Tag: century

Bottle Hunters Clash With Archaeologists

  • Though archaeologists may disagree, diggers Fortemeyer and Jordan say it’s better to dig quickly – maybe even sloppily – then to not dig at all.(Photo courtesy of Samara Freemark)

Archaeologists are not happy with bottle hunters. Bottle hunters spend their free time digging up outdoor privies – or, 19th century toilets. They’re looking for old glass bottles. But as Samara Freemark reports, they’re catching flak from the professionals.

Transcript

Archaeologists are not happy with bottle hunters. Bottle hunters spend their free time digging up outdoor privies – or, 19th century toilets. They’re looking for old glass bottles. But as Samara Freemark reports, they’re catching flak from the professionals.

If you ever went looking for buried treasure when you were a kid, maybe you can begin to understand just how crazy people can get about digging up bottles.

Take Jack Fortemeyer. When I met him, he was neck-deep in a hole in a backyard in Brooklyn. He was shoveling out a 19th century privy with his partner Scott Jordan. Not so bad for a 70 year old man.

“I told the kids you guys are going to have to do the digging while I sit up on the top in a wheelchair and you’re going to pass me the bottles and so forth. I’m getting to that point.”

Fortemeyer is a bottle digger – a person who digs up backyard privy pits looking for old bottles. The ones they find, they clean and keep. Or they sell them, or trade them with other collectors. Fortemeyer says he’s been hooked for decades.

“Found some bottles, had to find out about them, bought a book, and now I’m hopelessly addicted to it.”

Fortemeyer used to live in suburban Long Island. But he moved to Brooklyn because the buildings here are older. Older buildings mean privy pits – And privy pits… mean bottles.

“That’s why I moved to the neighborhood. To be closer to my pits. To be….I mean, that’s what it’s all about.”

“Jack, I see something….there’s a bottle there…”

So far today Fortemeyer and Jordan have dug up a nice collection of 19th century artifacts. Jordan spreads the pieces they like on a table.

“There’s a tiny piece of black pottery with floral design. a fragment of an 1840s teapot. A brass shirt button, little tiny stars going around the edge.”

He’s in the middle of describing them to me when I trip and step on a shard of pottery that’s been tossed on the ground.

“I think I….don’t worry about that. I think I just stepped on a plate and broke it.
Just more work for me. If we’re laying it on the ground, it’s not that important.”

What is it? Part of a white plate. So typical a lot of it doesn’t get kept.

And that moment right there is maybe the perfect example of why bottle diggers drive some professional archaeologists completely up the wall.

“It just makes us crazy. The bottle hunter, it’s all for them.”

That’s Joan Geisamar. She’s a member of the Professional Archaeologists of New York City – or the P-A-N-Y-C and yes, that acronym is pronounced ‘panic’.

“I have to confess the acronym came before the name, because we’re always in a panic about what’s going on.”

Geisamar says bottle diggers destroy the archaeological record. Professionals dig slowly. Painstakingly. They catalog every fragment, no matter how unglamorous. Diggers, she says, just barge in with shovels, looking for pretty things.

“They take what they want and throw everything else back in. It’s just a record that’s completely lost for personal gain and selfishness. Once it’s lost, it’s lost. And it’s
just morally wrong and professionally wrong.”

But Scott Jordan says in a place like New York, where there’s always development going on, it’s better to dig quickly – maybe even sloppily – then to not dig at all.

“There’s enough being destroyed left and right that we can’t even keep up with it
ourselves. There are so many sites, especially during the building boom in New
York where entire blocks are lost. If we’re there it’s gonna be thrown in a dump truck, put in a landfill. So those artifacts will just be lost.”

He pointed at the schoolyard next door. The playground had been slated for redevelopment. The diggers wanted to get in there. They offered to do presentations at the school, show the kids what they found. Everyone was interested. But jumping through all the official hoops took too long, and in the end, the yard was bulldozed and the site was lost.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

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Bird Extinction Rate Hikes Up

A new study indicates bird species are going extinct at a much faster rate than biologists previously thought. The GLRC’s Lester Graham has more:

Transcript

A new study indicates bird species are going extinct at a much faster rate than biologists
previously thought. The GLRC’s Lester Graham reports:


Researchers at Stanford University, Duke University and the Missouri Botanical Garden
conducted a more thorough analysis of bird data. The analysis determined the number of
bird extinctions since the year 1500 is a lot higher than previously estimated. Peter
Raven is with the Missouri Botanical Garden. He says the study, published in the journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows a lot more bird species have
disappeared.


“Which makes the extinction over the last 500 years go from about 150 to about 500,
about one a year instead of about one every three or four years.”


Raven predicts another 1,250 bird species will go extinct by the end of this century.
That’s a rate about 100 times higher than the natural rate before human influence started
changing the earth.


For the GLRC, this is Lester Graham.

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More Warming Warnings for Wildlife

A new report on global warming forecasts more uncertainty
for North American wildlife. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

A new report on global warming forecasts more uncertainty for North American wildlife. The
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:


The Wildlife Society is a group of biologists, habitat managers and educators. The society has
looked over hundreds of peer-reviewed studies from the last few years on global warming and
wildlife. The report says the one degree Fahrenheit increase in average global temperatures over
the past century is already having some effect on species like songbirds.


The Wildlife Society also says a predicted larger increase in global warming will generally push
wildlife and habitats northward. Douglas Inkley of the National Wildlife Federation says this
northward push means migration corridors will need to be expanded.


“Generally on a North-South axis, would be the best direction to put those in, so that the wildlife
are able to move as the climate changes.”


