texascavers Digest 6 Aug 2011 16:25:42 -0000 Issue 1362

Topics (messages 18297 through 18303):

Re: where a man can breathe free, and relevance to caves
        18297 by: Geary Schindel

book review: Lew Bicking
        18298 by: Mixon Bill
        18303 by: Carl Kunath

book review: Cave of the Winds
        18299 by: Mixon Bill

Re: book reviews: Lew Bicking, Cave of the Winds
        18300 by: Logan McNatt

The few remaining humans will worship Oztotl
        18301 by: BMorgan994.aol.com

Cuban caving publication
        18302 by: Mixon Bill

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--- Begin Message ---
Rod,

Thanks for the wonderful analysis on population growth, you are right on the 
money.  For folks that are interested in this area, I would refer you to a 
video lecture by Dr. Albert Bartlett, retired professor from the University of 
Colorado in Boulder titled Arithmetic, Population, and Energy.  You can 
purchase it for about $20 from the Univ of Col. Bookstore or can down load it 
in segments from YouTube.  Scary stuff, we showed it as a Bexar Grotto program 
one night.  I have a copy if anyone wants to borrow it.  Garrett Hardin also 
has some very well written papers on this subject.  You can view them all on 
line at the Garrett Hardin Society.

Couple of interesting facts from the video.  Bartlett talks about the rule of 
70 for doubling of exponential growth (any growth over zero).  That is, take 
the yearly growth rate of a city, say San Antonio at approximately 2.8 percent  
and divide that in to 70 and you get the doubling rate.  That is, in 25 years, 
the San Antonio area will double its population to around 4 million people.  
That means we’ll need twice the roads, schools, water supply, land area, food, 
police force, court, jails, parking spaces, energy, etc.  This is not 
sustainable.  The U.S. doubling rate is approximately 60 years if I remember 
correctly, which means we’ll have 600 million people by 2070.

China is the only major country that has addressed its population problem by 
limiting growth to a one child policy (they are thinking about dropping this 
policy – big mistake). Currently, immigration is the major driving force in 
population growth in the U.S. as I believe we are the only first world country 
with an increasing population.   Births for native born citizens is at zero 
population growth.   Maybe the U.S.  should start to limit Its population 
growth through economic means. If you believe that some people on welfare have 
more kids for an increased welfare check, it is reasonable to believe that the 
middle class has more kids for an increased tax break.  If we remove the tax 
breaks for kids, and actually have a tax increase for having kids with a 
graduated rate for having more than 2, it will help to decrease the population 
growth.  The tax rate should also be an exponential number, have more than 3 
and you probably can’t afford it.

So, we should also limit immigration if we want to limit population growth.  
There are consequences to limiting immigration such as it limits the best and 
brightest that want to come to this country, and also removes a cheaper labor 
source, but it also decreases all of the problems associated with growth as 
noted above.  This year, the world will pass the 7 billion mark after passing 
the 6 billion mark in 1999.

Scary stuff, I’ve been concerned about population growth for more than 20 years 
and it is why I’m a Neo Social Darwinist – I believe that we have way too many 
people on the planet and anything we can do to eliminate some of the dummies, 
I’m all for.  That is why I’m opposed to mandatory seat belt laws, child car 
seats, texting bans, and helmet laws.  If you aren’t smart enough to do these 
things out of common sense, you probably shouldn’t be reproducing.

Population and population growth has a major negative impact on our quality of 
life and natural resources, including cave and karst regions.

G






From: Rod Goke [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Saturday, August 06, 2011 5:51 AM
To: [email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Texascavers] where a man can breathe free, and relevance to caves


Regarding Gainesville Florida, Sleaze wrote,

   "We don't want no stinking roads either."

Austin tried that for about 2 or 3 decades, during which the attitude of local 
"environmentalists" towards roadway construction/expansion was:

   Don't build it, and hope they won't come.

They opposed road building on the theory that more roads would encourage more 
people to move here. The problem was that people came here anyway, resulting in 
severe traffic congestion problems, as bad or worst than those often found in 
much larger cities.

