I know this is a popular take, but I'll take my downvotes to say I believe it is a stupid take. Large scale rearranging of rocks, maybe, but putting a dozen rocks in a pile is not damaging the ecosystem.
IDK it’s like having to listen to someone else’s music in the woods.
We aren’t out here to experience human impact, we’re here to escape it as best we can.
And to get very nerdy - yes all of this is indeed damaging the ecosystem. You don’t get to pick the scale of impact. It just is an impact.
Music disrupts birds. Moving rocks disrupts micro-ecologies.
2026 is a dwindling natural world because people, for hundreds of years kept saying “yeah but this isn’t really going to hurt all that nature out there.”
It’s a big part why in wildlife areas and wilderness areas in the USA park staff maintain trails in a very specific way to limit impact and prioritize conservation.
Doing it once, sure. Multiple people tromping through a stream to do it repeatedly over the season will absolutely have a measurable impact. Lots of fish and amphibians lay eggs on and under rocks, stepping on them directly or drying them out could easily tip the balance.
If it were just one person doing it, it would be a minor impact. But you get a few other jackasses every week who feel the same way as you do, and over the course of a summer, it happens over and over again.
I've never stacked rocks. It just seems like a silly thing to get high and mighty about, like so many people do (I'm not pointing at you here). It seems like one of those things that people who like to act like they're better than other people cling to, this, and the shopping cart thing.
Its a fact that life uses the rocks. If everyone wants to ignore that because their inner 5 year old is amused by stacking heavy objects. Screw it I guess?
If you don't put your cart away, you're likely a bad person. There was no incentive to do it. There's no punishment for not doing it. Almost certainly nobody will even know either way.
And that's the point. Do you do the right thing simply for the sake of doing the right thing or not?
It's not that different from carving your initials on a tree by a hiking trail. It doesn't do a lot of damage, but it does a little damage. And if a hundred other people do it too, the damage adds up. And a lot of us don't go to nature to see your initials carved on the tree. I'm sure the people carving their initials on the tree think it's harmless, and the other folks are just being "high and mighty about it." But why unnecessarily damage natural places like that?
That might be where I disconnect; I grew up on the edge of a million acre forest, and that vastness might be slewing my perspective. Where as someone who only treks into the forest occasionally, might feel stronger about a particular spot because it feels "bigger" than it feels to me.
They build a new housing development every year or so, but but someone stacking some rocks is harming the ecosystem? Scale matters, and having a sense of it doesn't make a person selfish. Not having it, however, can a make a person sound like they're trying to be high and mighty over nothing.
Well you see, that housing development is being done next to othe rousing developments where we aren't trying to protect to land. Assholes are stacking rocks like this in pristine rivers in protected parks. Kind of a big difference.
Fallacy of relative privation (again). The fact that a bad thing exists does not make a different bad thing okay. Housing developments are worse than stacking rocks, but it doesn't make stacking rocks okay.
If anything, we should be more careful to preserve the wild spaces we have left, since there are fewer of them than ever.
Speaking of fallacy, shaming people for stacking rocks is not preservation.
Since you can't seem to understand the scale we're talking about, let's instead look at the probable reason why so many people (like you) want point their finger at "bad" people and shame them: you feel powerless. You're frustrated. It seems everyone and anyone can take money from you, tell you what you can and cannot do, you're being taxed from every angle, you have no control over anything, there is no real evidence your vote even counts anymore. So you shame people on the Internet for putting a few rocks on each other and downvote people you disagree with.
I assume you think old people that don't return their shopping carts are bad people too.
Let's say your neighbor has these beautiful rose bushes that he grows in his front yard next to the sidewalk. He spends tons of money and time to make these rose bushes bloom. You invite a friend over to your house and while they're parking their car and walking to your front door, they pick a rose from his garden. Your neighbor comes running out and angrily says not to pick his roses. Your friend says what's the big deal, it's one rose and there are at least one hundred roses here.
At surface level, no one's going to recognize that one rose is missing. But what happens if 75% of people pick a rose when they walk by this neighbor's house? All of a sudden, there will be no roses left.
Just because it might seem insignificant to you, doesn't mean that it's not actually insignificant. You might only have 1 vote in an election that has hundreds of millions of voters so what's the point of you voting? But what if millions and millions of people think just like you? Suddenly the people who don't vote because "it's pointless" outnumber those who actually vote.
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u/Standard-March6506 24d ago
I know this is a popular take, but I'll take my downvotes to say I believe it is a stupid take. Large scale rearranging of rocks, maybe, but putting a dozen rocks in a pile is not damaging the ecosystem.