I saw the bone quarry a few years ago, it quite literally took my breath away, one of the most amazing things I have ever seen in person. I am not sure what I was expecting, but it was not that. However, it is only one quarter of what it started out as. Vast swaths of it were removed. Mainly for museums, which is.. ok, I guess. But I am a bit sad thinking about what could have been preserved. While as the same time thankful they were able to keep as much of as they did in one piece.
Incidentally "The bone quarry" is on my short list for most metal place names.
A useful rule that I came across a while ago is "ask yourself before doing something (such as picking a flower in the wild), what would happen if a 100 other people did the same thing?". The answer should usually be "don't do that thing"
A friend, college educated responsible adult, went to the petrified forest in Arizona. Park ranger gave the whole talk about how rare and special these rocks are, and how they're disappearing because people are stealing them. The ranger indicated there might not be a park in the future, because so much is going missing. She had an immediate impulse to steal a rock. She claims she didn't act on it, and I believe her.
I think there's some inherit psychology that's tough to get around, some "I better grab one while I still can" deep down part of our reptile brain. People are still animals. Out on vacation they may not be fully engaging their critical thinking skills.
FWIW, Jim Gray's Petrified Wood Company has a vast supply of this stuff you can buy and take home. It's right down the road in Holbrook. Very interesting store even if you're not planning to buy anything. (No working website that I could find. Google it. I have no connection with them.)
I have a lot of flowers that grow out front of my house. If you pick my tulips, daffodils, roses, or lillies then I'll be mad because they're pretty, short-lived, and for pollinators. I go to great lengths to have blooming flowers almost year round and a great deal of planning goes into that. One flower dying prematurely or going missing isn't a big deal, but if everyone picked a flower then the great deal of pollinators my property attracts would be impacted in some small way each time, and the pollinators play a key role in the micro-ecosystem of my yard. I do my best not to disturb them. If you rip up the bulbs for your own I'll be doubly mad because you're just selfish at that point. Go buy your own bulbs like I did, or better yet foster a yard where bulbs multiply.
On the other hand, nature isn't so delicate. My ground cover has smaller blooms most the year and provide the pollinators with much more abundance and resiliency to what people or animal might do to my "prettier" flowers. It's difference between O(n) impact to O(log n) impact.
Sorry to be pedantic, but the categorical imperative is not about reasoning from the consequences of an action if everyone did it. It's about testing whether it's even possible for you to will the maxim of your action as a universal law without contradiction, or to what extent your action respects the rational agency of other humans. You could make the Kant-inspired argument that taking a limited resource for your private enjoyment does deprive others of their agency, but it's not Kantian to say "it's wrong to take the fossils because then there will be no more fossils."
I guess it would've been more honest to say "sorry to seem pedantic," because for me the comment was not mere pedantry (which I think of as hairsplitting for the sake of hairsplitting) but rather a matter of a fundamental distinction in moral philosophy (consequentialist vs. deontological ethics).
I mean, philosophy has a reputation for just that kind of hairsplitting but this seems to bear pretty directly on the basic ethical question of "What should I do?", one of the most important questions for humans to ask imo
If you know where to look, there are many panels of petroglyphs and other rock art located in the canyons and side-canyons of the desert southwest. Many are pristine and untouched but there are, unfortunately, too many that hand of idiots have defaced with their own graffiti or even bullet holes. It's the primary reason those who know where they can be found are reluctant to tell those who don't unless they are close family or friends in whom they have full trust not to mar these 700+ year old relics. It is so discouraging to see an outline of someone's hand from 1100 or the drawing of a animal right next to the "Joanie loves Chachi" some ignorant fool added in 1973.
Perhaps, but we study roman graffiti where people from antiquity did the same thing, like, I get that its bad and should not be condoned but tourists have been carving their name into this thing for thousands of years.
Not to derail, but this reminds me of a cave in Southern Arizona. Graffiti is banned and it’s heavily enforced, but there is ‘historic’ graffiti from the 1920-40s that is preserved. I always found this case very interesting.
I'll put forth that nothing of this sort, from the semiconductor age onwards, can be an artifact as we have far more readily available and detailed records to work from.
Such graffiti is only an artifact when it's purpose, history and other aspects are lost to time due to lack of alternative documentation.
In effectively all cases these days there is simply no additional value obtained from graffiti like this, unlike that of street artists doing murals or painting trains.
I believe it is 50 years in the US. I can't find it on mobile, but I remember reading an article a while back about some simple "john was here" on some anasazi petroglyph that hadn't been removed because it was from the late 1800s or early 1900s and was considered historic.
But also one of the most human things to do. What are precivilization cave paintings but graffiti? Leaving a mark on the world is a basic human instinct. That some things are better left intact is something that has to be learned.
Pre agricultural revolution pictographs and petroglyphs are almost certainly not graffiti. Religious function, navigation, resource marking, animal migration records, record keeping... these are some of the more likely functions.
Tbf, sometimes graffiti is a territorial marking and this is also a likely function.
I read in an art history book that cave paintings were used as a form of magic/manifestation and the farther down into the cave the more powerful it became.
A lot of these kinds of things are historians/anthropologists/whatever making things up. If something doesn’t have an obvious purpose then it is labeled as ceremonial or religious. A single artifact gets turned into an elaborate story with very shaky justification. These “just so” stories make good tales, but that’s it. The question ends up being “how could they possibly know this!?” And the answer is, they couldn’t.
