Our Future Environment

In caving, stewardship is an ethic that embodies cooperative planning and management of environmental resources with cave conservancies, communities, individual cavers and caving groups to actively engage in the prevention of cave damage and the promotion of conservation.
Overall, environmental stewardship research tends to focus on it as a relationship between people and objects, and less as relationships between people mediated by objects. Most often, stewardship is discussed as a sense of responsibility individuals feel as the caretakers of a property, even though they are not the legal owners. The National Speleological Society, the national caving organization that serves as a cave research, social, conservation and legal institution explicitly states their purpose as one of cooperative management. In an ideal situation, cavers would act as stewards in line with the National Speleological Society and understand their role as a responsible caretaker of local caves. However, caves do exist as a mediating object between cave explorers and landowners and can be treated with disregard if that social relationship “turns sour”. Thus, environmental stewardship literature should focus on the social relationships as equally as it does the object of interest.

Filed under: caves, anthro of property, natural landscape on April 23rd, 2008