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
and a rule in geology is the bigger the rock, the more force it takes to move
pretty much a rule everywhere tbh
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.
footprints with dead bugs squashed in them? stop walking on the nature.
Yes, a little known piece of history is that some areas we consider to be “natural” now have already been so deeply impacted by humans it’s shocking. Much of the east coast and some areas on the west coast basically had stream and river flow altered for hundreds of years by a single generation of clean cutting forests that increased runoff and washed away natural flow obstructions in waterways like logs and boulders. Like you said, salmon spawning in particular have been deeply impacted by this. IIRC not only does it give them less places to actually spawn, but it makes the journey far more difficult as they are fighting a faster water flow in a much more narrow waterway
cars, wineries, landfills, zoos, concrete, sewers, cats. all of it more harmful that the innocent stone stacking children.
Some friends work a campground in western NC and it's a big issue with campers setting the rocks up for photos and displacing hellbenders, which are both really cool and endangered.
I really like hellbenders so this pisses me off
Yes, salamanders are a great example of how moving even a handful of rocks, something seemingly harmless, can have such a horrible impact. It changes the amount of dissolved oxygen, and as a result the salamanders in the immediate area and downstream can not survive. It’s very sad
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.
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
Indigenous cairns ≠ stacking rocks to be aesthetically pleasing. Deeply colonizer mindset to think you have a right to alter the land in such a way for your pleasure, especially citing the fact that indigenous people do it
My favorite reactionary argument on hexbear is "some non-specific indigenous people somewhere do this or something superficially similar to it therefore it is good and you can't criticize it"
OK, show me the indigenous tribe which makes a tradition of uprooting riverbeds to form balanced-rock towers atop the rivers for fun and then I will criticize them.
Whoops, looks like those are used as markers and not just for fun, and also don't have to be made from river rocks. Honest mistake, since you're arguing in good faith I'm sure you will now admit your mistake and cease this mistaken line of argument for the future. :brandon:
There’s a huge difference between telling tourists and hikers to stop fucking shit up and suggesting the built environment human beings generally constrain themselves to ought to take a backseat to arthropods.
It should be clear which one the op is trying to say, owing to their words and the fact that it was posted on an english language website.
The examples I see of that clearly have rocks that were on land, not in a river. But also the context is different, the ecosystem when indigenous people were in control of areas was far healthier and it would matter far less.
This particular issue with rocks is very prevalent in manmade lakes ponds and rivers, it can lead to a mass die off of implanted fish
those rock towers in the rivers were made by children trying to have fun.
the rock towers on land were taken out of a river to build them.
that is the proper place for all poop. if you put your poop on the ground and not on your balls, you're destroying the earf. do better
:pain: stop this is too real
The slippery slope is the cut bank sloughing off into the creek, killing endangered species because stacking rocks is fun and I love fucking with waterway geometry
Should we kill all Beavers? I hear they alter water flows in an unnatural manner.
This is far worse than rocks, btw.
Beavers
Unnatural
I’m interested in where your fabled Robobeavers are located. When were they invented? How much environmental destruction have the wrought, in what I’m sure are just absolutely devastating modifications they’ve made to the environment over millions of years that no species have yet adapted to, especially because these unnatural beavers have not also existed and evolved alongside the species they are impacting over millions of years.
Alas, on a serious note, I’m sure you are very aware of the mass depletion of beaver populations across Europe and the Americas as a result of the fur and castoreum trades. I’m also sure you are aware of the horrible impact this had on the ecosystems where humans very unnaturally removed beavers from the environment. Of course, you must be aware of how the increased speed of runoff was devastating much in the same way that it can be when other things, for example humans removing rocks from waterways, can be devastating for the species that require slower flow of water in the areas they’ve been adapting for millions of years to survive in.
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.
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.
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.
And you personally are not nearly as in touch with nature as your ancestors which relied on it directly to survive. They knew what water flow would result in less fish spawn, what the amphibians needed to eat to survive, etc.
You are a much more casual observer of nature. You are a guest who does not need to alter it for your survival, and you are wise enough to learn how your actions are detrimental to it. You and I both know that “humans are a part of nature” is not a good reason to cause active harm to it when you know better. Messing with the commons because you personally find it aesthetically pleasing is just as bad as harming the commons for any other reason, perhaps worse since you have nothing to gain from materially harming it in this way. Why do you think literally every national park asks you to leave no trace?
