Lavoisier was brilliant, but I'm not seeing the connection between a French chemist of the 18th century, and a beautiful hoodoo today, in Taiwan.

You accurately re-stated his Law of Conservation of Mass.

(I know --- it's not funny when you have to explain it. :o)

Eventually, "nature" cares about as little about the wildlife killed by DDT in a stream as it does about how long a hoodoo stands. Our desire to maintain ecosystems is to some extent aesthetic as well. There's the additional butterfly effect issue of whether a particular disruption to an ecosystem will eventually impact our survival, but I would think that the National Park system was primarily set up to preserve aesthetics, and the ecological aspect (which is more important, but less politically viable) piggybacked on that.

Oh he's in trouble with the park rangers, also. They were incensed over it, and planned to charge him. It was unusual because pushing over boulders isn't really a popular park activity by the guests, and making a video of it for youTube, with you plainly enjoying it. Well, the stupidity rises sharply here, doesn't it? :rolleyes:

Maybe its the anti-royalist in me but I'm very disappointed that this thread failed to go in the proper direction.

That's because it was pushed off its pedestal.



I must confess I pushed a rock over once. I was climbing straight up a cliff in a box canyon above a small lake that spanned the canyon wall to wall. The walls were about 40 feet apart and comprised of square 3ft by 3ft by 3ft cubes. Damnedest things.

I finally made it to the top (about 50ft) and noticed the last cube at the top was "rickety". Well somehow I got it topple over the edge. It free fell the 50ft into about a 14ft deep pond. My gawd!! what a spectacular splash it made. That period of dead silence ended by a KABOOOMsh and a 60 ft geyser. It was spectacular, but afterwards I did have some of that."if everyone did that there would be no canyon left" feeling.:sniff:

I tried to push a rock over once.

It was a big boulder, I guess about 4' or more, at the north end of the Bixby Bridge in Big Sur. It had a sign that said "Do Not Lean on Rock." So, we called it the do not lean on rock rock.

Tell a group of high high schoolers not to lean on a rock and what do they do? They lean on the rock. And discuss why we aren't supposed to be leaning on it.

When it didn't budge we climbed on top and discussed ways of getting it to tumble. Then we discussed what would happen if it began to roll while we were on it.

Then we ran back and forth across Bixby Bridge. Naturally, one of us was more stupid/reckless than the rest and chose to run down the middle of the bridge rather than near the edge where we could step up on the pedestrian walkway to get out of the way.

After he nearly got run over we figured our minutes were numbered, so we gave the rock one more heave and left.

The last time I was down there, the rock was still there.