Dear Mrs. Burnett

Mrs. Burnett, I am writing a public response to you because your letter is available to the public media on the island.

I have read your letter several times over and mulled a response for several days. My initial response was to ignore it but after considerable thought I decided I needed to respond, especially to your conclusion attacking CSA and CAPR amongst others. They can eloquently speak for themselves so I have chosen to speak for myself.

You concluded: â€œâ€¦they view as their â€œpersonal freedomâ€ -which means they want permission to build what they want, where they want, how they want, when they want, without regard of their neighbors or their environment.â€

To put it candidly I consider this a personal insult. In this typical Friends attack mode you have generalized in a sweeping fashion that brushed over a lot of folks, few if any that you know personally. The attack does not fit many of the Libertarian acquaintances I have made. It most certainly does not fit me.

I have spent the last sixteen years of my life working full time to create a habitat for wildlife. On our 3 1/3 acres it was a gigantic undertaking for it was off limits with barbed wire surrounding it and water-guzzling to the point of running the well dry. The first thing that happened was the barbed wire came down, inviting everyone in. The second thing that happened was to cut water consumption down by a significant percentage. Beautiful sequential flower beds were torn up and replanted for habitat food. In their place came 200 new trees and over a hundred food-bearing bushes. Out came a broken down tennis court, to become a duck pond. Out came the broken foundation of an old house to be replaced by an oversized bird bath. In addition to water for the birds the goal was storm water control, a monumental task. And out came a vegetable garden grown through black plastic which had killed the soil. Trees, with birds nesting, now flourish in this formerly dead area.

Well, thatâ€™s just for beginners. Do you have any idea what spending sixteen years on a project is like? It means staggering amounts of money we will never retrieve. It means hands on every square foot of 3 1/3 acres four seasons a year. It means setting many goals, all of which have been met save for being part of getting purple martins to return. It means study, lots of study plus lots of trial and error. And ultimately it means walking away from it and saying to yourself, â€œI left it a far better place than I found it.â€

But in your pontifical place on a Friends board, high above the world of us peons who question the necessity of all the amendments to the CAO and SMP, you wouldnâ€™t have the remotest idea of the time, energy and money involved in such an undertaking. You inhabit a world where you know right and the rest are wrong; a world of good and evil and you inhabit the world of the righteous. The brilliant Harvard psychotherapist, Robert Lifton, calls this totalism -you are totally right and the rest of us are totally wrong. Lifton says totalists need a bridge to reality. Try bridge building -we need it!

I will give you this: you have immeasurably helped to further polarize people, something we desperately needed not to do.

(Ron Keeshan who inhabits a world of gray and considerable human ambivalence.)

Any Solution Will Do

I have lived an eclectic life. I think I learned something from each of the changes I made. It was the transition from one to another that got interesting. When the swab jockey met iambic pentameter, well that was something of a shock. But when rhyming couplets met the refractive index I thought for a while the train was going to be derailed.

But having always been a curious person the curiosity motivated me to stay with it until I mastered it. I learned important things from each new step that have stayed with me.

Gemology taught me to test and continue testing. Dealing with sophisticated synthetic stones always made me more cautious, with the threat of monetary grief always looking over my shoulder. I never lost my unwillingness to jump to a conclusion on the basis of one or two tests. I would, like any good gemologist run every test I could before I would make a call. Skepticism was a good friend. The ultimate peer reviewers were the two major gemological laboratories.

Somewhere in the mid-nineties I began intensively studying the science of global climate change. This was an ultimate intellectual challenge for me so there I was (and still am) reading books and essays over and over again to understand things I had never encountered before.

Again and again, scientists would uplift the absolute necessity of the skeptical approach to a project. Upon conclusion, it was submitted to rigorous and independent peer reviewers. Now when I read (or hear) anything I almost subconsciously kick that into my mind. What were the grounds for skepticism and what peers looked at this?

So it was with this in mind that I read several times the letter published in local papers, which ostensibly answered the CAO critics. Part of skepticism for me is being skeptical of my own predilections. So, I would put it down and say to myself, â€œYou must be missing something here.â€

But about the 5th or 6th time I finally said to myself that this is merely a repetition of data from Sea Doc and the Friends with no identification of causes.

