After a visitor dropped a bag of chips, a national park issued a strong warning, claiming there could be serious repercussions.
All of us have heard tales of tourists who leave places a little worse off than when they arrived. Thankfully, this isn’t as bad as permanently defacing or destroying a pricless artifect or part of nature, but getting chewed out by a national park isn’t great either.
The Carlsbad Caverns National Park used social media to publicly humiliate a visitor who, while exploring the caves, dropped an entire bag of Cheetos.
They did, however, emphasize that this might have “world-changing” consequences.
The Facebook page noted quite poetically in the statement posted on September 6 that everyone lives on the same planet, Earth, and that even seemingly insignificant actions can have far-reaching effects.
In this case, not a massive big deal for humans, but rather the vast array of animals and insects that dwell within one of the caves, the so-called Big Room, the largest single cave chamber by volume in North America.
The message read: “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.”
Not to mention, a fantastic snack completely wasted.
The warning continued: “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.
“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.”
Thankfully, rangers were able to remove the ‘foreign detritus’ (their words not mine) from the cave surfaces and ultimately protect the ecosystem.
I guess the lesson here is to hold tight to all of your goodies the next time you go cave exploring.
The Facebook message closed by saying: “Great or small we all leave an impact wherever we go. Let us all leave the world a better place than we found it.”
