ACKMA Journal No 17. December 1994.  Pages 4-10.

The carrying capacity workshop at Jenolan in June has been mentioned a number of times in this and the previous newsletter.  The following two articles are transcripts from a dietaphone tape that I recorded without the permission of the speakers.  There is much of interest in both of these impromptu talks.  Elery Hamilton-Smith, author of the second paper, has had the opportunity to edit his and has given me permission to use it.  Tom will not know about this liberty until he opens his Journal. I hope you will not be too upset, Tom.  Regards to Cathy!

I have edited Tom’s talk somewhat to make it easier to read but have not, I hope, taken the substance out of it: a number of in-jokes remain.  Please remember it was an impromptu talk. There were a large number of sides and interjections;  many have been removed as too much explanation would need to be added to make them clear. In any case many of them were not clear on the tape - often being overcome by laughter. Irreverent lot, these cave boffins!

SOME THOUGHTS ON ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT AS RELATED TO CAVE USE.

Tom Aley

I aim to talk about issues in environmental management - really what I want to do is to condense about four hours of what I would like to talk about into about 15 or 20 minutes. I think there are some fundamental premises as we deal with issues in environmental management that I would like to identify here.

Incidentally this discussion, I put it together this morning.  I didn’t do it in advance because I’m always running late, but the principal reason was that I wanted to get some idea of what was going on. So it may be a bit scattered.  But these are my perceptions and some of the things in here are designed to bring out some thoughts that I have and perhaps to make you think about things and make two or three of you mad.

First of the fundamental premises is that the surface and the sub-surface are intimately and integrally connected together.  We can’t just think of the caves, it's a whole system that we’ve got to keep making sure is the (unifying) premise through the whole thing.

Secondly, is that water is a primary mechanism and may be the primary mechanism for transmitting surface actions into sub-surface impacts.  We’ve got to focus on the water.

And thirdly, is that sound environmental management of all natural resources requires fundamental public acceptance that linkages exist and that they are of critical importance.  What I’m saying is that you can't do the kinds of things you need to do unless you have public acceptance at, yes, this is the kind of thing you need to do.  I think these kind of programs go hand-in-glove with good interpretation. You have to have good interpretation to sell the need for what it is you are doing, and that has got to be in there as another fundamental premise.  The success of the whole thing - the whole concept of carrying capacity or whatever we wish to label it, is intimately tied to the quality of the interpretation and how we are explaining what it is we are doing and why we are doing it.

Okay, some issues and observations on environmental management action at Jenolan Caves. First, the caves are in the wrong place, they’re down the bottom of this "V" shaped canyon. That’s a bad design, whoever designed them, that the caves should be here.  It’s made things very difficult for us. 

And secondly, past management land use decisions have made it worse.  We’re locked into a whole bunch of things there, and things like the tunnel through the Arch access, we've got everything bottled up down there.  And the reason that happened is that many of the decisions that were made were really short term decisions. 

OK, we’re trying to set up to handle 20,000 people a year.  Now we’re handling an order of magnitude more than that.  As we do our things in environmental management, I think we have to have an incredibly long view of things.  We can’t do the standard business thing of what's going to be the bottom line this year or the three year plan, or the ten year plan, or the twenty year plan.  We really have to think way out in advance of these things.  And I’ve heard various discussions.  One of the things that really concerns me is options, for how you handle people, and getting them in here, that may require a much higher level of visitation in order to support it. That is making, that’s the same kind of thing that’s putting everything down in the valley, when the valley is one of your big problems.

Alright, on to other things. There’s been some discussion about vegetation on the surface and the difference between the pines and the eucalyptus, and I’ve given a little thought to this.  Andy Spate says that you get 25% less water yield from pine lands than eucalyptus lands.  I would like to look at the data but he looks honest and trustworthy to me and it’s probably a good number [to work with]. As we think about things like that, why should we have a difference?  Well, the difference is going to relate to the nature of the trees and their stocking density.  And if you look at the difference between the pine lands and the eucalyptus, the eucalyptus has as many fewer trees per hectare  than you do with the pine.  There are some real differences.

