Trash are us!

TRASH ARE US

Of course, here in the Natural State, trash is just something we live with, and it’s part of who we are, or our roadsides wouldn’t look like a city dump. Yes, this column is going to rub some folks the wrong way, but the facts are that we turn a blind eye to all the trash around us, when instead we should be appalled by the mountains of trash that line our roads and city streets. Yes, we are living in trash, and seemly, we don’t give a rat’s ass. (Forgive my colorful language, but I think you get the point.) But what is even more destressing is that we have the potential to be a lush, vibrant state with gorgeous trees, shrubs, plants and beautiful roadsides.

I know I’ve told this story before, but a number of years ago we were in Switzerland and we ended up in a small town where they were having a Military Parade. It was historic back to crossbows and lances and went forward right up to Swiss Special Forces. We loved it, but something happened that stuck in my mind. Midway through the parade I saw a young girl who looked about 10 years old walk over to a vendor and buy an ice cream bar. The ice cream was wrapped and when she unwrapped it she looked for a trash can to put the wrapper. There wasn’t one in sight, so she neatly folded the wrapper and put it in her pocket. When the parade was over and we were leaving I noticed there wasn’t a scrap of trash where thousands of people had stood and watched the parade. Contrast that to the way any of our festival grounds look after the festival is over. I was Festival Chairman of El Dorado’s MusicFest for five years, and after each festival trash was everywhere.

            But festival trash is nothing compared to the roadside trash I see when I do my walk-jog on the 167 bypass in El Dorado. There are some stretches, usually when there’s an exit that in less than a hundred yards, where there is every imaginable piece of trash. Let me just say this; there is very little trash that some people won’t throw out of their car or pickup truck. I am shocked at what I see every day when I walk, and I have a theory---Driving from a convenience store on North West Avenue in El Dorado to the stop sign on Calion Road---by my house, is the time it takes some folks to drink a Bud Light. I’ve been thinking about putting up a trash can with a beer can target.

Well, we and I include myself, have gotten so used to living with trash, we seemly don’t see it. There must be a word for it, since someone who can’t see color is called colorblind. Maybe it is “trash insensitive” or “garbage-blind” or maybe just “crap-blind” or maybe we’re saying, “Yeah, we’ve got a lot of trash. So what.”

Come on folks, drunks can’t sober up until they say, “I’m a drunk,” and we can’t have a quality state until we call trash “trash” and then start doing something about it. So do something! At least let your voice be heard, and heard and heard again, until folks stop lining our roads with beer cans, plastic bottles, and plastic straws, and then maybe we can actually do something about the appalling condition of our towns. Bare ugly streets with stores that haven’t seen a paint-brush in 40 years lining potholed streets with utility poles taking the place of trees, and parking lots that must be in an ugly contest along with abandoned signs and overgrown weedy lots. I’m not talking about someone else’s town, I’m talking about your town, and my town, and here in El Dorado, we have a couple of real eyesore streets. By far one of the ugliest streets in the state or probably the mid-south is Hillsboro Street, Highway 82 Business, and yes, I know the Highway Department has great plans to widen the street, but give me a break. Those plans have been on the books longer than a coon‘s age, and for you city folks, that’s about 10 years. Well, what will we have when it’s finished? You guessed it. A wide, ugly street.

            It seems we have a blind eye to trash, and blank treeless parking lots and rundown buildings. Of course, the rat’s nest of utility lines that need to go underground and hundreds of God awful signs really put an exclamation point to say, “Trashy streets are us”. Of course, El Dorado is certainly not the only town in the Natural State with crappy street scenes. Sure landscaping does cost a few bucks, but National Surveys have proven the money spent on trees or landscaping is paid back by increased business in the retail stores that line those streets. Now I know we’re not going to see a lot of painting and sprucing up along our ugly streets, but how about just planting some crepe myrtle trees? And for God’s sake, don’t chop them off every year. Crepe myrtle aren’t poodle bushes, they are trees that will get to be 30 feet tall, so, quit “crepe murder.”

