[Rockhounds] Elmwood Mine, Tennessee

[Mark]

I am visiting the Nashville Area soon, and I was wondering if there were any 
locations for the Elmwood Mine that are open to the public for collecting?
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "jbacko" <jabac at hal-pc.org>
To: "Rockhounds at drizzle.com: A mailing list for rock and gem collectors" 
<rockhounds at lists.drizzle.com>
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2008 3:11 AM
Subject: Re: [Rockhounds] Question


> Kreigh Tomaszewski wrote:
>> John,
>>
>> If it is not grown, it must be mined. Plants are at the bottom of the 
>> food chain; plants do their own mining. People need knowledge of 
>> minerals, and technology, to survive, given our number on planet earth. 
>> Knowledge needs to be shared to survive; knowledge makes technology 
>> possible. Mineralogy and geology are the key sciences; rockhounding is 
>> the associated hobby. We help the future by actively supporting 
>> rockhounding.
>>
> Some people do need knowledge of "minerals and technology" to survive; but 
> only those who actively exploit them and make them available to the rest 
> of us. We, the users, do not particularly care where they came from or how 
> the manufactured articles came to be, only that they are there. And even 
> that is opportunism to a degree. If they weren't there, would we really 
> miss them? Living in the gulag proved to many that all one really needed 
> was a spoon and a bowl as utensils, and some clothing to protect against 
> the cold and rain.  Therefore we should know about how to make pottery 
> with clay and how to carve a wooden spoon, how to spin lint into thread 
> and tan a hide.  Farming in Egypt has been a subsistence activity that has 
> followed the natural patterns of the Nile for 6000 years or more. The 
> cultures of Atlantis, the Dynasties, the West, and who knows what others 
> have come and gone, yet the methods persist. ( I exaggerate of course but 
> not much).  We are probably prudent to be cautious of what is true for us 
> who live in an industrial and technological society as being universal to 
> the needs of all of humanity. Especially as it applies to "survival".
>
> I suppose there are some that would disagree with you about Mineralogy and 
> Geology as being the "key" sciences in favor perhaps of Physics. Just as 
> Theology was the "Queen of Sciences" in the Middle Ages and Alchemy 
> occupied a somewhat more lowly place. We build skyscrapers and libraries; 
> they built cathedrals and monasteries.  But you point about knowledge that 
> it must be shared and extended is well-taken. We believe in the education 
> of Everyman, perhaps the first persistent culture to try such a thing. And 
> it is a relatively recent thing, dating in force only from the last 
> quarter of the Nineteenth Century. One of the tenets of the philosophy of 
> science, and education,  is that these truths gained through observation 
> of reality are for everyone, to be shared and shared- alike. We have a 
> responsibility as those who have benefited and partaken of these things to 
> pass them on intact to all succeeding generations, lest they have the pain 
> of re-discovering them all over again! I am not sure how one does this 
> other than always making the information permanent and indelible ( in as 
> much as we can) and making it freely available to all who are curious 
> about it. The rub comes in finding the ways that make people curious about 
> it. To you and I, it was never a problem because we were always into 
> discovering these things for ourselves; it is our natural inclination and 
> talent. But to most it is not.  Unless there is a demonstrable benefit --  
> hence the great and almost mystical reverence for technology.
>
> As near as I can tell, The explosive rise in the standard of living since 
> the Industrial Revolution has been caused by the availability of abundant 
> cheap energy, mostly in the form of fossil fuels. There  are really only 
> two sources of wealth -- land and labor. The land provides raw material 
> and labor, i. e. someone's invested time, develops that material into 
> something attractive or useful, including food, clothing and shelter. 
> Abundant energy transferred that labor function to machines and multiplied 
> the effect to the point where we now have a considerable amount of idle 
> time in a large portion of the world.  Which we use in various ways, some 
> of which are  extending our own intellectual curiosities into areas we 
> might not do otherwise. Like rockhounding and radio and playing in a band 
> and volunteering at the hospital. Removing the source of that energy would 
> force us all back into the mold of using our labor to produce the same 
> effect; that is an improbable supposition. It is patently impossible to 