Definitely the kind of thing you’d read in an art history book.
I have heard artists critical of art history in the same way tech people are critical of tech journalists. Something along the lines of folks who don’t really understand a subject because they don’t/can’t do it writing from a position of authority about it and doing it badly.
Scientists who took things to universities did the world a favour. The government had no serious plans for the fossils and over time everything would have been stolen by tourists.
I think I read a comment on HN recently about people buying up land to conserve it via private organizations rather than the government. The government might sell it in times of hardship, but with multiple non-profit organizations responsible for maintaining the land, their mission would be less likely to be compromised by other national interests.
It's equally easy to imagine that a private organization is statistically much more likely to go into debt due to well-intentioned bad management decisions, go bankrupt, and have its land sold to the highest bidder.
In the end, it might depend a lot on which government and which type of private org we're talking about.
I think a lot of these organizations have set themselves up in a way that if they cease to exist, the land isn’t available as an asset for private sale.
You can sell or give away the right to develop the land.
Similar to HoAs you can restrict the usage of your land and as long as someone else holds the keys to unlocking that usage it will survive bankruptcy. The title would retain the restrictions.
It needs to be an entity due to no rules from private entities lasting forever, by making some entity control the release it isn't you deciding to persist but them.
It isn't foolproof of course but avoids the simplest failure modes.
> The conservancy, which operates 22 other preserves in California, and one in Oregon, plans to open the scenic property to the public for hiking, mountain biking and horseback riding in the coming years for free
Much of the San Francisco peninsula open space is under the supervision of an open space initiative voters approved about fifty years ago, it’s a line item in my annual taxes so government can work, too. https://www.openspace.org/who-we-are
I replaced the baity title with a slightly less baity phrase from the article itself. If someone can come up with a better one (i.e. more accurate and neutral, and preferably using text from the article), we can change it again.
> As scientists and NPS representatives looked on, the workers dug a half dozen pits, revealing piles upon piles of previously unexposed fossils, over one ton of material.
I have to presume that there are still tons of unexposed fossils on site still today, right?
Fortunately, from my experience, most "visitors" to National Parks, simply drive around and take photos from scenic views. I suspect if trail and off-trail traffic increased, we'd hear alot more stories like this.
I'm not sure this was ever a National Park, but rather a National Monument. Pedantic maybe: but National Monuments can be declared by the President under the Antiquities Act (and it seems under Trump easy to be demoted), a Park is a little harder to establish.
Yes, Americans should go back to England to their ancestral Anglo-Saxon homeland, and cede the country they stole from the indigenous people!
Except that the Angles, Jutes and Saxons stole their country from the Romans in the 5th century! So the Americans and English should yield England back to the rightful owners, the Romans, and return back to Anglia, Saxony, and Jutland.
Except the Romans took England from the Britons - and if we can find any of them left, we should cede England back to those truly deserving to rule it, the Britons!
Well, but of course the Britons deposed the true sovereigns of England in the 8th century BC, you know, whoever built Stonehenge. So, let's find them, and restore order to England!
And meanwhile find Koelbjerg Man's relatives and return Anglia and Jutland to them. Identifying the just sovereigns of Roman, Saxon, and North American territory is left as an exercise for the reader.
Go back far enough and you'll discover that, at some point in the past, all land was one taken through force without compensation by one conqueror or another.
And you support this? Because we're not talking about 10,000 years ago, we're talking < 200 years ago, with our government, that were made up of people who are only 1 or 3 generations before us, which in kind, impact people you can talk to yourself, today.
The same way you think could potentially also justify the history of slavery in the United States as being a historical wrinkle.
And if that's what you want to do: great, but know I'm not on your side of history.
It has nothing to do with me supporting those actions two centuries ago. I'm just describing history. Were the same tribes in charge of the same land for the past 10000 years, or did borders fluctuate depending on intertribal wars for resources?
Acting like the Iroquois and Algonquins (or substitute any other aboriginal tribes with adjacent borders, for that matter) didn't spend hundreds of years slaughtering each other for territory before they were both deposed by the European invaders is a little naive. So who, precisely, is supposed to get the "stolen" land back?
EDIT: just to be clear, I'm not advocating that first nation's are not due compensation or allowances for the loss of their lands, nor that slavery must be swept under a rug. On the contrary, we must look for the root causes of social unrest/upheaval and meet them head on. But you're not providing any practical courses of action that should be undertaken.
Did the local people's do the same? (Hint: Yes, everyone in the past were a holes)
We can only hold to account those actions which occured After we learn the lesson and make a rule to prevent it.
The UN has established rules that prevent this shit from recurring, and anything that happened before that is "too long ago" to merit true remediation.
Really... The alternative is to turn the entire world into the equivalent of Israel... And that's just evil.
Sure, but at least they are being run for public good. Stolen artifacts sitting in someone's private collection don't do any good to the public OR the native Americans who originally "owned" the land.
We're so far from transferring authority to tribes that the meaningful alternative to public ownership is private ownership, which is worse.
Incidentally "The bone quarry" is on my short list for most metal place names.
https://www.nps.gov/dino/planyourvisit/quarry-exhibit-hall.h...