            But let’s get real. The reason we have such God-awful, bone-ugly streets in every town in the state is because we put up with those eyesores, and it’s not just city streets, it’s every median along our four lane highways. Those mowed highway median right-of-ways are just one step away from being a bare parking lot.  You probably think our mowed right-of-ways are how right-of ways should look, but you would be wrong. When Louisiana, Texas, and even Mississippi start making our highways right-of-ways look bad, then you know we’re making Arkansas Highways the poster child for ugliness. We have hundreds of miles of highway medians where planting trees should be a priority instead of mow, mow, and of course you don’t ever have to worry about driving off the road and hitting a tree because the Highway Department clears way more right-of-way than needed.    

            Every state around us is into highway beatification more than we are, and we don’t measure up. My Lord, when Mississippi can say, “Well, we’re at least better than Arkansas,” you know we’re in the running to be last. Yes, I know we have a Highway Environmental Engineer, but he or she is like the President lying about Global Warming, as he or she lies, “We have beautiful highway right-of-ways.”

You know, maybe those men on the Highway Commission could use a woman to help with highway beautification, but I guess the Governor is saying “There are no qualified women to put on the Commission.” Or maybe he’s saying “This is a male only Commission.” or “Women don’t want to be on the Highway Commission.” Which is it Governor?

            But let me just say this: a big atta-a-boy to the governor for putting a woman on the Game and Fish Commission. That only took a 100 years, so I guess one day one of the governor’s grandchildren will finally put a woman on the Highway Commission.

thenorphletpaperboy: Richard, the Collector

thenorphletpaperboy: Richard, the Collector: Richard the Collector           I guess, what we own or maybe what we collect tells something about us. Or maybe I just have a str...

Richard, the Collector

Richard the Collector

          I guess, what we own or maybe what we collect tells something about us. Or maybe I just have a streak in me that likes to pick up things, and if you even glance at my downtown office, you would nod in the affirmative.  But since I’m a working geologist, and my studies have focused on the earth’s geologic history, and the earths minerals, that’s to be expected. Yes, and I have shelves of mineral and rock specimens, but that just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to my collecting.

            My serious collecting began when I was in my early teens. From conversations with farmers along the Ouachita River watershed, I found out that South Arkansas was laced with old Indian camps. That’s when my first splurge of collecting sent me walking up and down rows in cotton fields near the river looking for arrowheads. My display cases now has hundreds of arrowhead, mostly from South Arkansas, and although I stopped the arrowhead hunting when I left South Arkansas to attend the University, I did continue, for a few years, while in school, searching along the White River and added to my collection.

            Back when I was 14, I took five of the south Arkansas arrowheads, packed them up, and naively mailed them, with a note where I found them, to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D. C. The note said: “Please tell me which Indians made these arrowheads.”

            Well, believe it or not, in a few weeks I receive my arrowheads back with I very nice letter telling me that four of those arrowhead were made by relatively recent Caddo Indians, but one of the arrowheads I sent them was much, much older. Later, I realized earlier Indians who lived in South Arkansas could be distinguished by the shape of their arrowheads and the fact that these ancient Indians were pre-pottery. You never find broken pottery pieces in camps of these early Indians. These Indians didn’t have the skill to produce pottery.

             I have a question for any actual anthropologist who may read this column. There is a World Heritage site in North Louisiana called Poverty Point, which has huge mounds made by prehistoric Indians.  In the museum’s exhibit onsite, I noted the absence of any pottery. There is a non-pottery Indian mound in Union County, another one across the Ouachita River in Calhoun County, and a non-mound but non-pottery site in Bradley County at the mouth of Bangs Slough. Are all these non-pottery sites related to the miss-named Toltec mounds farther north in east Arkansas?

            By the way, a visit to the World Heritage site Poverty Point is worth the trip. The mounds there are enormous, and it is mind boggling to think they were built by Indians carrying dirt in baskets.

            I guess, my arrowhead collection numbers several hundred from both early and later Indians. By the time I went off to college, I could rattle off the sites of at least a half dozen old Indians villages. But I was just getting started in my collecting.

