I just found the idea of an apple core sitting out in the wild for six months to be absurd. Where I grew up it would be covered in bugs before you had time to pick it up again.
Maybe the key thing I’m ignoring is that discarding local fruit is different than discarding fruit that travelled great distances to you. The idea that throwing away an apple core would cause harm seemed laughable to me. But that’s mostly because trees all around me “discard” plenty of apples.
You don’t want to go around introducing potentially invasive flora or messing with the food of local fauna (though if it goes to the dump instead of the road side, local fauna are likely still going to have at it).
That’s the ECC at work! (Environmental Cleanup Crew)
They are, perhaps, the world’s largest NGO in existence. Every day you see them out there, from the over the top aerial surveillance, to the always by midnight highly mobile crews that do not waste time recovering those valuable tidbits of refuse that we so carelessly discard.
I have seen a veritable army of raccoons (+40) at Mammoth Cave after midnight waiting for the go ahead to clear the trash cans of edibles. I’ve seen a deer carcass cleared in two days by unknown scavengers.
All hail the ECC!
and they are all volunteers.
A couple times I have encountered animals that appeared to have died from natural cause that have not been scavenged. Once, a large hare that had been dead so long it was completely desiccated, with skin intact. Another time, two obviously released pet rabbits curled up together and died (surrounded by things they could have eaten; this is what happens when you dump pets in the woods ). Both cases were adjacent to a little meadow where I would watch a fox and a bobcat hunt mice (not at the same time ) so predators were aware of the existence of these ‘freebies’ . Maybe the abundance of their typical diet, maybe the fact they were already dead?
Forgive me for being a little dense, but don’t apples fall off trees and rot down every autumn/fall? I mean, isn’t that how they get the seeds to spread and germinate.
And yes, I have a small apple tree, I do know that it’s a natural process, it just seems odd that anyone should question that apples, or parts thereof, might be on a par with synthetic litter.
Apple cores are a lie! I don’t know how long it takes seeds and stems to degrade, but the rest of the apple is edible. Try it. If you’re a fan of Soylent Green, you can pretend you’re Charlton Heston eating every bit of a precious rare apple while you dine with Edward G. Robinson.
I had a simmilar conversation with my wife about what we throw in the ocean from our boat. I throw everything that is bio in the water, from citrus peels, bananna peels, apple cores or an errant pistachio. She would get pissed at me until I finally pointed out that the alternative to it decomposing and turning into nutrients in the ocean was for me to put it all in a plastic bag that took energy and transportation to make/get, Take that bag to the dumpster where a truck will expend diesel to drive it to the land fill and toss the peels and their shinny new plastic bag, into the ground where it will now take decades to decompose. She now throws it all in the ocean too.
I guess what I’m saying is, unless you are going to hike it out inside you reusable back pack and not in another bag in your pack, and put it in your own compost pile then you are better off tossing it in a nice shady ■■■■■ spot in the woods. Or you could stop being such a panzy and eat the whole damn apple!
Edit. The word moisture minus “ture” is censored? Ha!
I think you underestimate the impact - which is the original article’s point.
The summaries really don’t help the message by abstracting it.
From the actual article:
Realistically, does a humble apple core really cause that much damage? Our national parks are enjoying a plethora of visitation. Grand Canyon welcomes 6 million people a year. It is estimated that 10 percent of visitors hike approximately a mile below the rim. Let us be generous and assume that 90 percent of these sightseers will carry out their trash. But that, for our purposes, presupposes that the remainder will toss, say, something like an apple core. That’s 60,000 apple cores. We would be knee-deep in the execrable things.
) so predators were aware of the existence of these ‘freebies’ . Maybe the abundance of their typical diet, maybe the fact they were already dead?