My trip was cut short by the same sickness that has delayed my response. Shingles, afflicting mostly my hands and head have made writing, and then retyping on this infernal little phone, an unpleasant chore. I haven't the patience right now to give much attention to trifles, so please forgive the spelling and grammatical errors I've surely made.
Why does it matter if caves are damaged? This was the question asked last week by David Rose, quoted in context here:
"Why does it matter if caves are "damaged"?
We all (i hope) want to cave responsibly, not leaving litter and taking care to preserve caves as far as we can. We do this so future generations will be able to enjoy them, and to minimise other possible ill effects such as pollution of a water supply. But even this is not an overarching imperative.
We all die anyway. The planet will one day be consumed by the sun. If it contains fewer stalactites by then, who or what has suffered a loss? The passage of cavers may change a cave's appearance. But by what yardstick could you say that the altered version is "worse"? In fact, most caves will have collapsed or disappeared for other reasons long before the sun becomes a red giant anyway - as almost all caves that have ever existed on Earth already have. Do you mourn these vanished systems which once graced ancient continents?"
The easiest counter to such an argument is to extend it to extremes; Why should we take care of our children? Our communities? Societies? Bodies? Any seemingly obvious practical answers are brushed aside by the ultimate meaninglessness of Mr. Rose's premise. Interestingly, we seem to have a great deal of difficulty answering these questions, for the same reason that Mr. Rose cannot answer his own. So perhaps this tactic does not reduce David's argument to its deserved level of absurdity.
Such a rhetorical exercise does not, indeed, answer the question at all. In fact, it makes the answers more difficult. Instead of answering in immediately practical terms, we must answer the bigger "why?" This is inescapably a spiritual question that every thinking person will have to tackle or else make a life's work of avoiding. Having grappled with it for a long time, I am only able to write about it within the limits of my experience and understanding, which are embarrassingly inadequate.
Whether one is essentially religious, secular, atheistic, or whatever other term best applies, there is an apparent human need to make connections, to be included in something more than individual. That this is a spiritual need has been recognized and expressed in various ways by all manner of people, from John Muir to Jesus Christ to Al Gore to Alan Paton to Jim Wayne Miller to Aristotle. While the apparent goal of modern society is divorce from its natural sources, the resultant emotional, mental, and spiritual sickness make it increasingly evident that our spiritual need can only be filled through membership in the natural world.
The health of the body depends on the health of the parts, both in known ecological terms and in ways that we must, in humility, acknowledge our ignorance of. There is no isolation possible. As part of the natural world, we cannot escape one another's influence. No part can be damaged without consequences. That we fail to recognize these inviolable connections does not lessen their reality or significance. Our ability to be happy is correspondent to our ability to honor and submit to our place among things in their places. That goal is not being reached through severances in the name of "fun" (which is not the same as happiness).
So our care for caves is only a very small part of our care for ourselves, which includes our fields, streams, forests, air, soil, cultural memory, history, and tradition. It is important because it connects us to our sources of health, both physical and spiritual. In this light it is easy to see why cavers as a general rule are only giving lip-service to "conservation". It is all they are capable of. Not having learned the importance of caring or how to care for themselves or their surroundings or sources to any meaningful degree, how could they be expected to practice authentic care for a hole in the ground? In private correspondence, a user of this forum recently suggested that writing about hypocrisy among cavers would result in a massive work. This is true, but only to the extent that hypocrisy can be ignorant. I believe that the false virtues of "responsible cavers" have at their root a real and natural sense of responsibility. That they hypocritically confine their ethic of care to the underground world is mostly a product of societal indoctrination. That they do not know how to reasonably and effectively enact their natural sense of responsibility while underground is a product of a simplistic and formulaic caving culture and the lack of wider practice in everyday life.
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I do not mourn the caves that have gone, or that will, just as I do not mourn the apples which have fallen and rotted on the margins of our pasture, or the deer who have fallen and rotted in the woods. I thank them, love them, honor them, for they have come and gone within their own boundaries.
I mourn the apples rotting in the dumpster behind Wal-Mart. Their entire existence has happened outside of health and honor.
I mourn the bucks whose carcasses I find, shot through and beheaded, in the woods. Their deaths have happened outside of respect, by hands of men and women without understanding.
I mourn the caves (as I do any other parts of land) which have fallen under the influence of those whose primary goals are selfish or political, or involve shortsighted "growth". Yes they will collapse one day, but long before that day they will have ceased to be what they are. They will have been stolen from health and happiness.
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I can say in complete honesty that I have never practiced care for a cave (or anything else) out of consideration for "future generations". I recall writing, in an article about a cave gating which I opposed, something like, "I am unwilling to sacrifice certainly for an uncertain and probably unappreciative future generation." That the famously conservation-minded editors removed this line without consultation, and in fact replaced it with something very different, is an example of outright ignorance. The only way to care for future generations is to care for ourselves. To do right. We do not have the responsibility, or even hopefully the desire, to hand down to our children an Earth that is a museum of pristine natural examples surrounded by crud. A happier heritage would be an Earth whole, wholesome, holy, healthy, used and in use, within which all is contained in reverence for interdependencies and respect for mystery. And no matter how secular or religious one may be, happiness is as good a yardstick as humans have yet discovered.
