Stone emerging from concrete - a photo I took in California last year . The image communicates the victory of nature over industry gone off the rails. It is a cap on the insanity. Perhaps they can find one big enough to drop on the hole BP drilled in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, which is continuously spewing out black blood.
Perhaps we can still find enough 'real looking' ones not to have to keep making substitutes and fake ones. Perhaps architects and engineers can source out suitable ones, and masons skilled enough, to actually design buildings that incorporate natural stone structurally; strong stones that can support wooden beams and heavy floors and beautiful peeked roofs. Maybe they can discover a way of getting them to hold together which doesn't involve huge amounts of glue, threaded rod, rebar, steel cages or tons of cement.
There may come a time when old barn and house foundation stones are not just pushed over with bulldozers and buried in the ground, but reused. A time when the big 'freezer-sized' ones are no longer quarried just to push up against the sides of buildings as the only solution to holding terraced earth back. Or maybe they wont use all the random truckloads of rip-rap to merely dump it along ditches as quick fix to erosion. Then again they may consider not quarrying all of them just to ground them up into gravel and various grades of crushed aggregate. Maybe they wont need to burn it all at incredibly high temperatures predominantly to make concrete and unappealing concrete products.
Maybe natural stone, just as it is found in the ground, could be part of a much needed solution for this planet. There may in fact be hope. It might be a gradual change, or it may come along like a big bump in the road.