Yes, we are painfully aware that species are disappearing at an alarming rate. We know the ocean waters are seriously deteriorating. The science I read says that birds are being pushed north for several reasons, one of which is loss of habitat due to climate change in part. Also what I read is that the oceans are being warmed by the increase in temperature of the atmosphere due to the greenhouse effect. Also what I read is that the oceans are also absorbing carbon directly from the atmosphere which increases the acidity of the ocean.

Now my skepticism of what was supposedly accomplished by this CAO project kicks in. It looks like the proponents played leap frog over the host of global wide environmental problems and landed with both feet on the back of local property owners -a most ignoble understanding.

Species are disappearing, so ipso facto the property owners are to blame. Huh!?

Goodness, you would think we were harboring a legion of carbon producing gremlins in our shop building who come out at night and disperse carbon throughout island waters. Solid, well grounded and independent peer reviewers would almost look at this with humor. If this were a book I would say you started the book with the concluding chapter, replacing the preface. And I asked myself how the proposed remedies solve or ameliorate the listed problems. Thatâ€™s another question the letter doesnâ€™t answer.

And again the skeptic in me asks what analysis (and all that entails) was given to the economic and financial ramifications to these theoretical conclusions? I learned very early that there are financial ramifications to conclusions of testing. This I think is yet to be learned here.

In summary, I feel we have been given a list of problems over in column A and a list of remedies in column B. Is there a column C which explains how the remedies solve the problems? If there is, I havenâ€™t seen it.

(Ron Keeshan spent four years in the US Navy, worked a railroad gang for a year, got a BA in English, a Masters in Divinity, spent thirteen years in the ministry, became a diamond wholesaler and Graduate Gemologist and then retired to learn more about the natural world.)

Confessions Of A Fence Straddler

Actually that is the short version. What this really is about is confessions of a barbed wire fence straddler. Perhaps the barbed wire has meaning existentially for me because the very first thing I did upon arrival on our property sixteen years ago was to cut down two strands of barbed wire encircling the two acres. Sometimes I think I wound more of myself up than I did barbed wire. I still have scars that memorialize the removal. And I can imagine (painfully) straddling a barbed wire fence in this fractured, contentious time, locally, nationally and globally.

It is not particularly comfortable astride barbed wire. Literally or figuratively it can become immediately painful, not to mention hazardous to your health. I have always been able to make decisions based on independent analysis of each issue, not a knee-jerk adherence to a party line. I like to feel my mind is open to the realpolitik surrounding me.

First of all, you see, I am very comfortable defining myself as sitting within the great historical traditions of liberalism. I firmly believe in the social safety net and economic programs that make for a just society.

But alas, over time here on the island I came to see where local liberals had lost touch with how local environmentalists were running amok. That put me, oh so hesitantly, in league with the Libertarian movement confronting the head-long assault on property rights.

Having gotten there, I found any number of people saying that they were liberals with some Libertarian bent. The Democrats have been oblivious to that. So anyway, I can lean towards local Libertarianism with integrity. But the rub of the barbed wire starts cutting in when Iâ€™m hearing that Rachel Carson was wrong and that deregulating mercury will help save the economy, etc., etc., etc. And then it gets much more uncomfortable on the fence.

Late afternoon daily glasses of wine often lead to very intense hours of resolving conflicts we face. One issue we faced was money and how in difficult times the tax dollar is allocated. This brought us into conflict with people we used to think we had much in common with.

With Americaâ€™s infrastructure literally falling apart on all levels, should taxpayers be investing an incredible amount of money in an old building to house agricultural products when we see so many more important needs. Our answer was no, and that brought withering blasts. The barbed wire was again cutting in.

Yet we found in taking an unpopular stand on that issue a large number of people who quietly thanked us for taking a stand where they couldnâ€™t because of the backlash against their businesses. Ah my goodness, the gouge of the barbed wire.

I reckon contentious is too soft a word when talking about the CAO conflict we are experiencing. Ultimately I found myself solidly in the property rights camp. And as I have tried to be open on the issue I truthfully found the CSA (Common Sense Alliance) to be the ones seriously and thoughtfully searching for compromise, where everyone can win something. I havenâ€™t seen that spirit on the other side.

A life-long environmentalist who has given sixteen years to improving our property as a three acre habitat, I am appalled at the one brush covers all mentality of the â€œother sideâ€. Ah life on the barbed wire.