Unfortunately, this kind of failure to provide workable long range solutions 
often results when people practice superficial environmentalism, addressing 
only the local effects and symptoms of population growth while shying away from 
any discussion of the underlying causes of these problems. It's not hard to see 
why people find this approach tempting. It's relatively easy for activists 
groups to drum up support and claim political victories by promoting petty 
"feel good" measures with no powerful opposition and little, if any, beneficial 
effect. It takes far more courage and perseverance to address the fundamental 
underlying population issues, since almost any measure that would really help 
to alleviate overpopulation is likely to encounter strong opposition from one 
or more influential groups. Different interest groups tend to object to 
different measures on various grounds, involving political, religious, 
ideological, and/or business interests, but almost any suggested solution is 
liable to get you attacked and demonized by someone. Consequently, most groups 
with environmental interest prefer to focus on the symptoms and ignore the 
cause, as if population growth were an inevitable force of nature, beyond the 
control of human beings. Never mind the obvious fact that population growth is 
entirely due to human action. How many times have we heard people quote 
population growth projections as inevitable facts about our future and then 
proceed to talk about how they think we should deal with the consequences of 
that growth? Why does no one seriously discuss the possibility of limiting 
population growth to prevent undesirable consequences?

If any of you are wondering what this has to do with caves or are tempted to 
think of it as "off topic" then think again about the various cave related 
environmental and access issues that clearly are "on topic" for Texascavers. A 
large portion of these issues, probably most of them, are directly related to 
human population. For example, do you care about the effects of development 
near caves, including both environmental impacts and the effects of development 
on cave access? What do you think drives the demand for that development? Do 
you care about the effects on caves of quarrying, mining, or oil and gas 
production? What do you think drives the demand for these resources? Do you 
care about the quality and quantity of ground water, including that found in 
caves? What do you think influences the amount of pollution entering the 
aquifer and the amount of water that is pumped from it? Do you care about the 
effects of human visitation on caves and about the access restrictions that 
sometimes are imposed to limit those effects? What do you think affects the 
number of people seeking access? All of these, and undoubtedly more, cave 
related issues are directly affected by human population density. If these cave 
related effects of population growth are considered "on topic", how can we 
possibly dismiss the underlying cause as "off topic", unless, of course, it's 
just a cowardly attempt to avoid controversy about a relevant, but potentially 
contentious, issue?

Rod


P.S.  By the way, Sleaze, I was one of those graduate students who moved from 
Gainesville to Austin in 1973 for my first full time job in my profession. I 
would not say that "Gainesville is the Austin of Florida", because, although 
both are university towns, Austin is much more. Even at that time, Austin was 
(and still is) the state capitol, a center for high tech industry, and a 
regional music center, attracting musicians from many surrounding states in 
addition to Texas. The population of Austin at that time was approximately a 
quarter million (much smaller than it is now), but the University of Texas was 
so large (about 50,000 students) that it still gave Austin a university town 
atmosphere. At that time, I was impressed with the exceptional variety of 
influences and activities available in Austin for a city that small. I moved 
away from Austin in early '74 and returned in '84, finding that it had grown 
surprisingly larger but still was not a bad place to live. Now Austin still has 
advantages over many other cities its size, but in my opinion, it has grown far 
beyond its optimal size, and quality of life in the entire central Texas region 
continues to deteriorate from excessive population growth. I'm sure there are 
business interests who, like the purveyors of pyramid schemes, equate 
exponential growth with prosperity. For ordinary citizens, however, it means 
worse congestion, greater pollution, higher taxes, less freedom, and greater 
competition for limited natural resources.

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
Sent: Aug 5, 2011 3:49 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Texascavers] where a man can breathe free



In a message dated 8/5/2011 4:12:19 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
 writes:

If all the people fretting over the numerous environmental and social
problems resulting from overpopulation were to focus instead on the primary
underlying cause, we might reverse this trend and see real progress towards
long range solutions and improving quality of life for future generations

Amen! Here in Hogtown the living is still easy, the moss hangs from the
live oaks and all is well until the Students return. Gainesville is the Austin
of Florida, but the big difference is that there are damned near two
million Texacans in Austin but only about 250,000 gators in the Hogtown metro
area. The reason for that is that we don't want no stinking jobs or new
businesses unless they are directly related to University of Florida biotech
spinoffs. As soon as they become successful they move to Austin taking the
redundant grad students with them. We make it a point to screw every developer
who sticks his head out of a hole. We often lose, but we still cost the
developers millions every time they try. We don't want no stinking roads
either. The bad news is the dawning of the age of biomass. It seems we have way
too many trees, so the plan is to burn them in place of coal. After they
cut down all the trees maybe I'll move to Detroit. I hear there are wide
open spaces out there where a man can breathe free.

