[HN Gopher] The lost saga of Fossil Cycad National Monument (2017)
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The lost saga of Fossil Cycad National Monument (2017)
Author : robg
Score : 84 points
Date : 2023-07-09 13:40 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| Eumenes wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| 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.
|
| (This is in the site guidelines: " _Please use the original
| title, unless it is misleading or linkbait_ " -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
| justinator wrote:
| Aren't most National Parks on stolen land?
| advisedwang wrote:
| 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.
| bshipp wrote:
| 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.
| justinator wrote:
| 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.
| bshipp wrote:
| 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.
| boondoggle16 wrote:
| who gets to keep it? who did the asians kill in america 15k
| years ago?
| settrans wrote:
| 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.
| Xcelerate wrote:
| 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.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Was it Carmel Valley Ranch?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36396675
|
| > 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
| Xcelerate wrote:
| Yep! It was ekidd's comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36397747
| crazygringo wrote:
| I wonder if there's any evidence to support that.
|
| 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.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| 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.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| How does that work? If the organization goes bankrupt, or
| ceases to exist, how would the land not be treated as an
| asset?
| Guvante wrote:
| 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.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| A perpetual conservation easement or conservation
| covenant stays with the land even after it changes hands,
| at least in the US.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| 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
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| 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.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Scientists who took things to universities did the world a
| favour.
|
| I want to refine that to scientists taking things to display
| publicly - and in the same country.
| boondoggle16 wrote:
| >and in the same country.
|
| Today's borders aren't yesterdays borders. How should we
| decide what's fair?
|
| Or should relics stay with their ethnic creators, along
| racial lines?
| lasc4r wrote:
| That should probably be the default unless there's a
| compelling reason not to since they have the best claim to
| historical and cultural importance.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Or should relics stay with their ethnic creators, along
| racial lines?
|
| That works. We seem to be zeroing in.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Anyone who took anything to any kind of institution, public
| or private, in country or out, helped out here.
|
| Tons of these in private hands probably got thrown away as
| boring old rocks.
|
| And why would same country matter for something this old?
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > And why would same country matter for something this old?
|
| It would matter to the host scientists studying their
| regional phenomenon.
| justinator wrote:
| 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.
| melling wrote:
| Plymouth Rock is half its original size. Tourists used to take a
| piece.
|
| https://www.frommers.com/destinations/plymouth-ma/attraction....
|
| The tourist who carved his name into the Colosseum didn't realize
| how old it was?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/05/english-touris...
|
| Then we have someone knocking over this rock:
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna56596
|
| It only takes a few people to ruin it.
|
| Perhaps we shouldn't be so forgiving.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Perhaps we shouldn't be so forgiving.
|
| A better time to teach respect might be before the incident.
| lfowles wrote:
| Giving the Colosseum tourist the benefit of the doubt, maybe
| they thought that was a relatively "modern day" section they
| were carving their name on?
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > Giving the Colosseum tourist the benefit of the doubt
|
| Why? Carving your name into stuff that you don't own is dumb
| regardless of how old it is.
| rvba wrote:
| You learn about Colosseum in primary school
| boondoggle16 wrote:
| He wasn't a local, he was an eastern european. We love
| diverse cultures!
| melling wrote:
| He was originally from Bulgaria and there are Roman ruins
| there too:
|
| https://davidsbeenhere.com/2017/03/01/top-10-ancient-
| sites-i...
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| I disagree. Carving your name into something is disgusting.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| c420 wrote:
| 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.
| wyre wrote:
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| wyre wrote:
| Ya, I'm aware of all that. It's an interesting theorem,
| nonetheless.
|
| I also have no credence for this forum to not be
| hypercritical of art history literature, but here I am
| talking about it.
| Aloha wrote:
| 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.
| expensive_news wrote:
| 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.
| Aloha wrote:
| Thats my point - when does it transform from Graffiti to
| Artifact - 50 years? 100 years? 500? its still an
| interesting thought.
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/how-to-
| list-a-...
| throwaway3618 wrote:
| People have been murdering, stealing, etc since people
| have existed, doesn't mean we should just shrug our
| shoulders
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| We also study middens; it doesn't mean it's okay to dump
| your garbage in the park.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| I'm noticing more and more restrooms open to public/shared
| use eschewing placing mirrors because they always get
| carved up with everyones' names.
|
| Clearly most people find the act memorable, manners be
| damned.
|
| (I find the act barbaric, personally.)
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| 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.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| 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"
| jfoutz wrote:
| 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.
|
| I think, far and away, the most effective preservation is
| Pele's curse - https://www.hawaii-guide.com/why-you-should-
| never-take-lava-...
|
| Total fabrication by the parks service. They show you the
| rocks people have sent back, to lift the curse.
|
| If you're fully engaged and thinking critically, it's
| harmless. If you're not, it encourages good behavior.
|
| I'm not a big fan of marketing, but the way you tell the
| story really does have a huge impact on guest behavior.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| > She had an immediate impulse to steal a rock
|
| 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.)
| knewter wrote:
| Kant's categorical imperative
| megmogandog wrote:
| 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."
| Tao3300 wrote:
| See, I know you're lying because a pedant is never sorry.
| megmogandog wrote:
| 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
| tomrod wrote:
| Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I try to remind my kid of that every so often, when the
| opportunity comes up.
| kodah wrote:
| 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.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > what would happen if a 100 other people did the same thing?
| The answer should usually be "don't do that thing"
|
| Or "do it now and get the money before they do"
| wyre wrote:
| >knocking over this rock
|
| 5 years of time to only few thousand dollars in fines?
| Infuriating
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Infuriating
|
| Idiots together should make anyone itch.
| irrational wrote:
| > 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?
| Accujack wrote:
| I don't know about "tons" but Wikipedia says a highway built in
| 1980 revealed more fossils on the site.
| amelius wrote:
| Was hoping to one day own a fozzilized tourist that attempted to
| steal a fossil.
| down_vote_me wrote:
| [flagged]
| somat wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.nps.gov/dino/planyourvisit/quarry-exhibit-hall.h...
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