Now, those differences could be very important in ground water recharge, how much water goes down into the ground.  But, if you are dealing with concerns over, is having the pines here good, bad or indifferent, versus the more native vegetation, if the way you are concerned with the water yield from there is as a catchment, for it has to run somewhere.  Then it may not make much difference.  You may get less water yield on the surface from that area, but when you get water yield it's only during storm periods, and that runs all the way down the stream channels anyway. Now you're going to have some of that sink.  But I think there is a need as you think about these things to focus on whether you're concerned with the direct ground water recharge or lets say, the surface yield and subsequently getting into the ground water system.

Trees are pretty important in terms of caves and cave formations.  Something on the order of (I can never keep percentages exactly right in my head, I have to look them up all the time) 20 to 25% of the carbon dioxide (C02) that is uptaken by trees is respired through the roots as CO2. And of course this CO2 drives the solution and the degassing of water with the CO2 gives you the [speleothem] deposition.  Trees are giant C02 pumps, that are taking C02 out of the air and they are pumping it into the soil and into the sub-surface, so, vegetation on the surface is of tremendous importance that relates to fire protection and all those kinds of things.  There has been a tendency in the past to think of CO2 budgets just in terms of, well there’s biologic activity in the leaf litter in the upper layers of the soil, yes there is.  But an awful lot of what’s going on is related to the trees and that's related to: density of the trees, stocking density, species, blah, blah.  When you change vegetation, you are affecting one of the critical areas in the whole solution chemistry.

All right; You know, it strikes me that these kinds of differences in vegetation could be a very valuable interpretive topic for the tourists here.  It’s a way of taking what you see in the cave and relating it to what people see on the surface.  What kind of trees should we have?  Does it make any difference?  Trees are trees.  No, not really, look at all these things, that's a wonderful interpretive thing, it ties in biology and chemistry and geology.  Actually when you look at a cave and you say, oil, this is all geological features, no, to a great extent what you're seeing clown there is controlled by biological processes.  It’s that CO2 that is coming because of the biologic activity.

 OK, lots of good stuff there.  Desiccation of caves, drying out caves.  It affects the beauty in the way the cave formations grow.  You saw dry caves the other day, we saw some pretty wet ones today.  In many caves and the standard literature will speak about the CO2 de-gassing of the water.  As the water entering the caves loses CO2 to the cave atmosphere, it call no longer hold as much calcium carbonate solution and it deposits it and hence we have the cave formations.  But if you have a lot of air exchange through the cave you also have evaporation going on.  This balance between evaporation, that's going to give you deposition of cave formations too.  And they may be different in appearance.  You may change many things by letting the cave dry out. 

How you dry it out to a major extent, and I think probably a principal extent here, is by unnatural levels of air exchange in the system and particularly through convective air flow. That’s the way a chimney works. If you have multiple openings at different elevations, you get an airflow through it, that’s why a chimney draws to take the smoke out.  The amount of air flow you have tends to increase almost a straight line with the difference between cave temperature and outside temperature. The greater the difference the greater tile convective airflow.  And it reverses between cold weather and warm weather.  But the times that tend to be the harshest on the cave are winter, cold weather times.  Because you take cold weather from outside, you have; by the time you warm it up it has very low relative humidity.  And the cave has to make up all that relative humidity.

In our cave in Missouri, which has temperatures not much different from here in winter conditions where the outside temperature was let’s say 0oC – 15oC different from cave temperature.  Our cave moves a cubic metre of air per second, if we open our air-flow control doors our cave is having to add about 12 grams of moisture for every cubic metre of air taken in. Based on typical size of water drops oil cave formations it takes about 10 drops from a stalactite to give you a millilitre of water.  So every second, the cave is loosing 120 drips of water from the cave formations as it makes up this moisture deficit.  Now when we talk about it only in grains and millilitres and things like that it doesn’t sound like much, but when you think of it in terms of 120 drops per second, from cave formations or moist wall surfaces, suddenly you can see how you can have major desiccation of caves.  And I think cave desiccation is clearly a very important issue here [at Jenolan] and that there is a need for airflow control structures. I like refrigerator doors.  Maybe you need more of them.  You never need less, you always need more.  But air flow control structures are very much needed.  They’re of critical importance, and we worry about what visitors do, but to a great extent with cave micro-climate it is the facilities for the visitors that do the bulk of the damage, rather than the visitor person.