Sleaze
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--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message --- "Lew Bicking: A Legendary American Cave Explorer." Edited by David W. Hughes. National Speleological Society; 2011. ISBN: 978-1-879961-40-1. 7 by 10 inches, 324 pages plus plates, hardbound. $36; discounts for NSS members.

"Solo" Lew Bicking was an enthusiatic and hard-charging caver from his novice days in 1961 until his early death in a motorcycle accident in 1966. He gave his name to the NSS's annual Lew Bicking Award for the exploration and mapping of a cave or group of caves. (Originally, documentation--publishing--was also a requirement, before the secrecy types got to it.) Bicking was best known for exploration in the East, especially the Friars Hole Cave System in West Virginia, but he went west a few times, including for the 1964 NSS convention in Texas and the 1966 convention in California, after both of which he did some post-convention caving in Mexico.

David Hughes's recent book on Vertical Bill Cuddington (NSS, 2008) was written to be read. This book is a compilation that can only be browsed. It contains what appears to be everything ever written about Bicking's caving, by Lew or anybody else, mainly trip reports from the heyday of the Baltimore Grotto News. Included are a number of obituaries and items concerning the collection of the Lew Bicking Fund and the creation of the award. There is a section of twenty-nine black- and-white photos on pages not assigned numbers (shame!). Many of the articles are well written and interesting, but there are an awful lot of them. Finding the ones most informative and entertaining to you will be a matter of supernatural persistence, or luck. My favorite summing up was written by Squire Lewis on encountering Bicking in Mexico after the 1966 convention: "Lew's only traveling and survival equipment consists of a small Kelty pack whose sole contents are the largest Spanish dictionary every printed--about a 20-pounder--and a box of Mexican crackers. . . . His only clothes are those he wears, and he obviously has some warped goal of not taking them off--ever-- for washing or any other purpose. . . . He has gotten all the long way from Baltimore to California to [Mexico City] with nothing but his great dictionary and his crackers. We have never seen him spend any money--not any--he may well not have any. Yet he calmly proceeds intact through all the chaos of the byways and accomplishes his goals. He is the true stuff from which cavers are made."--Bill Mixon
----------------------------------------
May the last lawyer be strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
----------------------------------------
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--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
Readers are reminded that Squire Lewis authored (and Old Man Wisdom 
illustrated) a wonderful book titled Chronicles of the Old Reading Grotto.  The 
passage Bill Mixon quotes about Lew Bicking appears on page 73-74 of that book.

This 1993 work is still in print and has occasionally been available at Texas 
caver functions.  It's a great read!  I commented on the book and about 
Squire's passing in a short article for the Texas Caver many years ago.  Here 
is the text of that article:

Squire



            Squire Lewis passed on this last spring.  I didn't know about it at 
the time and got the news only after all the dust had settled. At the same time 
I learned of  a piece he had authored called CHRONICLES of the OLD READING 
GROTTO which details an incredible odyssey in the summer of 1966.   I just read 
this work, cover-to-cover; non-stop.  It's wonderful! This journey, made with 
two companions, spanned almost 17,000 miles coast to coast and Pennsylvania to 
Acapulco.  It's not the trip that is important, it's the way they did it. It's 
how they traveled, what they saw and did and the conclusions they formed 
thereby.  This is a tale of the shifting values which lead up to the era later 
known as "hippie-time."   But it's before hippies; before long hair and beads.  
It's about a time when questions were being asked about the way in which we 
lived, which things were really important, and how we as individuals fit into 
the larger puzzle.  It's about the realization that suits, ties, and the 
"establishment" aren't always right, or at least that they represent only one 
way of doing things.

            Squire does a wonderful job of describing the era.  If you were 
there, you'll understand completely.  If you weren't, or were a little young 
(or old) at these times, you'll still come away with a good feeling as to what 
it was all about.  In a way, it's almost an anthropological source book.  Its a 
catalog of most of the things that regular folks never experience.  My family 
always did things the normal way.  On trips, we traveled eight hours in a 
normal day, took our meals where there were waiters or at least people in 
uniforms, and slept in vermin free hotels.  Had it not been for my association 
with caves and cavers, I might have completed my life without sleeping the 
night in the parking lot at Cueva de Cacahuamilpa or dining in a mosca infested 
"restaurant" in San Luis del Cordero, or. . . .

