Kenilworth
New member
crickleymal said:
To teach us how to take care of caves and farms? No.
Simon Wilson said:
No, I haven't done any formal education at all, save three years of public school as a small child. I'm sure that's obvious. I read a bunch and listen a lot and do my best to keep my eyes open, that's all.
Simon Wilson said:
I would like that very much, and I go as many places as I can afford. Have only been outside the US a few times, and maybe not to the sorts of places where I might learn the lessons you seem to think I should learn.
But I'm not suffering from romantic delusion. I know that my life here is comparatively regal, and I haven't (yet) extended my argument "against" scholarly science beyond that dealing with caves and land use. Most of you are responding out of scale and context with what I've written, as usual.
That said, I would as soon live without electricity, computers, phones, cars, aeroplanes, and concrete. They don't impress me. The only reason I do not is that I haven't found a way to free myself from them without also abandoning other duties I believe to be important. I free myself where I can, draw lines that are easily drawn, but I am still far more involved in the commercial world than I would prefer to be. This is another big topic, and you'll forgive me if I'm too busy to respond to outrage associated with the preceding.
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As an example of what I'm talking about in regard to cave science, the NSS used to publish the Journal of Cave and Karst Studies once annually. It was devoted to original cave science, and was often ignored by casual readers because it was incomprehensibly technical. Before they stopped printing a physical copy, I used to try and squeeze what I could understand out of the papers, which wasn't a whole lot. I also communicated regularly, until his recent death, with Dr. Horton Hobbs, a limnologist and biologist and hydrologist who founded and mentored the most academically ambitious student grotto in the US. I also corresponded and occasionally caved with his students, and of course read their very high-quality journal, Pholeos. So I have been at least exposed to a lot of cave science, even if I couldn't understand all of it.
I have never yet seen a practical application of any of this science proposed. I understand that this is not always the job of the scientists. But if there is any point to any of this learning, it ought to be someone's job to figure out how to use it. And to use scientific conclusions only to conceive of more products is not really progress, the misery of "third-world" countries notwithstanding.
Moreover I have seen in most of these academic works and in the academics themselves very little evidence of affection for the cave or even for the science (this does not apply to Dr. Hobbs who truly was a lover of caves and cave creatures and of his students). And I don't believe that knowledge or innovation can improve the world if affection is absent.
But this is an awfully strung-out mess of a conversation. My original intent was to respond to Pete, saying that I do not like to claim that Science should be the stated aim of caving because it gives the impression of academic data-gathering, which is often no more useful than unlearned observation. I do think, as I wrote in the originally linked post, that we should each and every one of us be aiming to learn something every single time we go in a cave, and that we could do without terms like speleologist because they imply that regular old cavers are supposed to be willy-nilly tourists. I don't think that this is a very radical or offensive conclusion.
