NSS Convention 2026

The NSS motto, "Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints, and kill nothing but time" admonishes us: "Cave softly." We should minimize human impacts while exploring, surveying, photographing, or studying caves. Yet impacts abound. Cavers leave survey stations, install bolts, leave footprints, dig through sediments, or set off charges to remove bedrock to enlarge squeezes. Ideally (but impractically) we might aspire to leave no permanent trace of our presence, other than impacting renewable features. So what counts as a renewable feature (or resource) in a cave? Are there any such things? To count as renewable, features would have to potentially be degraded or disappear and then reform again in a minimally unaltered state through some physical, chemical, or biological processes. For example, degradation of cave water or air through chemical or biological agents (pollutants, viruses, or fungi) may harm bats or other organisms, but there is hope that mitigation could allow ecosystem renewal. Speleothems, however, generally form on a time scale much longer than that of human lifetimes. Consequently, we are taught not to touch speleothems because oils from our fingers could discolor them or inhibit their growth, and touching might lead to breakage. In Snedegars Cave, white drip hole rings form and disappear as a result of wetting and drying cycles associated with condensation, evaporation, dissolution, and precipitation cycles. Are drip hole rings renewable cave resources? Not really, I would argue. And what can we ethically do in exploring and studying caves? Come join an illustrated discussion.