In regards to your “struggling to believe”
Stone-stacking as a looming threat to rock-dwelling biodiversity
Aye, well there are two aspects here - one, thanks for the evidence, that's cool, I concede the point. And two, this is clearly an american phenomenon that is much more prevalent than I ever would've imagined.
So given the context and info, I very much concede my point and appreciate the educating, thank you!
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
I would chop down a bush. I would pick like, some square metres of flowers if I particularly wanted that many wildflowers.
Again, these are low-impact, low-scale events. If it was a super popular thing to do either in my locality then obviously it starts being a problem. But until then, one-offs like that are not meaningfully impactful. Invasive species are a whole other ballgame that very obviously can impact entire continents.
That is absolutely not a bad reason, so long as you're correct in saying it. Context is absolutely critical in whether something is good or bad.
Would you step on a blade of grass? Of course you would.
Would you step on a blade of grass if all other grass in the world had been stepped on and died and it was the last plant that was vital to revitalising all of Earth? Different question.
In my whole life of wilderness trekking, I have never once seen somebody stack rocks like that. If I did it, the impact on local life would likely be compeltely unmeasurable. If everyone did it, it would be a bigger deal with bigger impact that may need responses, obviously - but this is true of literally any action ever.
It's a thing around campgrounds and more touristy area. People do these rock stacking all the time for the insta
Sometimes you can be pretty confident that you're gonna be the only person that will ever move a rock in your general vicinity, but then you'll see a herd of bighorn sheep run by and kick a bunch of rocks loose. Fuck! This rock moving is out of control!
Seriously, depending on where you are you are probably not contributing to a real problem when you move a rock.
Sure, don't stack rocks in the crowded city park in downtown Boulder, CO. Of course, the damage there is already done, so moving some rocks literally doesn't matter. I'm actually responding to the idea that you can't possibly know if a bunch of people are gonna come to a particular place and tear it up. The truth is you can usually know.
Treating the wild world in general like you're walking on eggshells is not helpful. Don't step on the crypto soil, but pick up and touch and explore everything else. Have a campfire. Make your relationship with the earth tangible. If the wild places are just an abstraction you're never going to fight for them.
There's a creek througha park in downtown Boulder full of stacked rocks. Also, considet having a campfire any time of year, but always be cautious.
Just don't move the rocks for your fucking vanity, lmfao. It's not very complicated.
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?
thanks for the info dude! i will never stack rocks now!
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
I do hydrogeology, so not exactly there but adjacent. TBH, the whole struggle sesh feels like the person responsibility side of climate change. Like, yeah, its technically true, but you couldn't do in a century what the Army Corps of Engineers did for shits and giggles in a week.
On the flip side, there's no real reason for most people to fuck with river rocks in the first place, so just like, don't? Also, I have a feeling the biology side is more significant - a lot of stuff lives under river rocks.Hello geology field comrade!
Yes it’s the biology side that is much more severely impacted. Of course we know that individuals are only responsible for a minuscule percent of the total damage done to these sensitive ecosystems, but the main difference is that the places people ARE out there stacking rocks aren’t the dredged coal barge channels in the Allegheny river that are long dead, it’s the places we’ve specifically set aside to be refuges for surviving species. In these cases, there is directly measurable impacts on species diversity and density where areas are frequented by visitors. A striking and sad example is Smoky Mountain NP, which has quite literally the highest density of salamander species on the planet. Of the 30 species in the park, 10 are majorly threatened by water condition changes resulting in accelerated spread of disease, TDS, O2 saturation, etc.
The biology side isn’t my specialty either, but you and I both know how quickly conditions can be changed, especially in small waterways
Great Smoky Mountains is an especially rough one. One of the most otherwise untouched areas of the country exposed to huge tourism. They'll get too close to a moose one of these days :inshallah:
But really, the rest of the Blue Ridge Parkway is just as pretty and much less crowded. People need to go visit Doughton Park or something
This thread made me realize that i never touch river rocks, just ones above the waterline. Weird.
