CompuServe Messages

The "tragedy of the commons" is an important economic and political concern. It says that any good, be it land or health insurance, that is free for all to use will eventually be ruined because no one person regards it with the same concern as if it were their own. From this perspective, it does explain why Yosemite will eventually be paved to make way for RV parking lots. 🙂 As a fossil collector, I'll second that concern that without regular collecting, many fossils will weather away. I have a friend in Montana who saw large dino bones hanging from a weathering shoreline on a lake on public land. He alerted the authorities, but by the end of summer, the bones had melted away. I'm a big fan of the approach taken by groups like the Nature Conservancy. If you think something should be protected, buy it and protect it the way you like. This might include harvesting the fossils that are exposed this year, or it might mean putting a non-invasive foot path through the property, or it might mean doing nothing at all. I sincerely think we'd be better off if the government sold the immense public lands in the West. The Sierra Club's donations for a single year could buy up all the old-growth forest left in the Northwest, if that was their priority. One of the best sites for collecting trilobites in the Milwaukee area was an old quarry. The city of Milwaukee used it as a landfill and the fossil strata was covered around 1989. If you ever see a trilobite for sale that says "Hartung Quarry, Milwaukee" on it, rest assured it was collected many years ago.