I cannot read the future any better than anyone else. Nonetheless, I fear that 2012 is going to be remembered as one of Americaâ€™s darker times. I think before this is over the ugliness, the bitterness, the racism, the vitriol will be something â€œthe last best hopeâ€ will not be proud of.

So where will this leave those of us trying to negotiate our way from astride the barbed wire fence? Holding fast to our integrity and bearing with the barbs the best we can will not get any easier. Integrity never is.

It will get harder because people want probably more than anything to be able to fit you into their stereotypes. You go outside the mold and something is wrong with you. I think in the coming time it will be hard to hold onto our internal gyroscope, to keep ourselves balanced. But it is the only way to keep ourselves human.

To those of you whom I have dialogued with on this I leave you with the words of Robert Jay Lifton who has spent most of his life studying those who would tolerate no deviances from the prescribed path: â€œthe totalist needs a loyalist who is his bridge to reality.â€ Keep building the bridges. We desperately need them.

(Ron Keeshan hopes reason may find a way in but confesses that right now it appears to be on life support.)

Dogmatists

For me, Nathaniel Hawthorne reached his zenith and permanently joined a select few as a great American writer when in 1850 he published his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter.

The title reflects the essence of the novel. For having an adulterous affair, Hester Prynne was condemned by her Puritan community to wear a scarlet letter A on her chest. The Scarlet Letter is a towering work about sin, guilt and intolerance. It was Hawthorneâ€™s personal attempt to exorcise the ghosts of his intolerant ancestors.

Some things I think never change.

Thatâ€™s why such works of Hawthorne are universal and timeless. The most recent advent of the things Hawthorne so brilliantly described is in Swedish Hospital combining with Providence, a Catholic Health and Services organization. Evidently this kind of â€œmoney-savingâ€ adventure of secular hospitals combining with Catholic hospitals is rapidly occurring across the country.

In making the combination Swedish wanted to be â€œdeferentialâ€ to the Catholic dogma of anti-abortion and so moved its abortion services over to Planned Parenthood, next door. I am deeply troubled by this. I feel that they might as well plant a large letter A out front, thus marking the services offered there as out of the purview of â€œnormalâ€ hospital care.

I think in and of itself this is a denigration of a particular field of medicine that I do not accept. In doing this I think isolating it will provide a much more prominent target for harassment. I have a feeling Swedish will come to rue the day it walked straight into one of our ongoing cultural wars.

Now before I go any further, I feel it necessary to state that I am a patient of Swedish Hospital and Swedish Partners. Since going there I have been absolutely happy with everything from surgical care to my ongoing relationship with the number of specialists I need to continue to see. The last time there I marched in with a written statement that I was appalled at the position Swedish had taken on the abortion issue. I had on file an updated version of my Power of Attorney, Living Will and POLST, detailing my wishes for end of life care.

I was gratified that each one enthusiastically declared that â€œI will be your advocate.â€ I deeply appreciated that, but felt that I had been so thoroughly queried when I initially submitted them, that we were on the same page. Those were excellent dialogues. In my years of submitting those documents to MDs I had never had the positive experience of a serious discussion of the reasons I felt the way I did. Still, I insisted that my ethics did not stop at my navel. I have always been a strong advocate of womenâ€™s rights on all levels.

Further, becoming â€œdeferentialâ€ on one issue is not going to limit the dogmatists. Dogmatism is like a virus. It is always lurking about, looking for a host to attach to and then overwhelm it. This is true of political or religious dogmatists. In this instance dogmatism will, however subtly, undermine hard won right to die standards AND birth control laws.

If you think that is far-fetched, change your pot dealer because it would take very little political realignment to bring all this about given the volatile state of American politics.

For me these issues are not subject to state or religious dogmatists. These are issues quite complicated enough without outside interference. I speak from recent personal experience and from years as a counselor.

Practice your own beliefs but do not lay a trip on others. Well, I admit to being dogmatic about that.