            Because of people like Squire,  I learned an alternate life style; 
another way to view the planet.  After 30-odd years,  I have yet to meet  
people other than cavers who embrace that style, although I suspect that some 
of the climbers and rafters may come close, and I imagine that those outside 
the U.S. must commonly fall in step.  The difference is, in "second-world" 
countries, they are born to it in most cases and we, in the U.S., must come to 
it somehow.  The thing is, if you must have a soft bed and a hot shower and a 
"store-bought" meal on each occasion, you'll miss a lot and probably never know 
you missed it.

            So. . .  you ought to buy, or at least read, this classic piece of 
caver-oriented literature.  It's 146 pages of great reading and wonderful 
illustrations by Charlie Loving [who is able to do to society with a cartoon 
what Squire did with text].

            Squire and I were not friends.  Nodding acquaintances is about as 
close as we got.  That not withstanding,  I'll miss him considerably because of 
what he represented.  As they say in certain other circles upon the death of a 
respected elder:  "We are diminished."



===Carl Kunath




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


-----Original Message----- 
From: Mixon Bill 
Sent: Saturday, August 06, 2011 9:32 AM 
To: Cavers Texas 
Subject: [Texascavers] book review: Lew Bicking 

"Lew Bicking: A Legendary American Cave Explorer." Edited by David W.  
Hughes. National Speleological Society; 2011. ISBN: 978-1-879961-40-1.  
7 by 10 inches, 324 pages plus plates, hardbound. $36; discounts for  
NSS members.

"Solo" Lew Bicking was an enthusiatic and hard-charging caver from his  
novice days in 1961 until his early death in a motorcycle accident in  
1966. He gave his name to the NSS's annual Lew Bicking Award for the  
exploration and mapping of a cave or group of caves. (Originally,  
documentation--publishing--was also a requirement, before the secrecy  
types got to it.) Bicking was best known for exploration in the East,  
especially the Friars Hole Cave System in West Virginia, but he went  
west a few times, including for the 1964 NSS convention in Texas and  
the 1966 convention in California, after both of which he did some  
post-convention caving in Mexico.

David Hughes's recent book on Vertical Bill Cuddington (NSS, 2008) was  
written to be read. This book is a compilation that can only be  
browsed. It contains what appears to be everything ever written about  
Bicking's caving, by Lew or anybody else, mainly trip reports from the  
heyday of the Baltimore Grotto News. Included are a number of  
obituaries and items concerning the collection of the Lew Bicking Fund  
and the creation of the award. There is a section of twenty-nine black- 
and-white photos on pages not assigned numbers (shame!). Many of the  
articles are well written and interesting, but there are an awful lot  
of them. Finding the ones most informative and entertaining to you  
will be a matter of supernatural persistence, or luck. My favorite  
summing up was written by Squire Lewis on encountering Bicking in  
Mexico after the 1966 convention: "Lew's only traveling and survival  
equipment consists of a small Kelty pack whose sole contents are the  
largest Spanish dictionary every printed--about a 20-pounder--and a  
box of Mexican crackers. . . . His only clothes are those he wears,  
and he obviously has some warped goal of not taking them off--ever-- 
for washing or any other purpose. . . . He has gotten all the long way  
from Baltimore to California to [Mexico City] with nothing but his  
great dictionary and his crackers. We have never seen him spend any  
money--not any--he may well not have any. Yet he calmly proceeds  
intact through all the chaos of the byways and accomplishes his goals.  
He is the true stuff from which cavers are made."--Bill Mixon
----------------------------------------
May the last lawyer be strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
----------------------------------------
You may "reply" to the address this message
came from, but for long-term use, save:
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--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message --- "Cave of the Winds Then and Now." Photography by Norman Thompson, text by Richard Rhinehart. Westcliffe Publishers, Boulder, Colorado; 2011. ISBN 978-1-56579-650-8. 11 (wide) by 8.5 inches, 112 pages, softbound. $17.95.