….I think you’d have to say that it is well documented that the visitors create heat, and heat alters the humidity; the Altamira case excellently proves that....

Yes they do that, they bring in heat, sort of like a 100 watt light bulb, about equal, if you want to know the IQ of many visitors, it’s about the same as that.

Oh, I want to talk about this relative humidity business. I don’t like particularly measuring relative humidities. I don’t think that’s a good measure to put in because what we are measuring is after the air has taken the moisture from the cave, then we may get 100% relative humidity and we say, gee, we’re fine. Yet the cave surfaces are having to give up lots of moisture into the cave air.  We need to move those measurements back a step.  One of the things we’ve done in some of our studies is, we take basically cake pans and fill them with used volumetric flask and put in 750 millilitres [lets say] of distilled water and then measure how much water we have after a week or a month, and do that at various points.  You can put lots of these out, and very quickly you see whether you're losing a lot of moisture from cave surfaces and where that is located.  And it’s fundamentally cheap, you find some cheap pie pan you can buy and you use all of the same.

OK, I do have down something about cave temperature effects from tourists and from light bulbs. Yes, if you measure it - temperature - the rock will tend to cool it [the cave atmosphere] back down, but you are going through a cycle of moving moisture from cave surfaces into the air and then back into condensation. You have a number of problems there.  Management strategies that can be used in dealing with that may relate to how long you keep people in a particular place; how you run the tour. how much they’ve had to exercise before they got there.  That makes a great deal of difference.  And in some of these places you have to exercise before you get there I’ve found.

Carbon dioxide in the air from tourists, it tends to be worse in low places where it can pocket, being denser than normal air.  It tends to be highest in smaller confined spots and where people have had strenuous activity and they’re respiring rapidly.  So what you try and do is you regulate that by how long people stand.  The cave we saw this morning (Temple of Baal), OK, all these damn names.  The cave we saw this morning – thank you - (laughing) I can see that as a cave that could have some CO2 concerns.

..…It had about 2,500 parts per million CO2 at a guess.

OK, that’s fairly high, there may be some concerns with upsetting things there, whereas in Lucas Cave, or the first cave we saw that had lots of air flow through it, you’re probably not going to have impact.  But you need to pay attention to CO2 levels, and remember also, that in the deposition of the cave formations, that's a CO2 budget.  By bringing visitors in you may be changing whether the cave formations are going to grow right then or not.  So clearly, interfering with this whole CO2 budget is an important thing.

Alpha radiation is real nice stuff, I like measuring radon daughters.  They are very useful, they help you understand air-flow and air circulation patterns in the cave.  Beyond that I don’t like radon daughters.  I like most daughters, I don’t like radon daughters. I have done a lot of alpha radiation monitoring.  It has caused some major problems in caves in the United States.  In an effort to protect perceived health of employees at one national park cave, they decided they should better ventilate it and leave all the air-flow control wide open in the winter, and thousands of stalactites froze off the ceiling as the lower entrance to the cave froze. The freeze line went back probably 500 feet into the cave, that’s Oregon Caves National Monument.

In terms of alpha radiation, you can take measurements, you can characterize what you have in areas. There are many problems with the science in my view: the science on which many of the standards are written. One of those is the fact that they are based on incidents in the mining records and most of the mining data is self-monitoring data, and it's about half reality.  So all of the risk calculations are in effect grossly in error.  And in mines you also have things like hydrocarbons (diesel fumes, for example) which are carcinogens, you have asbestos, you have dusts that are carcinogens or at least lung irritants.  There are a lot of complexities.  One of the major concerns I have with the whole alpha radiation issue and something I would urge you all to be aware of and concerned with is alpha radiation considerations tend to push directly toward forcing caves into artificial ventilation which yields directly into the destruction of the whole cave system.  The whole issue is a very important issue because if you don't understand the impacts it’s going to have on the micro-climate we are going to destroy cave resources.

