Environmentalist

 

Selway Bitterroot Wilderness, Idaho             

If I were to define myself with a six-syllable insult to the English language, I would not choose a word invented fifty years ago by some well-meaning activists who didn't consider the fact that people are story-based critters who hate to be be bored with long, silly words. This modern noun: "Environmentalist". It was born to be misused and abused like those other unfortunates hastily-invented by clever wordsmiths to describe other factoids and truisms. "Politically-correct" and "woke" come to mind. Handy handles to beat people who annoy you over the head with, if you're into that sort of thing. You should know by now that if you're not one of those, there are plenty of people who are and there's nothing left of snaky words like "environmentalist" anymore except for the warm and fuzzy Earth Day banner it has become, whipping north and south like a wet noodle, right or left, whichever way the foundation-money winds happen to be blowing that day.

If I were to choose a six syllable phrase to define my concern for the Land, I'd choose the handle that Montana writer, Rick Bass gave himself. I'd call myself a "human-fucking being".

Olaus Murie and the Brandborgs

 

I've posted this "piece of book" before on this site, but I'm feeling impulsive tonight, wanting to amplify an insight Stewart and Anna Vee Brandborg shared with me about Olaus Murie that may be of interest to any scholars and students of conservation history still out there who have survived the flames of neoliberal scorched-earth corporate revisionism (Whew! Did I just write that?!).

Long before I met the Brandborgs or knew who Olaus was, I had Olaus' "Animal Tracks" imbedded within my favorite, beat-up books. "Life on the Mississippi", "Grapes of Wrath", "Winter Wheat", "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and the complete works of Edgar Allen Poe. Not bad for a Peterson field guide, I figured, but I never figured out how--or questioned why--such an odd accident of a classic within a meat-and-potatoes publishing scheme could have come about until I was privileged to bear witness to the following. Brandy and Anna Vee were enlightening individuals, simply put an as we march like lemmings off the next cliff of horrible news that seem to confine our choices from bad to worse, it's worth remembering that there were better times not to long ago when transformative policy was not only possible, but achieved.

We can do it again. Don't let 'em tell you different.

Making Democracy Work

 

Summer, 2012

AnnaVee's Kitchen

 

Stewart M. Brandborg, the last true activist to lead The Wilderness Society, maybe the oldest activist still fighting the Wild West’s crazy resource wars, maybe the last old-time activist left in America, was sitting in his motorized wheelchair telling me a story.

It was the mid 1950s, and his friend, the wildlife biologist, Olaus Murie, had come to Washington D.C. on a Greyhound bus from his cabin in Moose, Wyoming to testify before Congress on behalf of some critical conservation issue or other. Olaus was president of The Wilderness Society, a small organization on the cusp of blooming into its name, and the late fifties was the golden age of massive federal projects that were by design and definition bigger and more durable than the pyramids of ancient Egypt. 

Congress, like all dynasties, is a rarified club that attracts vulnerable people who accumulate more power than is healthy for humans to handle, and so become prone to the sufferings of pharaohs. These are diagnosable diseases, a timeless itches that have everlastingly tanked societies grown top-heavy, of would-be gods who worship themselves and the big and durable things they could command to be built in their names and then have those big things named after them. So, although Brandy couldn’t recall the exact nature of his friend’s visit when he picked him up at the bus station that day, it was probably a federal dam that Olaus had come to town to school Congress about. 

A long trip on a bus back then took some wind out of your sails, even if you were young, and especially when you were in your sixties and dealing with health issues, as Olaus was. So when the bus pulled into the station, Olaus, who had logged thousands of miles on foot and dogsled in the mountains of Alaska and Wyoming, took a walk around the block to stretch his legs while waiting for his ride. 

Olaus and Brandy had a lot in common. Both were westerners, uncomfortable in cities and physically-acclimated to living outdoors. Both were wildlife biologists with extensive experience “in the field”. Finally, and maybe most importantly, both came from that pioneer strain of Scandinavian stock that still populates the North-Central Minnesota plains, the farmers and merchants who came to those plains after they were seized from the Dakota people during the violent early years of America’s Civil War. 

