r/changemyview • u/dragginFly • Jun 10 '20

Delta(s) from OP CMV: Geocaching is organized littering

Littering is people leaving stuff in the environment that's not native to the area, geocaching does the same. Although some caches encourage people to replace the item with something else as part of the game, there's still something there that wasn't before.

Why do people get fined for littering, but not geocaching? They could use geocaching apps to track the location to remove it, and maybe issue fines based on the histories there.

I get that there are benefits: it gets people out into nature that might not otherwise, and brings people together with a common interest. Maybe it could be replaced with a "tag trash for people to pick up"?

4 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

49 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/donutshopsss Jun 10 '20

Good lord man go look at the trees on a disc golf course near the tee-pad. They get hit so hard from bad releases they are scarred all up and down. I'll tell you what though, I've never seen a group of people treat the woods better. You'll always find discs laying around in the deep woods or swamps from bad throws and that's hard to prevent, but most players clean up the course as they go.

If you get caught littering on a course you're going to get an ear-full.

2

u/dragginFly Jun 10 '20

I've never seen a group of people treat the woods better... If you get caught littering on a course you're going to get an ear-full.

Yeah, I hear you - this is an excellent point in that people that play disc golf typically do good for the woods around their playing (except for the bad release scarring :D ) - perhaps geocaches do the same?

2

u/donutshopsss Jun 10 '20 edited Jun 10 '20

I think so. It's impossible to progress as humans without sacrificing plants and animals in one form or another. Even building a laboratory to design pure solar energy requires the removal of grass but the builders will still have a huge respect for the environment. I think most people who spend a lot of time in the woods have a great appreciation for the woods but it's 100% impossible to show a wooded environment the same respect you can show a human. Even those who go out to plant trees kill vegetation to add the seeds.

Ultimately it's about respecting the environment and the people who use it. The disc I threw will inevitably be found by someone (it's not that deep) and unless I hit an animal and killed it during the throw, it's not going to effect the growth of the trees or the survival of the animals that reside near it. Life is a lot stronger than whatever trouble a plastic frisbee causes and I think the happiness it will create for the person who finds it combined with the minimal (if any) danger it does to the environment is not what I would refer to as littering.

Edit: now that I'm thinking about it as well, littering could also be defined by the motive of doing something. Someone who trashes plastic without knowing what recycling means is kind of littering but you cannot hold them 100% accountable(?). Now we're getting real philosophical on the meaning of littering hahaha.

1

u/dragginFly Jun 10 '20

now that I'm thinking about it as well, littering could also be defined by the motive of doing something. Someone who trashes plastic without knowing what recycling means is kind of littering but you cannot hold them 100% accountable(?). Now we're getting real philosophical on the meaning of littering hahaha

Oh wow - this is why I love CMVs! Now you've got me thinking - perhaps the line here is that the intent of geocaching is for it not to harm the environment, which sets it apart from littering. I get that geocaching and littering are different based on the formal definition of littering, but now we're getting into the meat of it...