Rock pollution

The destruction and dispersal of Earth's mineral life is a longstanding hobby horse of mine. Rocks are essentially a non-renewable resource; the conditions under which many of them were made will never be repeated again on Earth. Yet we blast them apart in shocking accelerations of entropy. Imagine a graph of the average size of rocks over the last 150 years, or a map that tracked the irreversible diaspora of rocks across the Earth. Even rockhounding, a practice that connotes care and respect for the mineral kingdom, transports rocks far from the site of their natural origin. (When I was ten I stole a rock from a national park in New Brunswick. I had been searching desperately for fossils that whole year and had finally found one, a thick reed whose ribs were clearly delineated in the red sandstone. That rock belongs to the Bay of Fundy. I am saddened to remember a friend's return from a grad school scouting trip to the Midwest: he brought home a cache of geodes, which we hammered apart on his front porch. I believe I still have one at my parents' house, unsmashed, thank God.) Yet for some people this is a joke .

(Some older rock writing here and here.)