It’s ironic that those lands were taken during the watch of no less a politician than Abraham Lincoln, who would seek to secure the blessings of liberty for immigrants fleeing tyrants in Europe and for people from Africa whom those Europeans enslaved, but couldn’t seek the same courtesies for the original inhabitants of the Land. True, there were sentimentalists among the abolitionists who yearned to save the savage with Christianity, none of which were words used by the Dakota people to describe themselves or their predicament. For his part, Lincoln used words that were also alien to the Dakota, to describe what his administration took from them, words like “frontier” and "wilderness". Given the radical strain of Swedes and Norwegians who ended up springing from that virgin sod turned upside-down, that’s a pretty fair definition of irony. But what could late-19^thcentury Scandinavian farmers fleeing decrepit, autocratic monarchies have known about what the Dakota People thought of their dear, beloved Land, or how they described it? 

Not much really, and so the farmers and merchants didn’t think about it much, or at least not at first, and that was the lay of the land when Olaus was born in 1889 along the Red River that defines the boundary between North Dakota and Minnesota, to Norwegian immigrants and, four years later, when Brandy’s father, Guy (Big Brandy in much of this narrative) was born in Ottertail County, the next one over from the Muries, to Swedish stock.

By the mid-1950s, Brandy and Olaus were fellow Wilderness Society board members. Brandy’s day-job was Project Director for the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), whose director, George Callison, saw potential in bringing “westerners” into the simmering national conservation stewpot, a pot that included the NWF as well as The Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club, whose cooks were about to serve up the country’s first watershed, environmental victory against, significantly, a federal dam. The monster was to be located in Dinosaur National Monument at a remote stretch of the Green River called Echo Park and, given the success ratio the Bureau of Reclamation had had with the building of dams in the arid West it seemed like just another slam-dunk for the Bureau. Until the conservationists won, and then started looking for their next tasty recipe, one whose ingredients included an overarching national policy to declare all such remaining intact ecosystems off-limits to human exploitation—and especially to dams—so they wouldn’t have to wage draining battles for each and every one of them—and lose most of them because, after all, there’s never been enough money in the world of kindness to match the wealth of pharaohs. 

Callison began looking for a western conservationist, one with experience “in the field”, who might like to help him fight a dam or two. It so happened that this was exactly what Brandy was doing at that exact moment in conservation history. He was a young wildlife biologist working for Idaho Fish and Game in central Idaho when Callison's friend, Durward Allen, a renowned biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, came upon him skinning a mountain lion and examining its viscera along the Paradise Road in the Upper Selway of Idaho. Allen had just written his pioneering book “Our Wildlife Legacy” that would define wildlife conservation in this country for generations when he and Brandy met, and they would have some stove-warmed conversations later at the Paradise Guard Station just downriver from the skinning. Allen already knew Brandy as a young,  fellow-wildlife-biologist who had recently published the first detailed study on Mountain Goats, but in the evening at the guard station Allen also got an earful about his inborn belief in democracy (which he inherited from his father) and about how he was using it to rally the local people in fighting two massive dam projects that had been recently proposed to drown out vast swaths of Central Idaho’s primitive areas. Penny Cliffs was on the Middle Fork of the Clearwater and Bruces Eddy (Dworshak Dam) would plug the Clearwater’s North Fork. In an impressive juggling act, Brandy was fighting both of them at once while simultaneously working for a state agency known more for nepotism than for conservation in those days. But Allen quickly deciphered that Brandy was not only thoroughly-grounded on the land he worked within but had been groomed and primed for the task of prompting anachronistic fish and game departments to evolve into something more than jobs programs. Maybe he’d be interested in tackling some bigger fish. Maybe pharaohs. 

Brandy grew up in Grangeville, Idaho, and Hamilton, Montana, small farming and ranching communities perched on opposite edges of the vast, mountainous, heart of Idaho, undeveloped then and now, within which Brandy had hunted and fished as a boy and where Allen met him as an adult. He’d been a Forest Service lookout in his teens, a smoke chaser, timber cruiser and range surveyor. He’d studied mountain goats for several years during and after college. He was at once a wildlife biologist, a conservation activist, and the son of a “social forester” of the Gifford Pinchot mold. Finally, he was a westerner, and so, at some point after Allen got back to D.C., he brought Brandy to Callison’s attention. 

It was a novel idea, this seeking out of those who lived in the “field” and who could speak in eloquent counter-arguments to nominally-elected potentates openly pining for their own monogramed Eighth Wonder. Callison set his sights on enticing the young Brandborg family to come to Washington. 

