EDITOR’S CORNER
Are Rules Just Meant to be Broken?
Adam W. Heft, CPG-10265
This edition of TPG begins the second half of 2021, and includes the essays of the AIPG student scholarship award recipients; please be sure to check them out to find what is motivating the current generation of students to want to become professional geologists. This edition also includes a piece on California geology – the Coyote Warp Landslide – an Alternative Interpretation. An international flavor is added with an article on Haiti’s Rock and Soil Engineering Challenges and Potential Solutions.
As the year is progressing, I’ll take the opportunity to remind members of a couple of things. First, for those eligible to do so, please vote for your choice of candidates for National Officers. The election closes on June 30; be sure to review the statements and background of each candidate, and vote for the individuals you feel will be best for AIPG. Second, the Annual Meeting this year will be held in Sacramento, California. Please consider attending the meeting, par- ticularly if you have never been to an Annual Meeting. The field trips are always a good time, and you will have many opportunities to network with friends and colleagues from around the country. I know, some members say that it costs too much to attend the meeting, or it is too far away, or they don’t have the time to take from their busy schedule to attend. Then consider rolling the Annual Meeting into a personal or family vacation. There are many things to see and do near each of the Annual Meeting locations, and by combining the meeting with a vacation, you are better able to do both at the same time. Many first time attendees of Annual Meetings have enjoyed themselves so much that they return the next year – and make lifelong friends with members from all over. I encourage YOU to attend; and if you do, look me up at the meeting. I look forward to meeting you!
This past year former editor John Berry and I have encouraged the submission of articles on California geology for publication in TPG. Since the 2022 Annual Meeting will be held in Marquette, Michigan, I encourage everyone to submit an article on Michigan geology for publication in the upcoming four TPG editions that lead up to that meeting. I’d like the first articles by August 1, 2021 to allow time for review and editing.
As I write this, we are beginning to emerge from the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic. Restrictions are being lifted in many jurisdictions, and people are starting to relax and enjoy getting back to a semblance of normalcy. Please be mindful of the restrictions that are still in place and respect the choices of others if they are more conservative in mask wearing or similar behaviors that we’ve had to endure the last year and more.
But with the lifting of restrictions, we are able to travel more, and in particular, visit various outdoor points of inter- est, parks, and similar locations. While it may seem obvious
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that while visiting these locations, we all need to behave our- selves, it seems that there are always those who cannot or will not do so. I’ll share an example from a trip that Sara and I took last year to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. After a week or so of sightseeing (and rock hunting!), we were on our way home and stopped at Laughing Whitefish Falls State Park. The park has nice trails to the falls, and wooden steps and a platform with a very nice viewing area of the bottom of the falls. The platform is a dead-end of the trail, and the perimeter has heavy railings and wire fencing above it to discourage anyone from climbing into the gorge and onto the falls. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the platform, there were numerous individuals (some with small children) that had climbed over the fence and were all over the falls. People had also constructed little cairns of rock in many places on the rock face. Needless to say, this behavior reduced the enjoyment of others’ that were trying to enjoy the falls and take photographs of the location. It can also result in a closure of the park, resulting in no one being able to enjoy it – this happened at a portion of the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes National Lakeshore for several months last year.
While this kind of behavior is unacceptable to many of us, what should we do? If I were much younger, I would have considered jumping the fence myself and removing the cairns so that we and subsequent visitors would have a more unspoiled view of the falls. But this doesn’t eliminate the problem; someone else would probably just rebuild them, and others would continue to play in the falls. There are safety issues in connection with this choice as well – the hazard of going over the fence, climbing water-slick and algae-covered rock, and potential confrontations with belligerent individuals that believe that the rules don’t apply to them and they can do what they like. I gave serious consideration with talking with a park ranger about it, but there were none to be found when we were on the way out.
I’d be interested in other’s views of the situation, and if you have experienced similar issues, what did you do about it? Are there ethical issues in connection with the situation? What do you think?
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