Removing rocks from the stream bed or stream edge to stack or throw can be aesthetically pleasing, but very damaging to the habitat you remove them from in both the short and long term. In the short term you are altering water currents, potentially speeding up certain areas and slowing down others which not only displaces wildlife in both of those areas, but may result in neither being suitable for habitation. It also creates a cascading effect in water flow, causing sediment to settle in areas of what is now slow flow and increasing erosion in areas of high speed flow. This disturbs the physical environment of the waterway, as well as its chemical (nutrient), chronological (change over time) development, and oxygenation.
In the long term, moving rocks brings about another issue, which is erosion. All waterways are shaped by erosion, and a rule in geology is the bigger the rock, the more force it takes to move. This rule is universal from boulders all the way down to individual clay particles. Your ability as a person to lift an even moderately sized rock has a monumental impact on the dynamics of the waterway. In some areas, a rock that may fit in just the palm of your hand might only be able to be moved by a once in a generation flood event. A stack of 3 or 4 of these rocks removes the equivalent of HUNDREDS of years of potential habitats, oxygen infusion into the water, or accelerates/decelerates the rate of erosion in the area you removed/added the rocks by hundreds of years. Simultaneously, you are impacting the riparian zone (edge of the waterway), an incredibly important habitat for terrestrial, aquatic, and amphibious plant and animal life. Changes erosion at the edge of a stream, river, or lake impact the whole body of water in all of the same ways as listed above.
Knowing when not to intervene is an equally important aspect of being a good steward to your natural environment as knowing when to intervene. Let nature do it’s thing and you’ll have even more beauty to enjoy when you are surrounded by it
This struggle session was brought to you by: rocks.
Climate change be like:
and a rule in geology is the bigger the rock, the more force it takes to move
pretty much a rule everywhere tbh
Always good to reiterate! Lol
Going to go pull a large, flat rock from a river and grill a steak on it while I inject myself with a syringe full of plastic I heated on a spoon. You mad, lefty?
What the fuck happened to Leave No Trace? And the losers who try to use Indigenous practices (PSA: Indigenous peoples aren’t a monolith and Indigenous peoples are composed of hundreds of numerous tribes and nations, many of which do not have rock stacking as a cultural practice btw) to justify their pathetic rock stacking need to be reminded that despoiling natural habitats and taking shit that doesn’t belong to you is peak colonizer behavior.
Sounds nice but do you have a source for your claims?
I’ve posted them twice in this thread but you may have to weed through the comments to find them lol
Also, don’t do this in alpine zones or really anywhere with a potential to go off-trail. Cairns can be useful in the mountains but they need to be strategically placed. Those high-altitude areas take centuries to regenerate and the rocks are important habitat/soil anchorage.
Rocks are also where most species lay eggs so you are probably smashin those little eggs and removing the ability for species to lay eggs easily :(
Also how fish avoid predation, so it could cause local ecological collapse
“Leave only footprints” makes sense to me.
footprints with dead bugs squashed in them? stop walking on the nature.
The beauty of nature is that it’s already beautiful and touching would diminish that. God/Universe/The Matrix’s Architect is like a zillion times better at beauty than man, you can’t improve it, leave it alone.
It’s okay to witness the marvel of the Earth and not tamper with. I have never understood why katz need to be touching stuff. I think it’s more than meaningful to take in the wonder of nature through senses and leave it at that. We can capture it’s magic through art and technology but just leave it alone.
Actually it’s not okay to witness the marvel of nature because actively seeing is interacting with it. We need most of the planet closed off to human interaction and that includes seeing. Of course I get a pass because I’m a conservationist but I’ll take many pictures, you can experience it in VR.
If an entire river is completely transformed with rocks all over the show in weird ways for like a mile, sure, you may well be upsetting the ecosystem in some way. If this happens in a couple spots on a river, the impact will be negligible. And they’re just rocks, a new arrangement will make new habitats for different local lifeforms.
Don’t forget that humans are in fact also a part of nature, we’ve been world-wide and in our modern form for like 200k years, nature has had time to adapt to low-scale low-technology human impacts.
Do you see rocks stacked like this without human interference? Wildlife has not adapted to live in towers of rock, it has adapted to live where the removed the rocks used to be. Waterways are a very sensitive habitat, and while you may think taking a few rocks here and there does not have an impact, it very much does. It impacts water speed, nutrient composition, TDS, dissolved oxygen, and this is without even getting to the physical alteration of the habitats.
Humans are a part of nature indeed, but humans also have the wisdom to learn how they are harming the environment by acting in ways the non-human world does not.
Oxygen used to be poison.
Is it valuable to try and restore the world to the state it was when most species were poisoned by oxygen?
There is a deep problem with mythologizing the present state of the world as ‘valuable’. It is totally arbitrary because you are essentially picking one point among infinite to value.
Oxygen used to be poison.
Oh PLEASE lmaoooooooo spare me. Yes, clearly my post is advocating for a return of the earth to the era of stromatolites. Make Earth Mesoproterozoic again!
Nobody is mythologizing the present state of the world, but it is objectively valuable to have intact natural spaces. Get this fake deep shit out of here and respect the commons
Not without human interference. But my point is homo sapiens and ancestors/relatives have been doing stuff like ‘stack rocks’ for well over two hundred thousand years, quite plausibly two million plus years, that is basically nature.
I struggle to believe there’s evidence that moving some rocks has any non-negligible effect on local populations or biodiversity. Life is very, very, rarely as fragile as you describe. But please share if there is indeed such evidence and I’ll change me mind.
thanks for the info dude! i will never stack rocks now!
Based and good stewardpilled
What are you a fluvial geomorphologist or something
If there is a fluvial geomorphologist in the room I will leave the floor to them to do any more explanation, but no I’m not lol. Definitely a fun field of study that I considered though
