Well, sure, but isn’t that also true of pebble taking? It’s not like the law is the reason people aren’t all going to the beach at the same time to snatch one of those sweet, sweet pebbles.
I don’t think trespass in absence of criminal intent is wrong.
If someone deliberately goes through your flower bed to ruin it, because of some local feud, that’s a problem. But worn out spots on your lawn do not seem to me a problem.
There is a hospital near me where I’d literally have to walk over a mile extra to walk to an appointment without trespassing. Now I’d drive. But I didn’t previously.
If someone had told me to avoid their lawn, I would have been careful next time. But it isn’t fair to the friendlier neighbors to be like that. Also, it’s bad for global warming to discourage walking with strict trespassing rules.
In this case, if everyone did it, the world would be better off.
True. That’s why I am saying the law is not required to prevent the odd person taking the odd pebble.
Apropos of nothing, here’s a weird little wrinkle…
Everyone seems to agree that fossils, seashells, driftwood and sea glass are exceptions to the stipulations about removing material from beaches in the Coast Protection Act 1949…
ALL of the rocks on the beaches near me are fossils. The beaches are composed entirely of flint, which is a fossil mineral, plus shells and seaglass.
Most of the examples here are various forms of resource extraction, but there are better examples to illustrate how the argument works some times, and doesn’t work other times.
Speeding is illegal; If everyone exceeded the speed limit, we’d be knee-deep in car crashes and death. But… almost everyone does speed, and nowhere near the predicted amount of carnage actually occurs. Some yes, but only a small percentage of all the countless speeding infractions result in a measurable problem.
What is the actual reason for the law though? Just because someone now says it’s so we don’t all take the coastline away one pebble at a time it doesn’t mean that is the original purpose for which the law was written.
There are a few possibilities. One, the law was written to prevent a small number of people taking moderate / large amounts of coastline away in an uncontrolled manner. Two, the law was written to prevent individuals from taking the coastline away one pebble at a time and this is not a legitimate concern. Three, the law was written for the previous purpose and it is a legitimate concern and your understanding of the fragility of the coastline is flawed.
You seem to think it’s number two while ignoring the other possibilities. Maybe it is, but do we know this for sure?
That’s not true. Flint itself doesn’t generally preserve any features of the source materials even when those are possibly biogenic. It is not generally considered a fossil. Individual nodules may contain fossils, but flint by itself isn’t worth preserving for cultural or scientific ends, like fossils are. Especially flint pebbles removed from their original setting and all ground up.
Yes. The context of the Coast Protection Act was the control of individuals or companies ‘extracting’ rocks and aggregates without licence, but the result is legislation that is written in the absolute. I mean, it could be argued under this that if you don’t pick a piece of gravel out of the tread of your boots, or if you return home with a grain of sand in your hair, you committed a crime.
Individual nodules that don’t contain fossils are believed to be trace fossils from the infill of burrows and tracks.
Trace fossils that aren’t in situ are of no value.
Is that in disagreement with something you think I said?
Yes - flint pebbles would not qualify as fossils by any reasonable standard and so wouldn’t be exceptions to the Act on that basis.
I am in agreement with you, BTW, that taking individual pebbles is of no consequence and falls below the coastal activity noise. That a handful of pebbles is not a Commons concern.
But if the law has to be written to not allow leeway for large-scale offenders (and IME a lot of environmental-type legislation, like flower-picking and sand mining, has to), it’s just a case of either grudgingly abiding by it, or breaking it knowingly.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned this:
The thing with exceptions is that they are arbitrary - the act doesn’t mention them. The busybodies who apply the act to individual members of the public are the ones who cooked up the exceptions for shells, driftwood, seaglass and fossils.
I wasn’t talking about a legal reading of the act, just how I, an individual with geological training that you have informed of this particular exception, would view the status of flint pebbles. That they are not generally considered fossils and if there is an exception for fossils but not pebbles, trying to call them fossils is something I would view as a cheat. This is regardless of whether the exception is encoded or merely a social convention.
I should add: that is different from whether I think the distinction between fossils and pebbles makes sense in this context. I don’t think so, or actually more I view it as a horrible misapplication. I think unlicensed gathering of fossils by members of the general public is in fact the only thing that should be controlled, and handfuls of ordinary pebbles should be fine. English law in this regard is messed-up, IMO. Fossil collecting should be a licensed activity.
I believe “if everybody did it” scenarios are simply the end result of social evolution over long periods of time. It everybody picked up a pebble from the beach long ago, there would be no pebbles on the beach today and that would be ok. We wouldn’t miss them because for us they were never there. Society adjusts to any scenario, or it breaks down (which also happens from time to time).
IOW, sometimes everybody (or most everybody, or enough -bodies to do harm) does do something harmful (like killing off a species, or crowd-crushing), but usually they don’t, because that’s the statistical likelihood of that behavior occurring in our population. Either way, society adjusts to the outcome.
Take crowd-crushing as an example. If human behavior compels everyone always to rush into enclosures and cause fatal crushes, I believe society long ago would have stopped making enclosures from which people could not escape en mass. We wouldn’t miss these enclosures today because for us they never existed. We’d have a different type of architectural model for enclosing people. Everybody won’t take a pebble from the beach. How do we know this? Because there are pebbles on the beach.
It always fascinated me how there seems to be the exact number and variety of jobs needed to run society. What if nobody wanted to be a doctor, or a plumber, or a car mechanic? What if nobody wanted to make the cork screw opener that allows me to uncork a bottle of wine? What if everybody wanted to be a rock star?
It all just seems too perfectly structured and fine-tuned—until you think about it. To use a tired saying, it is what it is. If it wasn’t, it would be something else. And maybe something else would be better than what it is. Maybe the beach would be better without pebbles. I recall on our family vacation to England when I was 7, those rocky beaches hurt my feet.
Proof in the pudding. If everyone did it:
If everyone walked out of a business the job would most likely fail.
If everyone got along, eventually we’d get bored, someone would fight.
If everyone would see thing for what they really are, how long would it take for organic cascade failure in the form of mass death.
When I was a kid, my father reprimanded me with the “if everyone did it” argument. I countered with, “If everyone were a doctor, we’d all starve to death.”
I got smacked upside the head for that.
I can’t tell if you’re being naive or just indifferent to terrible and preventable suffering.
What are you talking about? Suffering pebbles? I was posting about the “if everone did it” argument in general, encompasing many things.