To remove a pebble from a beach?

[Pigeonpoodle]

I saw this on another thread… Apparently “everyone knows that’s wrong!” I’ve very occasionally taken the odd interesting pebble as a momento. AIBU to have done that… What on earth could be the problem with it? One pebble amongst billions!

My daughter may or may not of taken a chunk of clay off the beach 😬😅 it’s sat in a bucket in My bathroom. She’s doing gcse art and wants it to do that apparently 🤨

We can do some maths on it. If everyone of the 100k (max) visitors a year to Dungeness picked up an interesting pebble (we'll say 15ml in volume - a tablespoon-sized pebble), then that's 1.5 cubic metres/year - so about an estate car boot-full. Back of the napkin sums, say there's half a square kilometre of beach. So to lose 1cm from the surface, you'd need to remove 50cubic metres - so if every visitor removed a pebble, and no storms brought or removed any, it would take 30 years to drop the surface of that small section of beach by 1cm.

ie. It's simply not a problem, and the CPS would struggle to justify prosecuting someone taking an interesting pebble as in the public interest, and anyone getting miffed about it is making a mountain out of a molehill.

There are many more people in the world now than in Palaeolithic times. It's not hard to work out what that means for the potential number of pebbles people will take off beaches.
And no it isn't 'hardwired' in anyone.

Your comment about Dunelm is just nasty and sneery, and you may feel comfortable to take your chances with a fine, but any pebble you take off a beach means potentially one less home or hiding place for a small creature, or one less item for another creature to use in e.g. a mating ritual.

I bet they didn’t see the joke, and revelled in the pettiness of it!

The Irish Sea must owe milllions in fines, cos it regularly sweeps vast amounts of pebbles, rocks, sand and shells away from the coast. Of course, it sometimes brings some or all of it back again, but what a bastard!

The actions of nature mean any pebbles tourists pick up are almost literally a drop in the ocean. Coastal erosion is a complex thing, and to blame it on people collecting rocks is a a vast oversimplification.

Industrial removal is of course a different thing, but kids collecting pebbles and shells are doing no harm. There are plenty left for mating rituals, even if the crabs are juggling 20 each!

I know it wasn't your intention, but your post really made me chuckle, especially the spectacular finale about the mating rituals! Top notch silliness 😁

I have a nice pebble I keep in my pocket to fiddle with, I once took a bag of nettles home to fertilise my garden, last year I made two crumbles with blackberries from a hedge, in the summer I ate a sloe berry (but spat it out again) and I have just picked a handful of three-cornered leek from the pavement for dinner. How much should I expect in fines and bad karma? Everyone has the opportunity to do the same, but most don’t and those that do, do so in such small quantities that it has no effect on the ecosystem.

If I was being political, I would say this type of thing is more scapegoating of the average person so we don’t think too much about where things like garden pebbles/gravel/grit come from and the effect that has on nature

your karma balance will be restored if you take out as much three cornered leek as you can, it’s a ‘schedule 9’ invasive non-native species.

Google told me it’s illegal to allow it to grow in the wild, but the pavement plants have grown under the fence from an old lady’s garden, so am I technically stealing from the old lady? That would surely knock off some karma points 😬

There is a tension in law, and life. One the one hand is being rule bound enough that society continues to function, the powers that be can govern, and the social contract remains strong. On the other is resisting the over enthusiastic exercises of power, questioning blind obedience, and disobeying stupid and harmful law. German society vs Italian.

The British, scandis, Canadians should be middling. Not chasing seagulls and shoplifting but also not calling the police when someone cuts their grass at 9.55am on a Sunday.

But being more Italian than German doesn’t make you Robin Hood. You need to be aware that there are reasons for rules, and you not knowing what those are, and making your ‘reckons’, doesn’t make you righter than those who choose to follow rules more than you do. Having lived in a ‘rules don’t matter and we all do what we want’ society for a few years, everything is harder and a little more dangerous.

If there’s good reason for breaking an unjust rule, go ahead. But just seeing something shiny and wanting it, and signalling disobedience and disorder to those around you (you brought up covid), has consequences. Sometimes small, sometimes larger. And hopefully you also support those (Palestine Action springs to mind) who break what they see as unjust or unfair rules. It’s not all just self-serving.

no, her plants are stealing your garden
(she probably doesn’t have them deliberately anyway.)

That’s delightfully written. But, in the context of this thread, complete nonsense.

No law against taking pebbles from a beach is intended to be enforced against beachgoers taking one or two home with them, even if it technically applies to them. They’re not disturbing any ecology. They’re not running a business that removes parts of a public space. They’re not creating an eyesore or a nuisance, unlike litterers or lazy dog owners.

In no country in the world would the police swoop on a kid going home with a pocketful of pebbles from a beach. Not even in Germany.

It was more in the context of the OP and others expanding the reasoning to Covid rules, panic buying, and removing things like fossils. Which neatly shows how the ‘if I don’t understand, it doesn’t apply to me’ logic.

Part of my job is enforcing rules. But much more importantly, making sure behaviour meets safety and social standards. I explain the logic at length, no one reads it. I just say, ‘don’t’ everyone does what they want, gets caught, suffers consequences and THEN says, ‘but I didn’t know why’.

I disagree. This isn’t a case of “if I don’t understand, it doesn’t apply to me”…

It’s “I understand very well, and it’s bullshit, so I’m not going to comply”.

Absolutely ridiculous.

Fair enough if you start harvesting the beach to renovate your garden. But a few pebbles for the kids - no that’s silly.

Ive just remembered that when we had a dog he used to put big pebbles in his mouth and you couldnt get them off him.

Also he was a prolific thief of sticks in woodland.

Leaving ecosystems as is, is not some new concept made up today. It’s something that is taught to kids in school (well, was where we are anyway when my kids went through). I just asked some of mine what the saying was that was always reinforced in school and they gave the following - they went to different schools at different times btw, also a mix of public/private, so guessing it was part of the curriculum when they went through.

"Take only pictures, memories, and your rubbish, leave only footprints."

Mate, can you do maths?! If 100 people took a stone PER day for 10 YEARS, it would be 0.00000365 of the 100bn pebbles on Brighton Beach.

If TEN THOUSAND people took a pebble a day for 10 yrs it would be 0.000365% of the pebbles.

how can you possibly think 100 people taking a few pebbles could be an issue?

Our coastlines are full of sexually frustrated sea life unable to perform mating rituals. It’s a real thing. It’s why the lobsters are so fucking pinchy.

I can't find any evidence that our marine wildlife suffering with sexual frustration due to a dwindling supply of pebbles and shells.

The closest I got was the Adélie penguin unable to mate if they can't find enough smooth, round pebbles to protect their eggs from the ice.

There was something about sea creatures in Japan attacking humans during mating season.

And a bit about slipper limpets stacking up in their shells to have some sort of mating orgy.

Nothing about UK native species struggling to find enough pebbles to perform.

It was a joke

Oh my god!! I totally thought you were serious 🫣. Good one.

I love a bit of deadpan too.