This is a very clever book. The Cave of the Winds in Williams Canyon at Manitou Springs, Colorado, has a long history as a show cave, starting in March 1881, and this book was published on the occasion of its hundred-thirtieth anniversary. It contains about a hundred pairs of photographs, one in each pair old, from roughly 1880 to 1930, and one recently taken to match as closely as possible the old scene. The old photograph are in black-and-white, except a few hand-colored postcards. The modern photos are of course in color. In addition to illustrating the development of the cave and its surface facilities, many are views of the canyon and sights within it, such as the Narrows and the Temple of Isis, a cave remnant penetrating a small ridge. I was struck by how much more vegetated the vicinity of the cave looks in the modern photographs. Evidently the canyon had only begun to recover even fifty years after a fire tore through it in 1847. Many of the photos, old and new, are stereographs, providing another possible use for the stereo viewer that was distributed with the guidebook for the 2011 NSS convention in Glenwood Springs.

The text consists of a brief historical introduction and long captions for the photographs. There is a good bit of redundancy, but this is not bad in a book meant for browsing.--Bill Mixon
----------------------------------------
May the last lawyer be strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
----------------------------------------
You may "reply" to the address this message
came from, but for long-term use, save:
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--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message --- Thanks for the book reviews, Bill. Very informative, e.g., I did not know the story about Lew Bicking. The description by Squire is priceless.-- Logan

On 8/6/2011 9:32 AM, Mixon Bill wrote:
"Lew Bicking: A Legendary American Cave Explorer." Edited by David W. Hughes. National Speleological Society; 2011. ISBN: 978-1-879961-40-1. 7 by 10 inches, 324 pages plus plates, hardbound. $36; discounts for NSS members.

"Solo" Lew Bicking was an enthusiatic and hard-charging caver from his novice days in 1961 until his early death in a motorcycle accident in 1966. He gave his name to the NSS's annual Lew Bicking Award for the exploration and mapping of a cave or group of caves. (Originally, documentation--publishing--was also a requirement, before the secrecy types got to it.) Bicking was best known for exploration in the East, especially the Friars Hole Cave System in West Virginia, but he went west a few times, including for the 1964 NSS convention in Texas and the 1966 convention in California, after both of which he did some post-convention caving in Mexico.

David Hughes's recent book on Vertical Bill Cuddington (NSS, 2008) was written to be read. This book is a compilation that can only be browsed. It contains what appears to be everything ever written about Bicking's caving, by Lew or anybody else, mainly trip reports from the heyday of the Baltimore Grotto News. Included are a number of obituaries and items concerning the collection of the Lew Bicking Fund and the creation of the award. There is a section of twenty-nine black-and-white photos on pages not assigned numbers (shame!). Many of the articles are well written and interesting, but there are an awful lot of them. Finding the ones most informative and entertaining to you will be a matter of supernatural persistence, or luck. My favorite summing up was written by Squire Lewis on encountering Bicking in Mexico after the 1966 convention: "Lew's only traveling and survival equipment consists of a small Kelty pack whose sole contents are the largest Spanish dictionary every printed--about a 20-pounder--and a box of Mexican crackers. . . . His only clothes are those he wears, and he obviously has some warped goal of not taking them off--ever--for washing or any other purpose. . . . He has gotten all the long way from Baltimore to California to [Mexico City] with nothing but his great dictionary and his crackers. We have never seen him spend any money--not any--he may well not have any. Yet he calmly proceeds intact through all the chaos of the byways and accomplishes his goals. He is the true stuff from which cavers are made."--Bill Mixon
----------------------------------------
May the last lawyer be strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
----------------------------------------
You may "reply" to the address this message
came from, but for long-term use, save:
Personal: [email protected]
AMCS: [email protected] or [email protected]


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--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
Rod of Austin writes:
 
“Regarding Gainesville Florida, Sleaze wrote,
 
   "We don't want no stinking roads either."
 
Austin tried that for about 2 or 3 decades, during which the attitude of  
local "environmentalists" towards roadway construction/expansion was:
 
   Don't build it, and hope they won't come.
 
They opposed road building on the theory that more roads would encourage  
more people to move here. The problem was that people came here anyway,  
resulting in severe traffic congestion problems, as bad or worst than those  
often found in much larger cities.
 
