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Comment by krzrak | Hacker News Reader

You realize you're not supposed to toss around garbage in the national park?

Here's a different perspective, which I will admit in advance is kind of ridiculous, but it makes me think...

Why are humans not considered to be a part of nature? I think it’s because we consider ourselves to be more intelligent than other animals/organisms and therefore assume it to be our responsibility to actively protect nature. However, this is based on our own moral standards, which were created by us, likely as a result of our ability to empathize.

A human eating an apple and discarding the core seems pretty natural to me (though it’s not, by definition). If this has an impact on the wildlife population, then perhaps it was “meant to be”.

Going out of our way to preserve nature seems more unnatural. Nature should have no expectation of our intelligence, so perhaps the human-caused destruction of the world is itself natural.

Then again, perhaps our increased intelligence is natural, so going out of our way to preserve nature is natural.

As you can see, I basically have no point here. It’s just an interesting thought train that I felt like expressing.

Of course, this argument could be extended to just about anything that a human does, including pumping oil directly into the ocean, which is why I’m not actually trying to argue this point.

I guess what I am saying is that if humans are left unregulated, nature seems to find a way to restore sanity. An example of this is the over prescription of antibiotics which has led to a decrease in their overall effectiveness. It seems like nature will always win in the end.

Unregulated humans have lead to the extinction of hundreds (thousands?) of species. Largely by hunting, but also unintentionally by destroying habitats. It's also a safety hazard: when you feed wild animals, they learn to associate humans with food and are more willing to approach humans, which places humans in danger. Aside from animal welfare, garbage is just disgusting. If one person sees an apple core, perhaps they'll assume it's OK to leave their Doritos bag, and someone else a beer bottle, and now the area is spoiled for everyone. Not to mention health hazards for both humans and animals from rotting food.

> If one person sees an apple core, perhaps they'll assume it's OK to leave their Doritos bag

Let me nuance that a little bit: They don't actually believe it's OK, they're really just lazy and inconsiderate. If they were actually unaware of the difference between food and plastic packaging, the problem would be solving itself.

Well, we're talking about a National Park. Which is a part of nature we explicitly try to keep unaffected by humans as much as possible. So elsewhere you may have an argument, but in this case any visitor influence on nature is bad.

I disagree. Discarding the core is unnatural. The only part of an apple that I discard is the stem.

I also ensure that I do not crush all of the seeds with my teeth, thus honoring "the deal" between fruit-bearing plants and animals (even though sewage treatment plants may be involved after the fact).

I draw the line at plums, though. Those are pretty much the largest fruit seeds that I will swallow whole. Peaches, you're out of luck.

But when you put toilets and sewers in the equation, tossing the seed-bearing portion of a fruit to another animal is probably the most natural thing you can do. The animal receiving the food has no cause to object. The plant that bore the fruit has no cause to object (unless it is seedless). And the only reason a human might object is if it somehow upsets the environmental equilibrium, such as if 10000 humans are all throwing their uneaten apple cores in the same place.

...like tourists at a national park.

When you're in a "natural" area that somehow gets a lot of human activity anyway, you're actually better off burning your garbage, and either packing out the ash if local soil is basic, or spreading it and peeing on it if the local soil is acidic.

Do you realize that plums and peaches and apples are all likely to be happy just to be carried off and dropped?

You don't have to eat freaking pits out of fruit.

That's not true. It depends on the plant species, but some seeds require physical or chemical abrasion of the seed coat before germination can occur. Some fruits have germination-inhibiting plant hormones in the fruit flesh, and cannot sprout until that is either digested or rotted away.

Some seeds require seasonal cycles of cold and hot, but that doesn't involve animals except insofar as they may cause the climate to shift.

That's not really why I swallow the seeds. I do it because it makes less of a mess to clean up after a meal or snack. Someone else might have to walk their apple core to a garbage can, and worry about whether it will rot and stink in there. I just put the stem on my desk and throw it in the landscaping mulch later.

Sure, throwing one apple core seems pretty natural. But a national park is full of visitors every day. If it isn't a strict policy not to throw trash and food where animals can scavenge it, they learn to expect and rely on it. This brings them in more frequent contact. With crows that's no big deal, perhaps an annoyance to visitors at worst. But other animals can be much more dangerous. Keeping a healthy fear of people in animals (and honestly of animals in people) is incredibly important.

The most extreme example of this is trash feeding bears in Yellowstone up until 1970. Humans naturally ate at hotels which naturally tossed their trash into giant piles nearby. Bears naturally came looking for all that food they smelled and naturally ate it. The humans then naturally started watching and the park naturally made that easier by putting up grandstands around the trash heaps.

Eventually a new Yellowstone park chief saw the ridiculousness and danger of this and stopped it. It then took a while for the bears to adapt their behavior back to their actual natural behavior without such a rich food source.

http://www.yellowstonepark.com/yellowstone-bears-no-longer-g...

National parks want to maintain nature in a certain pre-tech-influence state. Don't over-philosophize it.

People were philosophizing long before tech-influence. Technology was absent from the thought train too.

Are you saying they had thought trains before there were trains?

Biodegradable apple cores that he was feeding to birds? I think that hardly qualifies.

Well, ideally "leave no trace" and "don't mess with wildlife" are adhered to when in nature

edit: it's also illegal in national parks, carrying up to a $5000 fine and six months in jail

Yes, I have spent a lot of time out in nature and parks, and I generally am aware of not leaving a trace or litter. However, with something like a banana peel, I'd rather it end up as tree food the in a landfill, so I usually toss them in bushes.

The issue is that leaving food for the animals alters their behavior and can cause issues. You're probably not the worst offender wherever you are, as there are many people who just give food to animals, but the argument would be that it contributes to the problem.

Actually banana peels and orange peels don't biodegrade that fast in a north American forest.

Apple cores I think might not be too bad to toss, ants can eat that up in a day or two.

I pack out the peels of any tropical fruit.

Please don't do that with banana or orange peels, they remain present for a long time. I have no problem personally with people tossing apple cores in more remote, little-visited areas (though it still makes sense to crack down on such things a bit more in heavily visited areas like National Parks) but various peels don't rot well and remain in place.

I'm not sure about Yosemite or even nature in the US so maybe this wouldn't be an issue, but even biodegradable things like apple cores or egg shells can spread diseases to local populations of trees or birds. That's a real thing to take into account in natural parks with endemic species at least.

Huh. I didn't know. Do you have a link on that?

I don't have a link though, it's just something that was been repeated at length by the Natural Reserve agents and the ecobiologists to the personnel and visitors while I was on Kerguelen island (precisely about apple cores and egg shells - most of the vegetation is actually in the same Rosaceae family as apple trees, and there are many local bird species).

It makes sense to me, seeing how a single disease like chestnut blight or phylloxera can be very devastating to a population on a whole continent, it could be both as bad but also less noticeable in a natural park.

Well, there are seeds in it...

In the very least it's unsightly. Thousands of people go to Yosemite, imagine if every one of them dropped food debris along the trail.

It was an apple grown in one of the 3 orchards around Yosemite purchased from the store in the valley. It was a native apple.

Also, I don't consider biodegradable native fruits to be trash. People argue the birds will choke on seeds or something which is absurd. I hike in Yosemite dozens of times a year and I can't recall ever seeing so much as banana peel and I know people are tossing those on the ground everywhere.

Boy, there's one in every thread, huh?

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