            As a geologist part of my work is to make maps of the subsurface geologic formations for use in the search for oil and gas, and I think that gave me an interest in surface maps. Over the years, that interest has become almost an obsession to collect antique maps. At first, I just collected old Arkansas maps, but I quickly found out that Arkansas didn’t exist on maps before 1800. So, if I wanted to collect earlier maps they would be pre-Arkansas Territorial maps, which opened up a whole new area of map collecting, and you would not believe the multiple sources where I found maps, which covered the Louisiana Purchase area of our country. A vacation in the south of France turned up a pre-1800 Louisiana Purchase map in a local flea market, but by far the best of my maps came from the Map Room in London, from a source in New York City near Bloomingdales, and from Santa Fe, New Mexico. I have 67 framed antique maps dating back to the early 1700s hanging in my office.

            If you are a serious collector, you collect as you travel, and since I worked overseas for several years, I hauled back fossils, pottery, and minerals from several countries including a large batch of beautiful gypsum replaced sea shells from the Libyan Desert. As I supervised drilling and coring of numerous oil and gas wells, that added large pieces of rock cores from these wells that add an “I’m an oilman” look to my office. Those along with several trilobite fossils from Morocco says, “I’m a geologist.            “

            Of course, if you have blank walls in your house and buildings and you are a collector, you relish the idea of filling them with art, and Vertis helped along the way by bidding at an auction in Northwest Arkansas and buying a set of Richard Timm wildlife prints. She made a good bid in the auction, but framing the 31 signed prints nearly broke me.

            But there’s more; I added to my collecting during vacations when we traveled to the Central American country of Belize, which is a collector’s paradise, and today my home display case has several excellent pieces of Pre-Colombian Mayan artifacts.

            A serious collector will never pass up an auction, especially if old stamp collections are on the block. And since I collected stamps when I was a teen, over the years, I bought several albums, and I have a sizable box containing thousands of stamps. I don’t have a clue if these stamps are worth even checking out their value.

            Then, as we traveled on vacation to New York City, I began to attend Sotheby’s auctions, and not only did I attend, I bid. Well, at Sotheby’s some items sell for millions, but thousands of pre-Colombian artifacts sell for a few hundred dollars, and I have a display case to prove it.

             But even though my glass display cases contain most of the object that are valuable, and I mean in the hundreds not thousands of dollars, I treasure the glass shelves along one wall in our dining room that has a wide variety of collected items, none of which have any real value to anyone except Vertis and me. Pieces of broken cups from Ancient Greece, clay net-fishing sinkers from the jungles of Belize, and assorted minerals such as amber, gypsum, and halite. Of course, every Arkansas geologist worth his salt will have numerous quartz crystals. Most of these items I actually collected from various working trips and vacations on at least three continents. But I’m not a pot hunter, or one who would destroy the intrinsic value of a historic site. I collect what a plow or erosion has uncovered, and I have never dug or vandalized a historic site.

            Well, a true collector never stops collecting, and I catch myself viewing the ground every time I am in a prospective historic or river bank area. Of course, as Vertis will tell you, if something else comes in the front door something else had better go out the back door.

Rewilding Arkansas, Part 2

Rewilding Arkansas Part Two

            Several months back, I wrote about the reintroduction of extinct or almost extinct animals back into the wild in various states and countries. As you might remember several European countries are moving ahead, and of all things they are recreating the ancient cow. Yes, it’s the extinct cow you see on cave drawings in western France. They are doing this by cross breeding cows that are carrying the genetics from those ancient forerunners of today’s cows, and as they continue to crossbreed the cows the genetic traits increase until they essentially have a prehistoric cow. As they continued, the herd they developed became so close to the original cows that they reintroduced them back into a part of Europe that still had wolf packs, and they were concerned that the wolves would make short work of those cows. However, those cows didn’t only look like prehistoric cows, they had traits that enabled them to hold their own against the wolf packs and the cows actually increased.

            That is just an example of how rewilding is taking off, but not only in Europe. There are a number of areas in the United States where rewilding is actively being attempted. Even here in Arkansas I have seen a lot of interest in trying to rewild the State, and that is focused on restoring top predators to where they are a significant presence in our ecosystem. The ‘Bring Back the Wolf!’ bumper sticker is on over 200 Arkansas cars now---email me if you want one. There are numerous other groups around the country that are working to restore an ecosystem that disappeared almost completely by the early 1940, and the Yellowstone wolves are a good example of success.

