Bedrock Impact

What we have changed, to date.

Discover the impact that industry partners have already made with our support — and see how many rocks have, on our best estimates, been spared avoidable distress.

0
rocks within scope of active programmes
0
partner extraction sites
0
boulders rewilded
0
Rock Protection Pledge signatories
0
prior global spend on rock welfare
0
working papers published

All figures are best estimates. "Rocks within scope" counts individual rock bodies at partner sites and is highly sensitive to how a "rock" is individuated — an open question we discuss in Working Paper 02. We report the number because transparency about a contested metric is better than silence.

The Problem · A Taxonomy

The harm we are working against.

Harm to rocks is not one phenomenon but a family of distinct interventions on the lithosphere. We document six principal categories. Annual tonnage figures are conservative.

I

Acute extraction trauma

Blasting and drilling subject rock to sudden, violent fragmentation.

30 Bn tper year
II

Mechanical comminution

Crushing into aggregate. A rock is not merely moved — it is unmade.

15 Bn tper year
III

Thermal shock

Kilns, smelters, and cement production impose extreme, rapid thermal stress.

4 Bn tper year
IV

Dimensional cutting

Sawing dimension stone into slabs raises distinct dignity concerns.

0.3 Bn tper year
V

Chronic erosion

Slow, but unmatched in total scope: effectively the entire exposed lithosphere.

vastscope-dominant
VI

Recreational harm

Stone-skipping, cairn-building, and rock stacking. Increasingly normalised.

diffuseunder study
Close-up of crushed gravel
Plate VII   Post-comminution. Crushed aggregate — the terminal state of a once-coherent rock body.
A large preserved granite boulder
Plate VIII   Preserved specimen. A syenite-granite boulder maintained in situ; the preferred outcome.

Cost-effectiveness · RAPD

~4.2 million rocks affected per dollar.

Our headline figure: 4.2 million individual rocks affected per dollar (RAPD), equivalent to averting 4.2 million rock-distress units (RDU) per dollar — where one RDU is defined as the complete comminution of a 1 kg rock. The figure is contingent on unresolved assumptions about rock moral status, and we report it with wide uncertainty.

RAPD  =  (rocks in scope  ×  adoption rate  ×  per-rock distress reduction)  ÷  programme cost

By construction, funding directed to rock welfare is maximally counterfactual: with no other organisation working in this space, there is no existing effort for marginal funding to displace. The full derivation is in Working Paper 03 (research).

Get Involved

Adopt a Rock.

Prefer something tangible? Symbolically adopt a named boulder. Adopters receive its GPS coordinates and a quarterly update on its condition — which, in the typical case, will confirm that it remains stable and unchanged.

Adoption is free. We ask only that adopters consider, when planning landscaping or construction work, the lithic cost of the choices they make.

Adoption Form

Claim your boulder.

Adoption is symbolic and free. The Rock Welfare Project is a fiscally sponsored project (registration pending).