general welfare payments (Aid to Families with Dependent Children — AFDC), food stamps, special payments for pregnant women and young mothers, and federal and state housing benefits.

Is that the country to which Tea Party activists want the U.S. to return? Because that was the country in which most of them were born and in which they grew up.

WHAT LIFE IS

Life is meant to be lived as it is, not as you would like it to be.

Life is what happens when you’re making other plans — John Lennon

Life is an onion, peeled crying — Russian proverb

Life is a roller coaster ride, sometimes disappointing, sometimes thrilling.

Life is a car with broken shock absorbers; you get where you’re going but it can be a rough ride.

Life is a beach in winter.

Life is a bitter-sweet chocolate bar filled with hard things that break your teeth.

Life is a crap-shoot on a roulette wheel.

Life is a Möbius strip but too few know it.

Life is a combination of doing what we have to and what we are willing to.

Life is a bridge connecting yesterday and tomorrow.

Life is a one-way street built one day at a time with hope.

Life is a roadway paved with todays and nows laid out one after the other.

Life is a salad of todays seasoned by the memory of yesterdays and enriched with the promise of tomorrow.

All unattributed quotes are by SOB.

Collecting Rocks 02

We all know that one person’s trash is another’s treasure. This short essay is an exposition of what that old saw can mean in a person’s life. But a few words are required before I hit the ground running.

No one can know what roles “things” play in a person’s life. Not unless those roles are made explicit. Even then, uncertainty rules for many reasons. To clarify, I don’t mean “things” as in the number and brand of the suits hanging in your closet. Or what kind of car you drive. Or how big your house is. Or if you own a vacation house or three, one in Kennebunkport, one in Gstaad, one in Palm Springs. No. I’m referring to the little things at clutter your life with memories and meaning. Little artifacts collected from almost every stage in your life and that you keep close to you because somehow they are part of who you are, on the stuff real treasures are made of. And since this essay is a continuation of yesterday’s rumination on rock collecting, that’s what my focus will be.

Today, on my desk not much more than a foot away as I type at my computer, sits a treasured artifact retrieved from Marco Island in July 1977, collected during the land use/environmental planning course Drew N. and I were teaching in southern Florida. It was my last year at EMU and the last university course I taught as a full-time professor. It’s an old seashell, a Busycon contrarium, according to one of my marine scientist friends, or a left-handed whelk in everyday language (also known by many as a lightning whelk). Thousands are found on beaches throughout southern Florida every year. Here’s what makes this one so special to me: it is a Native American artifact that an unknown Calusa took a rock and knocked a hole in the wide, upper body of the shell, into which she stuck a branch an inch or so thick and probably three to four feet long, thus creating a rudimentary hoe for digging in the sandy soil. Handling it now, I feel an ineffable connection to that unknowable person and to the day I first spotted it. This simple implement is even more treasured since I retrieved it from a rubbish pile at a new home construction site in a subdivision near the old fishing village of Caxambas, where it was waiting for the trash man to haul it away.

Next to the whelk is a rock of hematite iron ore I bought in Quibor, Venezuela, at a street vendor’s small craft stand. Quibor is well-known throughout Venezuela for its craft vendors and uber-cheap goods. Hundreds of their little stalls line both sides of the road leading to Cubiro. Most of the vendors sell junk. I managed to buy a domino set, which we still have and the grandkids play with to this day, and a never-opened hummock in its original cardboard box in our moldy basement. As well as the hematite rock priced at 1,000 Bolivares, or about $1.75. The instant I saw it I knew I would buy it, no matter what the asking price. A little description first.

The rock has two very different sides. The one side features a hollowed out, elongated cavity surrounded by almost concentric, alternating light and dark jagged-edged layers of different types of iron ore. Its garish rusty, orangey-red coloration is certain to attract attention. It is that side I present to first-time viewers. My guests nod sagely and smile, trying to humor the geo-geek who stands before them, so obviously proud of his rock. It would be hard to miss the looks they give each other, thinking, “Jesus Christ, who let this guy out?”