.….There’s no way that’s going to happen in Australia. We can manage the problem without artificial ventilation ... It has already happened in Australia ... Where?...  [Ed.: The issue is whether or not we do manage without artificial ventilation - the current artificial panic which some people have generated will lead management authorities to artificial ventilation - almost certainly unnecessarily.  This is about managing the managers, not the caves].

I would have thought that an issue as fundamentally trivial as that, would not have led the National Parks Service of the United States to freeze the stalactites off of the ceiling.  This whole issue makes Ron Kerbo and me, both upset and irritated. 1 have spent too much of my professional life working on what I consider to be largely a non-issue - a strong political issue.  And I have been very much involved in and with the development of standards in the American show cave industry...

..…Can we just ask Ron to comment....

I strongly agree with Tom.  I think first that before safety development standards could be adopted... employee safety..??? and at this point I still think budget [dollars are perceived as the problem rather than health] is perceived as the health problems associated with radon.  In fact our safety officer once called me over an Italian lady - who was going to stay in a cave for 4 months in the US - and informed me that after I told her that this was on someone else’s land and not on the National Park, anyway, he informed me that I must remove her from the cave, and he reminded me that radon would remove at least a month from the end of your life. And I figured that I very much resent the two months that safety officers have taken out of my life, now...

I worked on this project for a long time, I was in the first group of radon volunteers in the National Parks Service, so I agree it can lead to a great deal damage and a great deal of psychological damage to cave guides because of the perceived health problems that they will run into, because it’s your responsibility as Federal Agents.

The last thing I will say about it, to give you some feel of what kind of risk this is?  We did a study in which we collected a lot of data on how people - cave guides - worked.  How many hours a day and things such as this, and also alpha radiation, radon daughter concentrations in caves where we monitored with calibrated pumps and all those things, scintillation counters and so on.

The risk per day that you go in a cave is similar to the risk of being killed in a car wreck on a trip of 5 miles.  That’s a risk, people should accept that, recognize it.  But I don’t control my life by my concern about driving 5 miles. I do fasten my seatbelt.  On to other things.

I’m concerned with run-off from paved surfaces around here... Run-off from paved surfaces may be, in some areas at least, a very critical situation.  It’s not just where you park the ears, it’s also paved roads and things such as that.  Somewhere along the line I discussed the fact that in highways in Indiana were going into peat sand filters.  So you were treating the run-off water. And a major thrust in water quality in the United States right now is treating storm water run-off from paved and hardened surfaces, rooftops, things like that.  It is an environmental issue that people should be concerned about.  And you don’t want to just take that run-off water and put it into the cave, because you’re putting lots of hydrocarbons in with it.  If you want to change the crystal register of cave formations, a good way to do the crystal poisoning is with hydrocarbons.  That’s more in your domain than mine 1 would think.  But, nonetheless, there is literature on that and it is something to be concerned with.

Related to that is recharge area delineation.  What areas contribute water to what are fundamental knowledge for what is being managed. not just the long distance tracings, but issues of - well where does the parking lot runoff go? That’s fundamental information.  And the final comment, I think, is these caves are a great stage for explaining to the public how what is learned at Jenolan Caves is important in their day-to-day lives.

Getting back to my first three fundamental premises, remember the stress on interpretation has to go hand-in-hand with improving resource management.  This is back again, you know, you put it up front and you put it back too.  This cave system is a marvelous stage for interpreting.  And I think, to make it most useful to people, you need to tie what they see here, what they learn here, what they get from their experience here, to day-to-day  life.  Cave interpretation has long suffered from the Alice in Wonderland syndrome. You go into this hole where nothing is the same and nothing is related to what you see on the surface and you come out and you forget about it, except to say it’s really beautiful.  Dammit, caves are a lot more significant and a lot more important than that. What caves do is they give us a deeper look at the earth on which we live.  They give us this three dimensional perspective.