Unfortunately, this kind of failure to provide workable long range  
solutions often results when people practice superficial environmentalism,  
addressing only the local effects and symptoms of population growth while 
shying  
away from any discussion of the underlying causes of these problems. It's not 
 hard to see why people find this approach tempting. It's relatively easy 
for  activists groups to drum up support and claim political victories by 
promoting  petty "feel good" measures with no powerful opposition and little, 
if any,  beneficial effect. It takes far more courage and perseverance to 
address the  fundamental underlying population issues, since almost any measure 
that would  really help to alleviate overpopulation is likely to encounter 
strong opposition  from one or more influential groups. Different interest 
groups tend to object to  different measures on various grounds, involving 
political, religious,  ideological, and/or business interests, but almost any 
suggested solution is  liable to get you attacked and demonized by someone. 
Consequently, most groups  with environmental interest prefer to focus on 
the symptoms and ignore the  cause, as if population growth were an inevitable 
force of nature, beyond the  control of human beings. Never mind the 
obvious fact that population growth is  entirely due to human action. How many 
times have we heard people quote  population growth projections as inevitable 
facts about our future and then  proceed to talk about how they think we 
should deal with the consequences of  that growth? Why does no one seriously 
discuss the possibility of limiting  population growth to prevent undesirable 
consequences?”
 
Rod:
 
Obviously the congestion in Austin isn't bad enough! Overpopulation may be  
the root of all evil, but roads are the vascular system that enables the 
evil to  metastasize. 
 
As for how to address the root cause, I've done my part and have no kids.  
Very few of my friends have kids either. We are an evolutionary dead end.  
Intelligence is an experiment that failed and that has long term evolutionary 
 consequences. The inheritors are those stupid enough or religious enough 
(there  I go being redundant again!) to simply act on their instincts without 
 considering the consequences. Yes, Walmart shoppers and their conspecifics 
 elsewhere are inherently inferior, brainless betas. They will inherit a 
degraded  world suitable only for themselves and their fellow cockroaches. All 
the  advances of the last several thousand years will be lost upon them. 
Here in  America we have already forgotten how to do or build anything. Our 
degenerate  descendants will be like the subhuman Tasmanians who lost even the 
use of fire.  Our collective amnesia will be unimportant because there will 
be no resources,  no power, no metal, no wood, no food, and no water. 
Cannibalism was a prominent  behavior of early humans and it will be again in 
the 
future. If you need an  example look no further than the Congo where the 
past and future have coalesced  into the present, a place where savage bands 
of Hutus consume pigmies as a  readily available form of bush meat.  
 
There is a solution but we won't pursue it because it isn't "fair", and  
that is totalitarian State control over reproduction. Not like in China which  
has a one child policy but is otherwise egalitarian. What is needed is a no 
 child policy for the betas, along with specific exceptions made for the 
tiny  percentage of alphas who qualify for the breeding program. That's right, 
we need  strict eugenics directed by the Overlords. For those of you who 
have forgotten  or spend too much time in church "natural selection" is the 
principle mechanism  behind the evolutionary process. The problem is that it 
is random and  directionless. When humans do the choosing it is called 
domestication, and human  directed evolution has worked quite well with the 
exception of the Chihuahua. To  make it work for humans will require that we 
bury 
Hitler's ghost and make our  selection of breeders be based upon science 
rather than racism, nationalism, or  ideology. Obviously this will never happen 
under a democratic regime. It will  require the use of force, and the only 
moral considerations should be those of  means, not ends. 
 
The good news is that evolution is an inexorable process. As we tinker with 
 our genome the good work of coevolution will continue apace. Roads won't 
be a  problem for the newly emerging species because there will be no cars on 
them.  The possums of tomorrow will have free sway to cross the way as 
sediments slowly  accumulate on the asphalt (chickens won't make the cut). 
Cockroaches with their  adaptability and superior intelligence will diversify 
into new and unimaginable  forms. Will our descendants think of them as 
succulent "land lobsters" or as  rivals? Even the coastline will recover as the 
underwater rubble of coastal  cities serves as the substrate for new reefs. The 
rich warm seas will bloom with  CO2 loving algae and the acidified waters 
will erode the calcium from the  rubble, thus setting the stage for the 
sequestration of carbon in the limestone  deposits of tomorrow. The few 
remaining 
humans will worship Oztotl by throwing  all their defective offspring into 
the well, then all will be well.
 
Sleaze

--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message --- El Explorador, Periódico Digital Espeleológico, a monthly web magazine from Cuba, can be found at http://www.geda.pinarte.cult.cu/html/explorador.htm . Issues 1 through 71, for May 2004 through March 2010, are currently on the site. Nicely done, all in HTML. The only problem is that each issue is one very long page, impossible to print. Even if you want to print just one article, you'll find illustrations broken over printed page boundaries. The editor casts a wide net, and there is a lot of material only vaguely related to caves, such as general archaeology or geology.--Mixon
----------------------------------------
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