It wasn’t long after the Brandborgs, Stewart, AnnaVee and their baby, Becky, had settled into the rhythms of D.C. that Howard Zahnizer, executive director of The Wilderness Society, noted similar potential in this big, young, talkative westerner. “Zahnie” took Brandy under his wing, drove him around town in his Cadillac Convertible (which impressed the young Brandborg as “the bee’s knees”) and tapped him to serve as a board member of the Wilderness Society, as a protégé and also as a taxi-driver for fellow conservationists needing rides to and from bus stations. So Brandy was not surprised when he showed up at the bus station and found Olaus waiting for him, holding a leaf. 

“It’s amazing,” he recalled Olaus saying. “How fine-veined they are, how they blow down the sidewalk in the wind as they do. How perfectly designed for their purpose they are.” 

AnnaVee was listening to this story from the open kitchen. She had been tolerating Brandy’s telling of it until he came to the part about the leaf. Then she quietly sidled up, which was how they split the duties of lifelong activism all those years in D.C. and then in Montana--evenly. In addition to being a wildlife rehabilitator and education advocate, she was Brandy’s fact-checker, Brandy taking up the airspace, AnnaVee underlying his narrative with the critical combination of introspection and accurate memory. 

“There are some things that you should know about Olaus, Sigurd Olson and Zahniser” she advised me in her soft voice that was every bit as earnest as Brandy’s louder one. 

“Zahnie was somebody that you just immediately loved. You just felt good in his presence. The same was true for Sig. You were glad to be there, and glad to have him with you. 

“Olaus was a little different sort of person. To me, sitting with him was like sitting next to Christ.”

 

#

 

Mark David Chapman, You've Done a Terrible Thing

I wrote this song 42 years ago, Dec. 8th, 1980, in a cabin up Nine Mile back when Nine Mile was still out there, a good hour away from Missoula when the weather was good, another continent when it was bad. 

I never sang or recorded it. I figured it was such a bummer song that no one at my relatively un-serious gigs (gig-lets, gig-gles) would want to hear it, but I've always liked it. 

A friend of mine, Addison Double, wrote one at the same time, too, in Missoula, and I remember coming into town soon after the tragedy and sharing our musical heartaches in that old house on Stoddard Street just below what's now the Toole Street bridge spanning the railroad tracks. Stoddard was a dead-end then, only the White Pine and Sash mill yard across what passed for a street and no Toole St. bridge to hop you across the tracks to the happening part of town.

I remember Burlington Northern making trains in the hump yard just south of the house. There'd be a tremendous chugging of the diesel engine as it pushed the linked mix-matched cars heading to different parts of the country backwards and up the "hump" where, once every car was ready to roll down the the other side of the hump it would be uncoupled (maybe they already were) and you'd hear big steel wheels rolling on big steel rails for a few seconds as the loose car picked up speed and was channeled by the yard crew at the fork in the tracks that sent it to its proper train and then "BOOM!!" when the car hit the train on the make. Like a cannon. You'd sit straight up in bed out of a dead sleep. That was the old North Side. I loved it.

I imagine Addison and I swapping our Lennon tunes on a dark winter night (no streetlights then) to the sound of booming trains, or cannons, whichever your imagination preferred.

After so many years I don't remember all the words to Addison's songs, only the chorus:

"You can kill the singer

But you cannot kill the song

Unless you can kill everyone

Who wants to sing along."

I'll record my song soon and post it here, but in the meantime, here's to peace.

Mark David Chapman, You've Done a Terrible Thing

by Bill LaCroix

The news is out, it’s in all the papers

The killer stalks, and he’ll never get caught.

If you ever turned your back on a shadow

You might get shot, you just might get shot.

I used to listen to his songs when I was a kid

And I never got caught, and I liked them a lot.

I’d sit in my room and play them for hours

He helped shape my thought, yeah he helped shape my thought.

Chorus 1:

Then Mark David Chapman, he bought him a handgun

For two hundred bucks, for two hundred bucks.

He hid in the shadows and on Lennon’s back

He tried his luck, he tried his luck.

Guitar break

Chorus 2:

He was famous as Christ, sometimes he was careless

But you know that he tried, yeah you know that he tried.

He wrote some good songs about this world’s unfairness

And that’s how he died, y’know that’s how he died.

As the news of his death was splashed in the papers

I read the same message I heard in his songs.

It said look at this thing that’s happenin’ to people

Something’s wrong, yeah something’s wrong.

All those lonely people

Where do they all belong?

Thought for the Day After Election Day, 2022

OK guys, here's the deal...

