I have a distinct memory growing up of a photo on our fridge, sent to us from a friend. The photo was of a guy taking rocks from along the San Francisco bay and stacking them in impossibly precarious positions. Apparently, the man was locally famous and, at the time, one of the unique things to do when visiting the city was to go see his impressive rock stacks.

Fast-forward a few years, and these rock stacks seem to be everywhere: along hiking trails, in parks—there’s currently even one along the side of NC-54 on my drive to school. Now, I don’t have a clue whether the San Francisco rock stacker had anything to do with inspiring this trend. But whatever the inspiration, stacking rocks in the outdoors has apparently gone viral.

When I first saw these “cairns,” I thought this was a mildly neat type of impermanent graffiti. At the very least, stacking a rock seemed preferable than spray painting one, or carving your initials into a beech tree. And some of these stacks truly are quite impressive.  But as time went on, I had a change of heart. They became distracting, and the more I thought about it, they even have the potential to be dangerous. True cairns, particularly as used in European outdoor recreation, are supposed to be informative, serving as trail marker sin snowy areas where a blaze might get obscured. If someone interpreted American cairn art as informative, they could end up lost.

But the last straw was an article I read in Southeastern Naturalist (Unger et al., 2017) that demonstrated that this rock stacking was leading to the deaths of eastern hellbenders—a species of special concern in North Carolina. Building cairns out of stream rocks destroys hellbender habitat, as hellbenders rely on large flat rocks for escaping predators and breeding. And moving the rocks can also crush the salamanders.

So why are people engaging in this destructive outdoor behavior? According to models like the theory of reasoned action (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980), behaviors are determined by “behavioral precursors.” I believe normative pressure is one such behavioral precursor that plays a big role in why people stack rocks. The act has become an incredibly common sight in parks all over the country, and the evidence of the behavior can stick around for quite a long time if the “architecture” is good. The long life of a pile of stacked rocks as a structure, combined with the seeming innocuity of the act—what you leave behind in a rock stack is “natural” in a material sense, and rocks aren’t alive so doing something to affect them might feel less intrusive than say, stacking up box turtles—can make this behavior seem like acceptable behavior. “Everyone seems to be doing it so why shouldn’t I?”

So what is holding people back from “good” behavior (i.e., leaving the rocks alone) and what kind of intervention might be useful to change this behavior? At risk of invoking the deficit model, with this behavior I do think education has an important role to play. Rock stacking is such a new phenomenon that I doubt there is widespread public understanding of the detriments of this sort of environmental vandalism like there is for taking a rock or spray painting one. The optics of the act don’t look particularly bad. And so I think putting out flyers at trailhead billboards describing the impact of this behavior, for instance, is a necessary ingredient in addressing this behavioral problem. Such a fix may impact another behavioral precursor—evaluative beliefs—by reframing how people think about the consequences of their behavior.

But information isn’t the only answer and additional strategies must be used. One idea would be to make negative effects of rock stacking more direct. Rajecki (1982) describes direct experiences as those which involve someone actually interfacing with the impacts of a problem in a visceral or sensory way. Such direct experiences have a higher impact on behavior than indirect experiences, and so can play an important role in changing this behavior. Put simply, people need to see the dead salamander. Such an image (like the one published in Unger et al. (2017)) could be used in our proposed billboard notice, or in areas of high rock stacking activity. Such an image also serves a second purpose, because it makes the impacts of the behavior much more immediately tangible. Such impacts have a leg up on less tangible environmental impacts like greenhouse gases emissions in terms of changing behaviors because the cause and effect relationship is dreadfully clear. And it helps that the victim of the behavior is one of the largest amphibian species in the world; perhaps not “charismatic” megafauna in a traditional sense, but an endearing slimeball at the very least, whose plight is surely affective at some level.

Internal motivation, as outlined by Kollmuss and Agyeman (2002), are another barrier to preventing people from stacking rocks. For whatever reason—a need to express oneself, boredom, engaging in a fun activity—people seem to really like balancing stones. And so changing that behavior will necessitate refocusing those motivations, or fulfilling them in a way that doesn’t involve environmentally destructive behavior. One way to refocus those motivations could involve urging people to knock over rock stacks when they see them. This is a direct, easy, and fun activity and is in fact what Acadia NP park rangers do when they see rock stacks. Getting rid of rock stacks in this way puts an environmental problem—rock stacking—into people’s “locus of control” (Newhouse, 1991), giving them an opportunity where they as individuals can easily have an important impact on an environmental issue, something that has been shown to facilitate pro-environmental behavior. Eliminating rock stacks in this way could also eliminate some of the normative processes encouraging the behavior, simply because people will see fewer rock stacks.

A final barrier to reducing rock stacking is contextual (Steg and Vlek, 2009). Essentially, I would argue that people have few opportunities to express themselves artistically in outdoor protected areas and so any strategy to reduce the negative impacts of the behavior shouldn’t necessarily eliminate a rare outlet for releasing artistic energy. I propose that a structural fix may be one type of contextual factor to facilitate behavior change in this context. I believe managers should allow rock building in certain high-traffic park areas (perhaps near a visitor center) and provide rocks for participants to use for the activity. Such a fix still allows participants to engage in essentially the same behavior—it in fact makes it easier as now visitors don’t have to dredge streams for their rocks—but diminishes the destructive nature of the behavior. Such an activity also presents a more welcoming opportunity to talk to visitors about the impacts of rock stacking in wilderness contexts.

 

References

Ajzen, I., & Fishbein, M. (1980). Understanding attitudes and predicting social behaviour.

Kollmuss, A., & Agyeman, J. (2002). Mind the gap: why do people act environmentally and what are the barriers to pro-environmental behavior?. Environmental education research, 8(3), 239-260.

Newhouse, N. (1991) Implications of attitude and behavior research for environmental conservation, The Journal of Environmental Education, 22(1), pp. 26–32.

Rajecki, D.W. (1982) Attitudes: themes and advances (Sunderland, MA, Sinauer).

Steg, L., & Vlek, C. (2009). Encouraging pro-environmental behaviour: An integrative review and research agenda. Journal of environmental psychology, 29(3), 309-317.

Unger, S. D., Williams, L. A., Groves, J. D., Lawson, C. R., & Humphries, W. J. (2017). Anthropogenic Associated Mortality in the Eastern Hellbender (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis alleganiensis). Southeastern Naturalist, 16(2), N9-N13.