Over the past week, Glenn Taylor, Dylan Taylor and Dave Hill have gotten fifteen minutes of fame that they will never forget. The three men, former Boy Scout troop leaders in Utah, recently made international news when a video of the men toppling a boulder in Utah’s Goblin Valley State Park went viral. The troop leaders pushed the boulder from its perch onto a mound of soil and then proceeded to strike poses and high-five each other. Hill announced on the video, “We have now modified Goblin Valley.” Since the video was posted, the three men have made news as far away as Europe and Japan and have even received death threats.

Goblin Valley is a unique landscape, resembling the surface of Mars, formed from 170 million-year-old sandstone. Over millions of years, water has eroded most of the sandstone layers, leaving behind mushroom-shaped pinnacles that can stand more than a dozen feet tall. The former Scout leaders violated the Utah National Parks Council’s “Leave No Trace” policy by knocking over the boulder and may face charges. The men defended their actions by pointing out that the boulder (which weighs as much as a medium sized car) was precariously perched alongside a busy trail and could have easily rolled onto passing hikers. “We did something right the wrong way,” Taylor told NBC news.

Why all the anger? News media loves to pick up on people doing stupid things, and today’s YouTube videos have given them plenty of fresh material. The former Scout leaders’ silly behavior in the video is easy to lampoon. As a geologist, it is hard not to be saddened by their actions. However, felony charges and death threats are an extreme overreaction and the continued attention given to the story is surprising. At most, the Utah State Parks department should issue a fine to all three men for damage to the park’s landscape.

Many people would probably agree that historical sites and unique environments such as the Amazon rainforest should be preserved for the ages, but what about unique geologic features or landscapes? Throughout the U.S., the National Park Service and state agencies already protect many of these features – Yosemite, the Devil’s Tower and the Grand Canyon to name a few. Geologic features are usually the last things people think of preserving. They are often given short shrift, erased or altered by activities such as mining, dam building and even off-roading.

Many of these sites give us geological and environmental insights as significant as ancient forests or the Library of Congress. The Grand Canyon area, for instance, preserves much of the history of life on Earth in its stony layers. It is literally possible to start at the bottom of the canyon and hike through the Earth’s past, passing early sea life such as sponges and shellfish, fossilized leaves from early forests, tracks from the time of the dinosaurs and even the remains of giant sloths that roamed the West during the last ice age. The layers also contain evidence of environmental changes as beaches and reefs switched to dunes and back again. These natural archives are invaluable records of our planet’s past and our own biological origins that offer hints for the future.

Even locations that are less spectacular than the Grand Canyon often contain stunning discoveries. In 2008, scientists unearthed a fossil of the world’s oldest flying insect behind a strip mall in Attleboro. Even minor ponds and swamps can give us information that will help us to understand and fight climate change.

Although we will always have a big impact on the landscapes around us, we can try to limit the damage we do. We can take the lesson of three Utah Scout leaders to heart and start to think about geologic features and landscapes as special places in their own right.

Eamon McCarthy Earls is a Collegian contributor and can be reached at [email protected].