(Ron Keeshan has always appreciated the French Libertarian/Philosopher Georges Palante from early in the last century: â€œIf there is a single and universal truth, freedom has no reason for existing.â€ )

Photography And Change

When I started to work seriously at wildlife and nature photography many years ago I admit to being quite simply a gee whiz, wow, oh my gosh photographer. There is still some of that feeling whenever I pick up a camera but also there came a time where I saw change. Because of our love of grizzlies we returned many times to the same places in Alaska, Churchill and British Columbia. I remember the feeling when I first flew over vast areas of dead forest in the Kenai peninsula, killed by insects now able to thrive in Alaska. We also visited glaciers that had changed so much I would ask if we were in the same place. We saw stands of trees thriving in areas of Denali Park where there were no trees 15 years before. The greatest change was re-visiting Churchill and seeing the differences in the land and the impact of those changes on the polar bears.

We realized that we had experienced world climate change which we had read about for years. Photography began to take on a different dimension. In some ways it became painful to photograph iconic species of birds, the polar bear or the grizzly. I began to question (even more than I always had) my right to be intruding on their turf. Would this be the last of this great species? What would it feel like if there were none? It was incomprehensible to me that our grandchildren would not experience what we had.

The work of Ian Stirling, a professor at the University of Alberta, and the acknowledged world authority on polar bears, who has spent forty one years studying them, impacted me deeply. Stirling says the iconic polar bear of the Hudson Bay region is doomed to extinction this century. It is the disappearance of ice upon which the bears depend for hunting. Since our visits to the Canadian Arctic and sub-Arctic areas we follow the daily Canada ice maps. We have seen the diminishment of ice in both area covered and thickness in the ice. Iâ€™ll return to this before I conclude. Bear with me as I seem to shift gears here.

I recently read The Fate of Greenland by Philip Conkling, et al, which had a profound impact on me. The narrative and the photography are stunning. The book details the research in the Arctic made possible by Gary Comer. Comer was a venture capitalist who became a millionaire after his founding of Landâ€™s End. He had a longtime fascination with the Arctic. When he sold Landâ€™s End he took off in his incredible ship, Turmoil, carrying a helicopter and became the first non-commercial ship to transit the Northwest Passage. This was 2001. Accompanying the exhilaration of success was a very deep questioning of what the ice changes that made his journey possible meant to the Arctic and indeed the world.

Comer set out to find people who would answer that question. He met Wallace Broecker of Columbia University who had spent his life studying the oceans, and he agreed to recruit scientists, organize voyages and coordinate the reports for study of climate change to be called the Comer Fellowship Program. Among those he recruited were George Denton, a geologist from the University of Maine, Richard Alley a glaciologist from Penn State, and Philip Conkling, Founder of the Island Institute in Maine. Broecker also formed an advisory network of 23 senior scientists. They would recruit young scientists to study in this field without having to spend their time fund raising.

The Fate of Greenland is the report for the general public on the trips. The photography is stunning and the commentary priceless. I have read it three times and Liz once and we both intend to read it again. I would uplift the authorâ€™s hope that involving so many young scientists will help us comprehend the meaning of the changes in our climate. Nonetheless, ominously present throughout the book is abundant historic evidence from cores drilled out of the Greenland ice sheet of just how abruptly climate change can arrive in the Arctic. The book also has research from the rest of the world to show that climate change has impacted the entire planet in the past.

In Hudson Bay Comerâ€™s question about the meaning of the ice melt stands answered by Ian Sterlingâ€™s research showing the coming extinction of the Hudson Bay polar bears. The Fate of Greenland is a sobering book. But one of the positive feelings I had as I finished this treasure was here we have a portrait of American capitalism at its bestâ€"but alas Comer did not live to see it published as the whole time he was working with this project he battled cancer, succumbing to it in 2006. Courage. Dedication. Vision. And all of it produced a gigantic legacyâ€"the Comer Fellowship Program, American science at its best. Every time I pick up the book I feel humbled.

Ron Keeshan thanks you, Gary Comer.

Therefore I Propose

Washington D.C., home to the largest brothel in the history of western civilization, seems paralyzed on budget reduction decisions. If you even mention the military-industrial complex (over half the budget) you would think you were desecrating the flag. In fantasy, I see the spirit of Ike keeping our representatives awake at night by over and over delivering his farewell address warning us of the dangers of the military-industrial complex.

Then thereâ€™s the farm bill, loaded with staggering amounts of money absurdly accomplishing nothing. Ah and then the energy subsidies. Taxpayers for Common Sense state that â€œEvery year, taxpayers shell out $15.6 billion in tax breaks and other handouts to the oil and gas industry.