We can tie them to the protection of groundwater that is easily contaminated; how rapidly water can move in when you get a rain, the water’s in here the next day, and it brings stuff with it, in solution and suspension etc.

Another important thing that we can get in interpreter programs, and I think need to be enhanced, is stressing, especially to kids, the importance of scientific understanding in modern society.  Kids, maybe they’re different here than what we have in the US, I will speak to the US. Kids are avoiding science courses.  How can you function in our modern societies without a decent understanding of science? I don’t care what you’re going to be, even a lawyer.

Let me just take a moment and tell you one of the nicest experiences I’ve ever had with a lawyer. I was testifying in a case involving a proposed hazardous waste injection well, they were going to inject hazardous waste into the palaeokarst.  And they were going to inject 50 billion gallons of [this] hazardous waste into this palaeokarst.  And I was working for the owners of oil rights. They were afraid their oil would become polluted and they could riot use it, could not refine it. And for the City of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, that got it’s water supply from the nearby Burning Creek River. I testified about these things. What they were planning to introduce was acids, bases, neutral compounds, chlorinated and unchlorinated hydrocarbons and other liquids and semi-liquids.

And one of the compounds they’d listed on their application was hexachlorobutadiene.  It’s a pesticide with a mammalian toxicity of about twice DDT. I once had to take Organic Chemistry.…never saw any use in that.  But one of the things I did learn in Organic Chem. is every damn syllable makes a difference. Changing one syllable [means it] is not the same stuff.  OK, I was testifying about this hexachlorobutadiene which in the United States is a primary pollutant.  If you have more than a certain concentration of it in the water supply, even with treatment, you cannot use it as a drinking water source.  If you took the low flow in the Burning Creek River more than 6 ounce (Oh God, that metric system! - this much) hexachlorobutadiene dissolved in the low flow in the Burning Creek River per day would exceed that drinking water standard. And in view of the nature of the palaeokarst arid the many holes in it from old drilling, I testified that I thought you could have that much leakage per day into the Burning Creek River.

OK, it came time for the cross-examination, and the opposing attorney - nasty lady - started with this belittle the expert approach. "'Now Mr. Aley you have testified about this" (now before I say the rest, remember it was hexachlorobutadiene that I testified about): she said, "you have testified about this hexadiene" and asked this long question and got to the end of it. I said" "Excuse me, is that in there too?" And she said, "No, I was asking what you testified about". I said: "I testified about a number of compounds, and I need to know if that was in there too so I can  answer your question." I knew she was trying to get me to say hexachlorobutadiene. But I wasn’t going to do it.  Finally she asked the question and got me into a corner and I had to tell her.  So she backed off and the next time she said: "Now Mr. Aley, you have testified about this hexachlorobutadiane" and went on with this long question and got to the end of it, and I said: "Excuse me, is that in there too?" Pretty soon the six lawyers representing the groundwater injection industries all had flashcards with syllables on them. I got her one more time, but as soon as she could, she got loose from hexachlorobutadiene and all organic chemistry.

For some reason the administrative law judge ruled against them in this application and it failed. And as I was leaving town, I ate dinner first - this was in Tulsa and as I came out of the restaurant, they were just putting new newspapers in the rack, and I looked at the headline and the headline said" "Is that in there too?"

What kids need to understand is if that attorney had had an adequate understanding of science she would have understood every syllable was important.  You didn’t have to be an organic chemist.  It is important to everybody, and one of the things you can do with caves that is wonderful, is that you can show to kids the importance of science and how it interacts with all kinds of other stuff.  You can sneak up on them. They don’t know they’re being educated.  OK, and you can talk about pines versus eucalyptus, and finally the caves are a great stage do plays. Don’t just do one-liners.  That means you focus on concepts not just facts. Do plays down there, it’s harder, but boy the potential you have here, and in terms of the business of caves, you need to do plays.  Visitation is enhanced.  The public has happier.