In the 1920s the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission put bounties on wolves, cougars, and bobcats. Of course, with a bounty and open season on essentially every apex predator, the last wolves were killed in 1942, and the last cougar within a few years after that. A few bears managed to survive in several refuges, but without any protection virtually all our large predators were killed.

            The slaughter of apex predators was brought about because they were considered dangerous to humans. I know you might think hundreds of settlers or even later Arkansawyers were killed by cougars, bears, wolves, but according to the resource reading I have done, I can’t find any accounts of these animals killing anyone in the state. More people have been killed by cows or dogs than all the apex predators put together.

            However, the unsupported fear of these animals is still with us, and last week in El Dorado several people reported a black bear near the football stadium, and a number of police cars responded to check out the bear. The bear ambled off into the woods near the stadium and the police commented, “We didn’t want to report it because it might panic people.” Panic people? There are no reported incidents where an Arkansas bear ever killed anyone. At one time there were an estimated 50,000 bears in the state found in every county, and no one was ever fatally mauled. That essentially proves the reasons for the wholesale slaughter of the apex predators was horribly flawed. In other words these species were singled out for exterminations because of unsupported fear of attack on humans and livestock. With today’s technology farmers and ranchers can easily use electric fencing, sound speakers, and other items to minimize any predator attacks on livestock.

The unfounded threats to humans culminated in the bounties and pack hunting that essentially eliminated the wolves, cougars, and bears, which horribly damaged our ecosystem.  It’s hard to admit we screwed up, and it is going to be even harder to override the sentiment that eliminated hundreds of thousands of essential animals because of a false premises. If we admit the error of bad wildlife management, it cries for reversal. That’s right. We should have never removed those apex predators from our ecosystem, and we are now paying the price for our errors.

            We have a huge deer herd, no quail, and millions of feral hogs and of course, that is the predicted result from the absence of predators, and the introduction of strict deer hunting regulations. With no predators and a regulated hunting season the deer multiplied like rabbits on Viagra, and the quail eggs ended up as hog food, and anyone who thinks differently just doesn’t understand wildlife management.

However, we can’t live in the past and moan about wildlife loss such as the millions of slaughtered buffalo (Every wonder how the “Buffalo” River got its name) and passenger pigeons that were exterminated (Pigeon Hill near Moro Bay was a Passenger Pigeon roost) and what is even more terrible are the documented accounts that millions of these birds and animals were just killed and left to rot in the fields.

The question is, can we in good conscious not attempt to rectify the sins of our ancestors? And this isn’t ancient history. The last wolves in Arkansas were killed in the 1940s along with the cougars, and they were killed because the fledgling Game and Fish Commission put a bounty on them. It was wrong then, and it is wrong now not to try and reestablish these apex predators back into our ecosystem.

Of course, the recent survey, based on confirmed sighting, says 100 to 125 cougars have moved back into the state and more are coming down the Arkansas River from the Rockies, and based on a number of sighting in and around the Mulberry and Buffalo Rivers, we may have a few gray wolves that have come down the Arkansas River, and/or from Minnesota. It seems Mother Nature is trying to correct our mistakes.

            But let’s be rational about where we are today, and consider what our ecosystem would be if it had been managed properly a 100 years ago. Yes, we would have wolf packs, cougars, and a lot more bears. We would still have our quail, we would never have had the feral hog problem, and we have a slightly smaller deer herd, but one without chronic wasting disease.

            I think Game and Fish is finally getting the message that the quail problem is not habitat, but scavenger animals who are eating the quail eggs. Opening up the season for possums, coons, and coyotes, is going to help, but they need to go a step farther, and bring back the apex predators to really solve the problem, or, for God’s sake, at least put a moratorium on wolves, cougars, and eliminate the bear season.

When you take an ecosystem out of balance, certain animals and other parts of the system become out-of-control to the point where they foul the whole system. That is exactly what has happened because all things in a viable ecosystem are connected.

 Chief Seattle said it a lot better than I can.

            If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth.

Chief Seattle