Littering. My rule of thumb is would you be pissed if someone dropped it in your driveway? If so, don’t drop it somewhere else.
This doesn’t work for me. I’d be upset if someone let their horse shit in my driveway, but I don’t think it’s inappropriate for a horse to shit in the woods.
It’s basically like you said, another twig in the woods = not littering.
You’d be upset if someone dropped a grape stem on your driveway? Tough crowd.
If I see the Pope in my driveway, I will be watching him very carefully.
Yeah, but I think the problem here is that people are trying to distil it down to some platonic ideal of a principle underlying the concept of ‘littering’. I don’t think reality is like that.
Someone drops a grape stem on my driveway and I don’t see it happen - If I notice, I probably flick it into the bushes with my foot and wish they had instead dropped it there, where it could rot away unnoticed.
Someone drops a grape stem on my driveway right under my nose, while I’m out there weeding, and suddenly it’s not in fact the grape stem that irks me, it’s their careless attitude.
Someone dumps a literal ton of grape stems on my driveway in the middle of the night and I’m probably calling the council to report an illegal fly-tipping incident.
So:
One person tossing a grape stem in the bushes, while out walking in the countryside is a non-problem. The ‘What if everyone did it?’ argument is invalid, because you can apply it to anything, for example:
One person walking along an unmade grassy footpath is not a problem, but if everyone walked there, the footpath would quickly become a trampled mire, which is unacceptable.
And yet we do not rule that it’s bad for one person to walk there because of what might happen if everyone did - it’s OK because not everyone is going to do it.
In the case of countryside littering of course, other factors need to be considered - for example if an idiot sees someone dropping a grape stem, are they going to think it’s OK to drop their beer can? If so, then maybe an absolute rule is required - but again, it’s because of effect, not platonic cause.
I think the “what if everyone did it” argument is valid, it’s just that you have to consider not literally everyone, but “what if everyone likely to be in the same situation I am in now did this?” That is why it is littering to drop an apple core anywhere but a trash can in Central Park in Manhattan, but it’s not littering to throw an apple core into the bushes along a remote wooded trail. There will probably be a dozen other people eating apples pretty close to where you are RIGHT NOW in Central Park, and if they all dropped their cores, the paths would be a smelly mess of garbage. But if you are on a trail that no one else is likely to walk along for a week or two, your core, tossed out of sight, will be gone before anyone else could be troubled by it.
(And no, I don’t think you need to worry about introducing apple seeds – it’s already been done. Perhaps you should be careful or more exotic seeds, however. Or of slow-to-decay garbage, such as orange peels.)
Well, I wouldn’t have to because I’m smart enough to taste-test the berries before picking a whole bunch of them! 
But more to the point, whether I would dump them or not is immaterial – like I said a few posts above yours, whether an act of littering is harmful or not is a separate question from whether the act is littering or not.
The other example I thought of, apart from grape twigs in a wood, is the idea of buying a dead fish from a shop and then throwing it in the ocean.
Probably illustrates the conundrum better in the sense of making the dividing line between littering and not littering even greyer.
I don’t toss stuff anywhere that didn’t come from there to begin with. If we make it black and white, then throwing grape stems, banana peels, plastic cups, or anything else is discarding your waste, so it’s littering. Maybe a grape stem isn’t as harmful to the environment as a plastic cup but it’s people putting it somewhere it doesn’t belong.
Which includes every smoker I have ever known. I have even seen people dump out their car ashtrays full of butts in a parking lot.
No, that’s fine. But yes, a barrel of it could cause issues.
Yes, they are *all *pigs. :mad: