>Oh please. This is so far from an actual concern that I struggle to summon the energy to even shrug about it.
It is causing noticeable impact though. I recently went to Iceland which has had rapid tourism growth since about 2008. There is a place along Ring Road (the road around the whole island) where long ago, a rock was placed on a stack for good luck in their travels. [1] There's essentially one place where it's "tolerated" on the island for a reason that goes back hundreds of years. Even driving 20+ miles beyond the location, there were stacks of rocks off ~100 feet off the road. It really ruined the natural look.
Iceland has moss covering large chunks of the island. It takes something like 30 years for the moss to grow back. Simply stepping on moss can kill it, justifying the MANY messages about staying on the paths. Someone walked over 100+ feet of mossy rocks to stack rocks.
The rocks slow down the water flow rate and prevent the dirt from getting scooped up.
I don't know how else to say it, but it is a big deal.
I have no idea what the right number of tourists for Iceland is but at several locations the facilities (restrooms, food services, shop) were small and completely overwhelmed by the number of busses that were stopping in quick succession.
I was on a cruise and unfortunately the logistics of port calls tends to create very bursty traffic patterns with large number of tour busses disgorging visitors in quick succession at these under-sized locations.
For example the facilities at Goðafoss were undersized: https://www.google.com/maps/@65.6860127,-17.5395264,3a,37.5y...
On the other hand the facilities at Geysir were much better: https://www.google.com/maps/@64.3100169,-20.3013397,3a,75y,1...
I guess it should say, "locally". I don't disagree there's far worse things damaging the ecosystems of the world, but if there's a trail, and people keep hiking off trail to make rock stacks, that area will get damaged, locally.
It's like if someone built a path through your backyard. Great, there's a path you don't want, used by people you don't want in your back yard. But everyone likes it, as it provides a nice shortcut. Are the local authorities to shrug and say, "well, there's worse things", and cite its popularity, then point to your car? Or, should something be done?
They will tell you to deal with it, and pay for your own fence. In fact, they'd be more likely to intervene, if you build a fence that's too big. A fence made out of stones, even. Stacking too many stones to make an excessively large fence, to prevent people from stacking stones.
Imagine.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=skateboarders+v...
‡ Almost nobody is at the extrema of "mine all the things!" or "do no mining at all" -- clearly some is needed -- so I consider that your position a straw man.
My revulsion is the use of the internet as a bragging platform, in general. It doesn’t matter if it’s a walled garden or a fediverse of open source aggregators. People showing off and hamming it up to score points is the root cause, and any attention, even negative is going to fan the flames.
Particularly if people develop a sense that you’re going to step on their efforts to goof off and play drunk jenga in the woods with popsicle sticks, which is the tone this argument projects to most people.
If it’s not this, it’s love locks or any other insipid passtime that erupts for a few years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_lock
Graffiti never dies, it just takes on new forms, and moves to new areas, growing at a fixed rate proportional to the population, just like litter.
To be honest, I’d rather go back to last week, when we were more worried about the giant microplastic garbage patch in the Pacific ocean gyre. It’s probably a more pressing issue than rearranged rocks being moved a few feet, here and there, in zones already tightly controlled by humans to seem artificially wild.
There's lots of true wilderness (e.g. BLM land in the US, far northern Canada, etc) which are the opposite of "tightly controlled", mostly inaccessable to motor vehicles where you can travel for weeks without seeing another human.
As for the consequences of stacking rocks into formations, I thought this mystery was solved several thousand years ago with any variety of ancient pyramids?
If anything, it's an argument for the sake of arguing. It's almost perfectly illustrative of the perils of trying to get humans to cooperate and agree at all.
First of all, you have brick buildings. Second of all, you have open pit mining. Third, you have mountaintop removal. Fourth, highways. All of which are literally millions, if not billions or perhaps even trillions of times worse.
For reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-pit_mining
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountaintop_removal_mining
I mean, hey, maybe we shouldn't throw pennies in wishing wells, or Old Faithful for that matter, but seriously, if you're worried about this, I have another anxiety: shoes. The durable rubber soles of shoes actually leave imprints in sand, when people wear them while walking. Don't believe me? Try it yourself!
And what's worse? Astronauts used these appliances on the surface of the moon itself, forever contaminating the lunar landscape, previously pristine, and unfettered by human influence. A tragedy of the commons.