> produce the same standard of living for as much of the world as it now 
> enjoys by human labor alone.  But it would be relatively easy for a few to 
> direct that labor to their own benefit, a clear danger, and history shows 
> this to be the common mode.  We are in the uncommon era. Because we have 
> abundant energy. Not because we have a  corner on technology or science or 
> anything else.
>
>> Our planet needs to support an ever growing human population, with an 
>> improving standard of life, without significantly damaging the total 
>> environment (locally or globally). We need to be thinking about how to 
>> expand beyond our planet (Earth First, mine the other planets later). We 
>> mostly have the technology "off the shelf".
>>
> There are two factors that cannot be ignored here. One is entropy. 
> Inevitably it becomes more and more expensive for any closed system to 
> extract useful work from it as useful work is being done by it.  Though 
> the Earth in the solar system is an open system, the pass-through of 
> energy is on a much much longer time scale  than is our present use. We 
> are using it as a closed system to support our standard of living. We have 
> to present to everyone the idea of geological time. That is, the 
> accumulation of "fossil energy" takes an incredible amount of time which 
> is totally unrelated to real ordinary time, and however slowly we use it 
> up we cannot reach a sustainable level that is consistent with present 
> standards, much less those extended throughout the whole of the world. And 
> there is no way that the streaming of energy in geological time can 
> support it either. When we speak of the building of mountains or the 
> movement of continents,  or the creation of a crystal,  or how old a given 
> shell really is, we should convey that awesome numerology of time. We have 
> to teach that free energy is limited, and that we should use it as wisely 
> as possible. I believe that alone would bring us into a more sane and 
> rational approach to living life. After all, we don't really need much 
> more than a bowl and a spoon and a safe place to take shelter. :)
>
> The second factor is your supposition of expansion. To other planets and 
> beyond. It is an easy one for we Americans to come by. It is precisely 
> what we have been doing for the last century or so. We have moved the 
> exploitation of resources further and further away from us while 
> collecting the benefits.  Now we worry about the Amazon rain forest. 
> Because we use their wood and not our own. We refuse to mine our own 
> mineral needs, Because we mine and use the minerals of others. Never mind 
> the environmental costs to the others. We, at least, can gain comfort that 
> we are protecting our own nest. All the while having all the toys and 
> benefits that go along with it.  It seems to me that it does no good to 
> push the basic activity out of the picture and onto others. We have to 
> learn how to use the Earth when and where She is, with minimal disruption 
> to be sure, but with true use to support our own needs (and desires). 
> Also, along with that exploitation of other planets and such is the 
> greater cost of doing it, the entropy factor at work. Unless of course, we 
> migrated en masse to the new place. Think of what that would cost!
>
>
>> Think globally, act locally. Resist movements that prevent making life 
>> better for everyone.
>>
>> Kreigh
>>
>>
>
> I am not quite sure what movements you have in mind here. The things that 
> ultimately prevent making life "better for everyone" are hard-wired into 
> the physics of the universe.  We can make life better for everyone but not 
> at a very high level for a very long time unless we can come up with a 
> truly cheap and universal energy source. But as far as I know every energy 
> source has side effects. Even too much waste heat is an unpleasant side 
> effect, and I can not see how we would not fall to temptation and overuse 
> any other energy source as we have those now in use!
> The cheaper it is, the more we would (potentially) abuse it. Do I sound 
> too pessimistic? I hope not. What we do have is an incredible capacity to 
> learn how to do things right. Maybe not always the first time. But we do 
> find a way to make things work in pretty short order. Maybe because we are 
> naturally inclined to the better way. Maybe because we are basically lazy. 
> Who knows? I do know that our children and their children will find a way 
> to make the whole thing work. We may not recognize the result, just as a 
> medieval scholastic would be totally amazed at the modern world, but it 
> will satisfy them.
>
>
>
> Thank you Kreigh.
>
>
> (I think maybe we have flogged this subject enough).
>
> john
>
>
> -- 
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