Posted: Dec 24, 2006 10:22 am
hewhocaves wrote:
in my view, its origin is irrelevent. if it's calcite, aragonite, or gypsum and takes on any of several layered forms (i.e. is not simply a crystalline expression of the mineral) commonly found in caves (eg. icicle, layered, drapery flower or helectitic) it cannot be sold. Provision could be made for crushed formation to be sold if its mixed in with limestone (i.e. as part of a quarrying operation). I think this is simple enough for even lawyers and judges to understand. If they can't grasp that, then i suspect the basic tenets of law are beyond them anyways.
Good luck, John. You're then taking on the travertine bathroom and flooring industry. And people who can afford travertine in bathrooms are way richer and more influential than either you or I.
Not to mention the marble flooring and sill industry (much of which is not true marble). Also the Mexican onyx trinket industry, and that will likely not make show cave and roadside attraction owners happy (most of whom no longer sell cave 'rock specimens' by mutual agreement, but do sell scads of Mexican onyx chess sets, book ends, little animals, and so forth). And the cabochon lapidary/jewelry makers who use carbonate botryoidal minerals (such as malachite--copper carbonate and rhodochrosite) in their jewelry. If you say 'layered minerals' you're impinging on agates, sardonyx and a whole bunch of other things out there. (Sure, they are quartz, but tho you and I can tell the difference in a trice, most people can't.) What about geodes? They are, in effect, little entranceless caves.
You also miss and do not protect many other cave minerals which form botryoids, stal (I occasionally see pyrite, limonite, rhodochrosite and malachite stal at rock shows) dogtooth spar (almost always come from underground voids) and include caviform minerals from mines, which are legal. These other minerals, though more uncommon, actually bring more money.
I don't see any way to entirely stop the sale of cave rocks (both speleothems and speleogens) without banning rock and mineral specimen sale entirely. And I will never agree to that. It's hard enough to get people interested in geology as it is.
I've got nothing against prosecuting to hades and back dealers who rape entire Chinese caves, and set up tables of nothing but cave stal at places like the Tucson rock show. Or the New Agers who sell stal as the new replacement for rhinoceros horn. (I've gone after a couple of these). Most people I've talked to listen to my concerns. Throw the book at the egregious offenders, and make examples of them. But going after the people who have one or two cave minerals amongst thousands of other specimens for sale isn't worth it, and actually would encourage a tailgate/black market in cave minerals.
There are even rock collecting books which put formations in with petrified wood--there is a special category of rock sales in which the provenance of petrified wood is tracked, to make sure it isn't coming off public lands. We're making progress at about the same speed as it took to get cavers to quit writing on cave walls. But generally:
In the immortal words of Jimmy Buffett: "it's the god's honest truth, it just ain't that simple."
I've got to go bake cookies now. Happy holidays to you, John--I respect your position, but I simply don't agree with it.
Teresa