 

We had an election where the Talking Heads and the brains behind them (Ew...ww..!?) tried to convince us that forcing women to be incubators for unwanted pregnancies was not as big a deal as inflation. Turned out they were wrong but still, we should give those (not) poor pundits credit where it's due. They were unspecific about what kind of inflation women should be more worried about than full-metal, fascist speculums with body cams (??!!??). 

 

In other words, there was no "red wave", because people--predominantly women and predominantly young ones--who felt they should have more say about their bodily functions than, say, a state legislature full of local wing nuts in the pockets of billionaire oil sheiks (Hello, Montana!) showed up and spoke American. "Go to hell," they said to the bastards, and here's what I say--in American--to all the guys (and pundits) who put Choice on the back burner this election cycle cuz (just cuz....) Shame on ya. If you couldn't see how your rights are just as tanked as the rights of women over such a basic, biological, moral issue, then you deserve the neutered, technicolor Disney-fantasy-land where you never get laid that you apparently live in (Jeez, did I just write that?)

 

But it wasn't just the punditocracy and some other guys who were wrong about the apparently-mysterious ways of democracy. The Democratic Party was wrong on both their messaging and their strategy. There was an energized base after the Alito leak that I don't think will ever be matched in my lifetime. We all knew the axe was gonna fall as soon as Barrett was shoehorned into the supremes, and we all knew it was coming years before that. Why didn't 50 states have an abortion rights proposal--sponsored and promoted AND FUNDED by Democrats--on all the ballots this fall? This is Politics 101 in a functioning democracy: motivate your base with actual actions that will improve their lives and then turn them out at election time. It would have been a "two-fer", getting people to the polls who knew what fascism looks like even if they couldn't articulate it (Hello, Kansas!) and getting us as a society a long ways towards taking the microphone away from psychopaths. 

I happened to be in DC when the Alito leak hit the headlines and spent several days in front of the Supreme Court protesting. There was one, spontaneous big protest right after the leak but then I was shocked when that tapered down to anywhere from 5-50, ebbing and flowing with no apparent program, just pissed off people like myself. We should have been jamming First Street NE in front of the Supreme Court every single day but we weren't. Why? I asked around to those who were showing up regularly and seemed to be in the know for some clues, and they said the national groups were telling people NOT to show up at the Supreme Porch because they didn't want the "optics" of pros and antis shouting at each other on the news. The national pro-choice groups did organize one huge rally and 10s of thousands, possibly 100,000, showed up. Of course corporate media low-balled it and made sure they sought out the .0001 of the crowd who were wingnuts to give them "equal time". For math geeks, .0001 is 1 in 10,000 which means if 100,000 people showed up to support choice, 10 showed up to support religio-fascism, which was about right. But does the media's baked-in bias mean you don't organize in-the-streets dissent of religio-fascism until nobody can think of anything else? Of course not, and I think this is a big failure of electoral strategy for the Dems, as well as the Pro-Choice movement. The only reason I can think of that keeps them dropping our ball is cuz they're competing for the same billionaire dollars as the Repugs. They made a conscious decision to take "the quiet route" cuz of their relationship with corporate America and more to the point, corporate media. This kind of attitude is almost as infuriating to me as the trumpsters'. We needed real leadership when our actual bodies are on the line and they were AWOL. Just like the Clinton campaign in 2016, they were listening to the same bad birds who whispered in their ear "Just squeak through without rocking the donor boat." (Hello Rahm Emmanuel!!) and--need I say?--she lost to the most horrible head of state in modern times. Nice job, racehorse whisperers. I'm furious. Aren't you?

 

So yes, we missed the bullet the other day, thanks to everyone who turned out to vote but don't forget that dodging bullets isn't our only option. IMHO, it would have been a "blue wave" if the Dems hadn't fumbled the ball with Hobbs. Again, there should have been boilerplate pro-choice initiatives, not just candidates, ready to hit the streets in all 50 states the day after the Alito leak and on the ballot Nov. 8, and there were not. As much as many of us hate to admit it, the Dem are beholden to the same billionaire bucks as the Repugs and we should be just as mad at one as the other. Time and time (and time and time) again since Reagan the Dems have chosen to ride on the backs of everyone who shows up and does the legwork for them--voters especially included--despite the obstacles placed in their way by the corporatists, both Republicans and Democrats. At the very least, Dems should acknowledge the not-rich people who are coming out to vote for them--in spite of what they're not doing for them--with action: Climate Sanity, Universal healthcare, an Equal Rights Amendment, expanding the Supremes, getting rid of the Electoral College and filibuster, tanking "Citizens United", but so far they have not. The Dems, thanks to all of us who pay attention and care, are still playing the electoral game that should have more consequences than they think it does when they flub it. There has to be pro-choice ballot initiatives (or the equivalent) starting up in every possible state for 2024 and there has to be the hot oil of public opinion being poured down the neck of every Democratic candidate every time they show up to a meeting or rally for the next two years to not only support these efforts but to shake their money bushes to fund them. They have not felt our non-violent/ electoral/ moral wrath at letting us down so often for so long yet. They need to or there will be no electoral game for them--or anyone--to play in the very near future. 

