Every action, big or small, leaves its mark. At Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, even the tiniest things, like lint from our clothes or a dropped snack bag, can impact the cave’s delicate ecosystem. What might seem like a small, forgettable moment to us can create a ripple effect in the cave’s natural world. Let’s remember that wherever we go, we have the power to make a difference—let’s leave the world a little better than we found it!
Great or small we all leave an impact wherever we go. How we choose to interact with others and the world we share together has its effects moment by moment.
And we feel it.
When we are greeted with a smile. When we share the first rays of dawn with someone we care about. Or when someone imposes their frustration on us, or when someone we care about forgets to pack the sunscreen and snacks.
In the same way, we affect the world around us in subtle ways too. Here at Carlsbad Caverns, we love that we can host thousands of people in the cave each day. Incidental impacts can be difficult or impossible to prevent. Like the simple fact that every step a person takes into the cave leaves a fine trail of lint.
Other impacts are completely avoidable. Like a full snack bag dropped off-trail in the Big Room. To the owner of the snack bag, the impact is likely incidental. But to the ecosystem of the cave it had a huge impact.
The processed corn, softened by the humidity of the cave, formed the perfect environment to host microbial life and fungi. Cave crickets, mites, spiders and flies soon organize into a temporary food web, dispersing the nutrients to the surrounding cave and formations. Molds spread higher up the nearby surfaces, fruit, die and stink. And the cycle continues.
Rangers spent twenty minutes carefully removing the foreign detritus and molds from the cave surfaces. Some members of this fleeting ecosystem are cave-dwellers, but many of the microbial life and molds are not. At the scale of human perspective, a spilled snack bag may seem trivial, but to the life of the cave it can be world changing.
Great or small we all leave an impact wherever we go. Let us all leave the world a better place than we found it.