The report also urges more measures to reduce emissions of pollutants that contribute to global
warming. The Wildlife Society will take up formal policy recommendations at its meeting in
March.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

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Administration Stays Course on Global Warming

  • Many scientists are finding that much of the Arctic's ice cover could melt by the end of this summer. However, the Bush Administration cites a few reasons why compliance with the Kyoto treaty is still not a favored option. (Photo by Michael Slonecker)

Despite warnings that global warming is causing the
Arctic to warm up at twice the rate of the rest of the world, the Bush administration is not changing its policies on emissions in the U.S. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

Despite warnings that global warming is causing the Arctic to warm up at twice the
rate of the rest of the world, the Bush administration is not changing its policies
on emissions in the U.S. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:


Earlier this month 300 scientists presented a four-year study that concluded the
Arctic was warming up right now. The report indicated the northern ice cap was already
diminished by 15 to 20 percent, and by the end of this century half of the Arctic’s summer
ice cover would be melted and polar bears could be nearly extinct. The study predicted that
the wildlife in the Arctic and the people who depended on it for food would be in dire straits.


But even with the new evidence that the Arctic is facing worse warming than first predicted,
the Bush adminsitration is not changing its course. The White House has indicated the U.S.
would lose too many jobs and have to restrict its economy more than other nations such as
China and India if it were to adhere to the Kyoto global warming treaty. So far, the Bush
administration has agreed only to fund further research on the issue.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

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Part 2: Selling the Right to Develop Farmland

  • Farm museums like this one are sometimes the only remnant of the agricultural life that has been overrun by development. However, some communities are buying farmers' development rights in an effort to save the rural landscape. (Photo by Lester Graham)

One way to keep farms from becoming subdivisions is to pay the farmers to never build on their land. This has been happening on the east and west coasts for decades. But it’s just now beginning to catch on in the Great Lakes region. In the second of a two part series on farmers and the decisions they make about their land, the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Peter Payette takes us to a place where local government is paying to keep land in agriculture:

Transcript

One way to keep farms from becoming subdivisions is to pay the farmers to never
build on their land. This has been happening on the east and west coasts for
decades. But it’s just now beginning to catch on in the Great Lakes region. In
the second of a two part series on farmers and the decisions they make about
their land, the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Peter Payette takes us to a place
where local government is paying to keep land in agriculture:


Whitney Lyon’s farm has been in his family for more than a century. He has 100
acres of cherry and apple trees. The orchards are on a peninsula that stretches
fourteen miles across a bay in Northern Lake Michigan. His farm is about a half
mile from the clear blue water that attracts thousands of tourists here every
year.


Lyon says real estate agents love his property.


“We run clean back to the bay on the north side… that’s view property. It’s
worth 30, 40,000 bucks an acre.”


But it’s not worth that much anymore. The rights to build houses on the Lyon farm have
been sold. The way this works is this: the Lyon’s keep the land, but they get paid
for the real estate value they give up to keep the land as a farm instead of house
sites.


(sound of apple picking)


There’s a thick fog across the peninsula today. Whitney Lyon is picking apples. His
wife Mary is inside watching kids. Mary says the day they sold the development
rights was the best day in their thirty years of farm life. She says she knew they’d
be able to stay on the land. And because of the money they made, she downsized her
daycare business.


“The big change, especially the last two or three years, I no longer just buy stuff
from just garage sales. I have actually been spending money on purchasing things for
the house. Which previously, everything came from garage sales.”


Many of the Lyon’s neighbors have sold their development rights as well. For ten
years, the township government has raised money to buy those rights with an additional
property tax. Almost no other community in the Midwest has a program like this. But,
if approved by voters, five more townships in this area might also start programs after
the November elections. Each township is separately asking voters to approve a property tax.


The American Farmland Trust has helped the townships design the program. The group is
excited because this would provide an example of local governments joining together to
protect farmland. Farmland Trust’s President Ralph Grossie flew in for a campaign event.
In a speech, Grossie told a crowd of about 100 people there’s a disconnect between farmers
and their communities. He says the community benefits from the farms while the farmers
struggle to make ends meet.


“We believe there is a middle ground here, there is a way to strike a deal between those
who manage our landscape – private farmers and ranchers, landowners – and those who
appreciate and benefit from that well-managed landscape. If you think about it, that’s
the heart of the property rights debate. Almost all those conflicts over property rights
are really about who pays for achieving a public goal on private land.”


Grossie says paying farmers with public money is the best option if a community wants to
keep farms. Otherwise, he says government forces farmers to pay when they give up profitable
uses of their land because of zoning laws. But a few in this crowd weren’t buying.


Some are opposed to more taxes on their homes or businesses so the township government can
write big checks to farmers. Others question if younger generations even want to farm.


(sound of noise from crowd)


And some are just plain suspicious of government. Roger Booth is talking to another
opponent of the propposal after the speech. Booth is explaining that when the right
to develop a piece of land is purchased, it’s gone forever. But he points out there
is one exception.


“Eminent domain. And who’s going to decide eminent domain has the right to take it? The
people in power of government at the time. Not today. Thirty years from now.”


Government also has an image problem because prominent local farmers often sit on the
town boards. It’s hard not to notice they could be the ones cashing in on the public treasury.
Critics also point out these programs tax farms to save farmland. And they say buying the
deveolopment rights does nothing to improve the business of farming. Supporters admit this
doesn’t guarantee future success for farms. But they say at least it gives the farmers a
chance to keep farming instead of selling to developers.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Peter Payette.

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