Then I turn it over so the second side is visible. And what a shock. That side has been carved and smoothed into an easily recognizable human face that is vaguely Oriental, perhaps because of the red-orange color of the rock itself. The smooth head has one ear, defined hairline, full set of facial features, and a beard. It is an astounding piece of art. I can’t believe it was carved by anyone in Quibor, or perhaps even in Venezuela. My guess is it had been stolen and then sold for a pittance to me. Naturally, when I showed it to my Parsons friends they looked at it with a mixture of incredulity, astonishment, and pure envy. It was the absolute score of the trip. Linda B. offered me twenty dollars for it but I just laughed. How could I possibly sell a treasure of a lifetime?

Sitting on top of my old steamer’s trunk, itself a treasure from my 1961 trip to Marynook, the Marianist Novitiate in Galesville, Wisconsin, is a rock from the island of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. It is shaped like a very large canine tooth. I spotted it in a driving rainstorm half buried in the mud as about sixty people were running up the stairs from the open boat dock to the shelter of the Frenchman’s Reef Hotel, where we were staying. Because the stairs were so narrow and the crush of people behind us, I had no chance to stop and smell the daisies, so to speak. And it continued raining heavily all that evening, curtailing a night-time raid. But early the next morning I all but ran down those stairs, leaned over, and grabbed the rock/tooth. I also have about four or five other rocks collected from St. John but that one is my favorite.

Keeping my rock/tooth company on the trunk are two igneous rocks, both similar in appearance though not in size. They are a faded, faintly bluish gray (perhaps from glaucophane) with veins of whitish (feldspar) and pinkish coloration (probably iron) running through them. I found the smaller rock in 2002 in the Pecos River, in northern New Mexico, just north of the town of Pecos. I was on a lark, taking time off a project I hated in El Paso, and had spent the night in nearby Albuquerque. I drove north on State Highway 63, pulling over at a small State public recreation area on the River. A short walk brought me to the stream, which I immediately started prowling, looking for a collectable. After perhaps ten minutes I found a beautiful rock that looked to be largely basalt that had been injected before it had frozen completely by an iron-rich volatile, accounting for the colorful veining. In 2010, when on my way north to pick up my grandsons, Taylor and Kyle, at Philmont Scout Ranch, I took the same highway again, hoping to find the rest area and score several attractive rocks. To my surprise and pleasure I found a rock of the very same type, only that one was about five times larger, about the size of a football. On both occasions I looked diligently for similar rocks in the river and along the bank. No luck. On the days I searched those were the only ones of that type all along the stream. Today, both are displayed proudly on the trunk. Also on my desk are the following treasured rocks.

• Conical white seashell embedded with tiny red dots and a small fragment of eroded staghorn coral shaped exactly like an erect penis and testicles, both of which were found on the beach in Tucacas, Venezuela, in El Parque Nacional Morrocoy.
• Rocks collected from various locations:
• A white, fist-sized feldspar tinted with red streaks from Catalina State Park, Oro Valley, Arizona. Beth and I were walking up the Romero Canyon Trail at the beginning of the hike when I spotted the rock half buried at the edge in the path. Not wanting to carry the rock uphill for several hours, I dug it up on our way down.
• Greenish rock (apatite?) from the Sanctuary Resort in Paradise Valley, Arizona.
• Greenish basalt from St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands. My granddaughter Sophia says it looks like a little castle. She’s right, it does.
• Olivine (?) rock from a road cut near San Jose de Ocoa, Dominican Republic.
• Flint from the grounds of St. Andrew’s Church in Sonning, England, in the Thames River valley near Redding. I was staying nearby at Bull’s Inn and found the rock while exploring the church grounds and cemetery.
• Fired clay piece featuring a textile impression taken surreptitiously when I was on a group tour of Gyeongbok Royal Palace, Seoul, South Korea. It was illegal to remove ANYTHING from the palace grounds. But when I spotted the clay fragment in a pile of broken rocks I bent over to tie my shoe and scored it. Shameless.
• Green piece of serpentinite (California’s State rock) collected from a road cut on State Route 132 in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada west of Coulterville.
• Two pieces of limestone collected from Bonhomme Creek in western St. Louis County near Babler State Park, one rectilinear and the other oval shaped. In the first, the limestone surrounds a smooth, hunk of red-brown chert (jasper) whose natural color is caused by hematite or goethite impurities. In the second, the center is a pale greenish material, which is either iron or chromium.
• In my desk drawer are pieces of apple-green serpentinite from northern Venezuela (I “found” them in a rock garden in Choroní) and two very dark gray “worry” rocks from Bonhomme Creek that I used to carry in my pants pockets.

