I just took a trip, and I saw lots of rocks. I looked out over the Grand Canyon (big water-carved rocks), I walked the length of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (rocks put in a fun shape by an artist), I took a bike ride near the base of the Tetons (glacial rocks stacked in big piles), and I drove back home to Phoenix through Utah, which felt like driving across one big, red rock. I could go on about all the interesting rocks that I happened upon during this trip, but I’ll spare you that. What I have really been thinking about since I got home is whether it is okay or not to pick up rocks and take them home.
I assume it is a pretty universal experience to, as a child, pick up a small rock at the park or the beach and take that rock home. The rock might be especially smooth or shaped like an animal or be a cool color, whatever might grab your interest. You keep it and it sits in some corner of your house, maybe sometime later reminding you of that nice day at the park. This was a pretty common occurrence when I was a kid, at least. And it still is now. I pick up rocks when I go on hikes, take walks, visit my home, travel to a new place, and just about any time I am in a place where rocks are loose on the ground. I usually have no clue what kind of rocks these are or what they are made of – I’m not a geologist. But an interesting rock has always seemed to me one of the best physical ways to remember a trip or an event in my life, a way to hold those memories in my hand and feel their weight. A rock can become a natural, earth-made souvenir indicative of a certain, specific place.
Now, here’s the problem – I’m pretty sure bringing home a rock breaks the “take only pictures, leave only footprints” rule of camping and hiking, in which I am normally a firm believer. In a tiny way, it feels like I am marring the very landscape that I (and many others) have come to appreciate. Most state and national parks even have explicit rules prohibiting the removal of rocks and other natural elements. So, for the last few days, I have been struggling with the ethical question of my rock collection. Here are some of my thoughts and (vague) conclusions.
First, you can come at this mathematically. I chose Spiral Jetty as the subject for this word problem because its total weight is a known figure and it is easy to find the average number of visitors per year. I crunched the numbers to see how long the land-art structure would survive if every visitor took a rock. Spiral Jetty consists of 6,000 tons of rock, and at last estimate about 146,000 people visit every year. If each visitor takes a 4 ounce rock starting today, the sculpture would be completely removed somewhere around the year 2349. Now, that’s a long way off, but I think we should try to preserve culturally important works of art for as long as possible. It can’t be ignored in this equation that the major themes Robert Smithson looked to explore with Spiral Jetty were erosion and erasure, but I doubt he envisioned humans being the main force behind the piece’s eventual disappearance. So, we probably shouldn’t take rocks from notable land-art sculptures.
But does the above math scale for, say, the Tetons? The mountain range is exponentially bigger than Spiral Jetty, and though it attracts exponentially more visitors it is hard to believe that someday the mountains would be gone because everyone took a rock home to New Jersey or Florida. But the mountains would be different, changed through the extraction of minerals for the pleasure of humans. The Tetons, in this scenario, are mined not for energy-producing coal or expensive luxury minerals like gold, but are mined for inexpensive keepsakes. Am I a miner, taking rocks for my own personal enjoyment from places I have no right to take from? Once again, the scale in this comparison is way off (I don’t want to equate taking a rock home from a park with destroying an entire ecosystem to profit off the land) but these things do make me think.
Along the lines of environmentalism and preserving the beautiful (and habitable) parts of our planet, I have thought about the ecological impact of taking a rock from a place compared to that of purchasing man-made souvenirs. Is taking a rock worse than, say, buying a snow-globe that was produced outside of the country with underpaid or even exploited labor, shipped into the country on a plane or ship that burns fossil fuels, trucked into a National Park, housed in an air-conditioned gift shop, and that once bought will eventually end up in a landfill or as plastic trash in the sea? A rock was made naturally millions of years ago, requires no disposable packaging, and will return to the earth without issue. Through this lens, the rock seems like the better choice to me, but that still doesn’t make it right.
I don’t know if there is a solution to this rock dilemma. A possible fix might be carrying around a bunch of boring rocks wherever I travel, and using this supply to replace any interesting rocks that I find and want to bring home. The net mass of the mountain would stay the same, but it is still altering the landscape in an unnatural way. It might even be considered littering.
I think the difficulty in answering this question comes down to our struggle to understand that a harmless individual action can actually be extremely harmful when everyone does it. I don’t feel bad when I take a rock from a place, but I certainly feel bad knowing I have played a (small) part in the disappearance of a certain mountain or state park. This failing of human comprehension plays a part in many real issues, many more important and pressing than taking rocks from places. I don’t know of anyone that has a simple solution to this right now. Hopefully, someone will soon.
Maybe far in the future, I will take a grand trip to replace every rock I have collected to its rightful place, or as close to its rightful place as I can remember. It might be a way to acknowledge the problem with taking rocks from places while still being able to enjoy a rock collection. It also sounds like a good way to once again relive the memories of these important places – the reason I took the rocks in the first place.
Links to Things I’ve Enjoyed Recently:
If you want to look at some amazing art about rocks and nature, check out The New Pangea Project. A collaboration between two artists living on different sides of the Atlantic, it is easily one of my favorite accounts on Instagram.
As I have been updating my website over the past few months, I have been looking at lots of artist websites for ideas, inspiration, and just to see what my peers have been working on. This page on Parker Bryant-Carty’s site may be the single best webpage on any artist’s website that I have seen. It is also about collections and the power of specific material objects.
Taking Rocks from Places
You still brought up some really relevant points while missing the mark (big-time) ecologically. Worth the read ;)