This is on top of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies to the mature nuclear, coal, and biofuels industry. All the while the oil companies are thriving.

In the third quarter of this year alone, six of the largest oil companies recorded $36.8 billion in profits, bringing the year-to-date total up to $115.1 billion.â€ The only thing that gives me perspective on this was a joke a while back that traveled the internet: â€œThe economy is getting so bad the oil companies had to lay off thirty Congressmen.â€

Well, I donâ€™t think I can do anything about that bunch. But I hope some of us can work to redirect how money is spent on the local level. I donâ€™t consider it an over statement to say that when Rep. Kristine Lytton appeared before the Council she in essence said â€œYou donâ€™t have your act together. Let me know when you do.â€ I would like to make some proposals that make common sense to me at least.

Therefore I propose:

The Council immediately sell the properties on Beaverton Valley Road and the Windermere Building.

This would help pull the plug on the San Juan County Real Estate Investment Trust and the unwise investment of pots of money in property and equipment which are all marginal to the core operations of the County. The monies would be used to help pay down the County debt.

Secondly, I would like to see a committee of six business men and women with the authority to examine the major issues facing the County, and make reports directly to the public without review, revision or vote by our elected officials.

Perhaps the newly elected Charter Review Commission can find a â€œslotâ€ in our Home Rule system for this committee. An analysis of the finances of the County would be the first thing I would like this committee to tackle. We have both active and retired business people with records of success who we need to talk into serving on such an Independent Blue Ribbon Committee.

Third, I propose that the community recognize superior work done on its behalf by striking a medal to be awarded to those doing such work. I would call it something like the Order of the San Juans.

I would give the first award to Ed Kilduff and David Hyde for their exemplary work on the islandsâ€™ environment. The argument over the CAO has shown how much really fine local thinking we have. I think the island is really fed up with the squandering of money on one so-called consultant after another.

Writing letters and all the complaining we do to each other will no longer cut it. We need to think creatively. We need to think in terms of options in ways we have not done before. Perhaps the Council would then demonstrate that it recognizes the seriousness of the financial dilemmas we find ourselves in.

(Ron Keeshan whose years in business were part of an eclectic journey to understanding the world he lives in.)

BEST

I have always been interested in how things become â€œinâ€ within a local or larger culture. For instance I was amused at how â€œinâ€ firemanâ€™s caps, of greater and lesser expense became â€œinâ€ for women to wear. Then there came the use of â€œcoolâ€ and â€œawesomeâ€ both of which I am ready to have deleted from the dictionary. So it is with interest that I have observed a newly coined favorite, â€œbest.â€

A few decades back I went to hear a scientist from Los Alamos who came down to Santa Fe to talk about the future of the earth. Making a long story short, he was the first person to grab my attention on the issue of climate change. The essence of what he had to say was, donâ€™t worry about the earth, it will be here when all is said and done. However what exists now upon the earth is going to change radically unless the course is altered.

Since then I have tried to understand the issues involved. No matter which side you came down on, what interests me as much as anything is, was it peer reviewed? Who furnished the money for the study? And of course who attacks you tells a lot.

First, on a positive note, I have been interested in a â€œbestâ€ study to come out of Berkeley. A long time climate change skeptic, a most notable physicist, Richard Muller, decided that, ok, he was going to go back to square one to meticulously examine the evidence presented for climate change.

He assembled a team of 10 physicists to attack every assumption made by climate change advocates. At least part of his motivation was to ascertain what scientific reality lay behind the attacks on the East Anglia University scientists whose e-mails had been hacked and whose work was used as evidence that climate change was based on a hoax.

Ultimately in irony of ironies, the Koch Brothers Foundation anted up $150,000.00 for the study. It became known as the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study, or given the way we love acronyms, BEST. A cryptic conclusion, not yet peer reviewed, is that yes, climate change does exist and yes, we have a problem. Weighing who was involved, how the evidence was obtained, and the money involved, I find this â€œbestâ€ personally acceptable. It is a best effort by one of our best scientists.

Now I want to turn to a â€œbestâ€ that has troubled me from the very inception of its local use, and that is the â€œBest Available Scienceâ€ invoked on behalf of legitimizing the so-called Critical Areas Ordinance update.