Under the window in my den are two short file cabinets. On top of the cabinets are five of my favorite rocks.

• Large colorful hunk of meta-limestone with inclusions of crystalline quartz and pockets of iron ore weathered to orangey-yellowish limonite collected from a dry creekbed in Franklin Mountains State Park in El Paso, Texas. I was working for Jacobs in 2008 on the Fort Bliss project and had several morning meetings cancelled. Instead of going back to the hotel and laying around I dragged one of the landscape architects with me and we toured the nearby Franklin Mountains, ignoring signs as we strolled around the Park warning that removal of natural materials would be punished by Texas-style torture and painful death. Well, not quite but close. Of course, I paid no attention and stole the rock without an ounce of compunction or regret.
• Beautifully layered, fist-sized hunk of reddish rhyolite mixed with whitish feldspar. While working in Abu Dhabi on the Das Island project, members of the planning group visited the offices of ADNOC, our client. As we walked back to the car we cut through the grounds of the Abu Dhabi Hilton. A very attractive rock garden formed part of the landscaping on the side of the resort. Naturally, as I strolled along I searched the garden for interesting rocks and spotted that stunning specimen. After glancing around to see if anyone was watching, I stepped over the chain and scooped it up, much to the consternation of my colleagues, who worried I would be arrested by some alert security guard. No way.
• Three rocks from Paradise Valley, Arizona, from the Sanctuary Resort. The first is an olive-green, massive (non-glassy non-crystalline) rock, probably a member of the olivine group. The second is a pretty pinkish-tan rock I have not been able to identify but it is almost certainly metamorphic. The third is a bluish igneous rock with surface joints/striations that have been filled with weathered iron, forming an attractive webbing of orangey-red offset by the light blue ground mass.

In my son David’s old room, now unoccupied, is a rock unusual even for my collection. It is shaped a little like a flying saucer, thicker at the center than the edges. But even more unusual is its coloration, characterized by light and dark stripes, sort of like a varve but not. The rock is brown, with the darker, thin stripes a darker brown. It looks somewhat like horse flesh but only somewhat. I found it in Bonhomme Creek, along with a number of my other favorites. A friend who is a professional geologist had no idea what it was either.

Sitting in the same bookcase is a rock that looks a little like the cartoon character Snoopy or like an early Beetle. It was collected on a beach in Maui, not far outside the village of Lahaina. I spotted it from about thirty feet and headed straight for it. The rock consists of cemented white coral fragments onto which a hunk of dark gray lava became fused. It is visually so distinctive even visitors who have little interest in rocks marvel at it.

Artifacts, environmental treasures, memories all intertwined. Perhaps that’s why I love rock collecting. It allows me to connect my love of geology and rocks and minerals and the landscape in an environmental context that is both physically enjoyable and intellectually stimulating. While rock hunting I wind up paying almost as much attention to the birds (I’ve been a bird watcher almost all my adult life) and the condition of whatever environment I’m in, whether it’s a stream-course in the humid Midwest or a dry creek bed in the arid Southwest. I love reading the signs of native bedrock, soils, vegetation, animal activity, erosion, and deposition while trying to decipher how human occupancy has affected the landscape.

Connections to the Earth, that’s what rock collecting means to me.