I will admit, again, personal predispositions. One is that I have consistently found the Friends science to be at best, weak. Secondly, much always seems to be based on what some bureaucrats from the south end deem best for all areas of western Washington. I think this is how we ended up with an expensive Hood Canal Tax, the septic system tax. Hood Canal had a major problem so ipso facto everyone does. Not so.

I have always thought of the northern area as part of what was known as the Salish Sea. We have more in common with British Columbia than Seattle. From the beginning I have been far more locally concerned about what was being dumped in the Fraser River than the long time chemical dumping in southern Puget Sound. Ergo, I have found the whole Ordinance thing extremely troubling. Yet I have kept on trying to understand the whole thing.

Let me tell you that over the years I have, for myself, concluded that â€œcomplexityâ€ is an obfuscation of the issues. It hides a lack of substance. And then along comes a report that the waters around the San Juans are â€œpristineâ€. Then on top of that there is a splendid report by an experienced oceanographer who makes it clear that looking south for analysis is looking in the wrong direction. We need to look north to the rivers of British Columbia.

If you start out looking in the wrong direction you sure get lost. So, where does that leave â€œBest Available Scienceâ€ or for that matter the staggering dollars invested in consultants? I am not impressed. For me, the â€œBestâ€ evidence comes from non-ideological sources that have no ax to grind.

The best I have seen is the short and very substantive piece Dave Hyde and Ed Kilduff did, San Juan Archipelago Water Marine Water Quality & CAO/SMP. It is a quick Google. There was an old expression, if it ainâ€™t broke donâ€™t fix it. That says it best for me. Hey, here we have the best work, done and it is free. We have truly the best resources right here amongst us.

(Ron Keeshan whose vision of the shoreline is Friendless)

Hymn To The Serviceberry

Our large, old serviceberry tree has run its cycle and is rapidly preparing for its well deserved winter rest. The serviceberry doesnâ€™t get the admiration that a lot of other trees get. It does not have the stately grandeur of the Douglas Fir. It does not have the great color displays of the maple. It cannot produce the truly beautiful color of the chain tree. I guess you might say that it is just, well, plain vanilla. But in this case (as in all others) looks can be very deceiving as each year it produces a magnificence no other tree does, at least for me. Wildlife landscapers will tell you it feeds at least fourteen species of birds. Now, I freely admit to being a tree loving tree hugger. And before this particular tree, I simply stand in awe.

Every summer, about mid July we have anxiously awaited the arrival of the banditos, otherwise known as the cedar wax wing. For without fail, that is the time that the serviceberry berries have ripened. At first a few scouts come in to check the berries out. Then very quickly a vast swarm of cedar wax wings swoop in and by the end of the weekend the tree is stripped. Then we do not see the banditos until the following year.

But this year was different. For a while I really did wonder if the few berries there would ever ripen. As it turned out they were 4-5 weeks late, I reckon pretty much like everything else this past summer. The bandito scouts would come in, check the berries out, and leave. Then, something happened that has not happened around here in many years. When the berries finally did ripen the starlings swarmed in, en mass, cleaning the tree in a flash. A very few bandito scouts ate what they wanted. The starlings hung around for about a week, eating off the ground but then fortunately left.

Then something different happened. All kinds of warblers came to the serviceberry which graciously served a generous plate of insects to all arrivals. This was something really new. There was a quantity and variety of warblers we had never seen before. Usually they are very skittish and do not linger. I had never had the opportunity to casually study the warblers. That was certainly a major reward in itself. But another great reward was not long in coming, for casually mixed in with the warblers was a young three-toed woodpecker. This was a first for me and fortunately this treasure feasted long enough for me to study every angle. Then gone, not to return, but Iâ€™m grateful for the miracle.

Amongst the other wonders of this magnificent tree are the seeds, via the vectoring feeding birds, which are fertilized, dropped all over the place, and grow heartily. I asked an acquaintance who knows trees why the naturally deposited seeds grow more easily than the transplanted ones like from nurseries. She offered that the transplanted ones have to adjust to a new soil whereas the seed is instantly at home. So, we have a bunch of serviceberries establishing homes. What a joy.

So adieu, magnificent serviceberry. Your year was a great service and joy to us all. Thank you and rest well. We will anticipate your return next spring.

(Ron Keeshan: after years in the diamond business finally found the real gems of this world.)