"If you cut off my reproductive choices, can I cut off yours?"

 

Politically-Correct Forestry

Mill Creek Canyon 18 years after the so-called "stand-replacement" fires of 2000

 

Note: I submitted the below Letter-to-the-Editor to the Bitterroot Star a couple weeks ago in response to an article they ran about a forest fire deep in the Selway-Bittterroot Wilderness that the Forest Service over-reacted to. This kind of forest mismanagement is of local significance but also of national interest. The current Bitterroot National Forest (FS) supervisor, Matt Anderson, is trying to implement a run around the National Forest Management Act (NFMA), which was passed in the '70s to require federal land agencies to have meaningful public involvement in their projects. The FS has long complained about having to do Environmental Impact Statements (EIS's) on every logging project so Anderson wants to include the WHOLE Bitterroot Front, 150,000 acres, into a catch-all fuzzy-edged Environmental Assessment (EA), so the Forest can literally just cut-and-paste any massive, industry-friendly disturbance they choose within those boundaries under the rubric: "Trust us but if you don't too bad cuz we have the legal t's crossed and i's dotted so see ya later suckers....hahahaha......!) He attempted this at his old post on the Tongas in Alaska, got his (read: our) agency's ass sued over it, but it looks like it might go through this time cuz of false fire fears and wing nut local officials. I'm putting it here more so I can find it in the future than anything else.

Your Oct. 18^th article quoted Stevensville District Ranger, Steve Brown, at length about his reasoning for carrying out a logging operation at the mouth of Mill Cr. Canyon under the guise of “fuels reduction” and “forest health” and was amazed at how effortlessly he seemed to present himself as a forester just doing his job mitigating fire danger instead of an ideologue violating core wilderness principles in favor of “getting the cut out”.  

I have a long list of disappointments concerning Brown’s statements on what he thinks his job is supposed to be, which I think Mill Cr. landowners, Jim Miller and Dr. Eric Keeling, who were also quoted in the article, covered pretty well, with the proper mixture of intelligence and cynicism appropriate for such bureaucratic shenanigans. Brown’s statements and actions were full of inconsistencies and paradoxes, maybe the biggest one being the fact that the father of one of the landowners he blew off was Dr. Charles Keeling, the internationally-renowned climate scientist who was among the first to notice Climate Change and to develop the first accurate system for measuring carbon in the atmosphere still used today: the Keeling Curve. I have to admit I smiled when I read that and realized that, notwithstanding recent and vigorous efforts to kill it, irony’s not quite dead yet.

More to point: Brown used a wildfire deep in the wilderness that posed no danger to people’s ill-placed houses in the woods to invoke the worn-out, anti-wilderness boogie-man of “fires roaring out of the canyon” to carry out a logging operation using firefighting funds. I have lived through many intense fire seasons here, I’ve been evacuated, helped with evacuations and actually have firefighting experience. I watched both the Mill and Kootenai Canyon fires from our home on the west side, read the Inciweb reports and the weather reports accessible to anyone with a laptop(!) and I was not only not worried about it “roaring out of the canyon” but was wondering what the h… the Forest Service was doing running helicopters up there in the wilderness at thousands of dollars a trip! Wilderness fires are far cheaper and more beneficial to the environment than non-wilderness fires precisely because they aren’t supposed to be “fought”. Everyone who knows anything about wildland fire knows (whether they publicly admit it or not) that $10,000 bucket drops in steep mountain canyons far from any structures is not only not a serious firefighting effort, it’s a political air show. “A big bank in the sky that opens up and showers money.” To put a finer point on it, wasteful air shows in wilderness areas is the “politically-correct” thing to do in our current, facts-optional times, but are not based on any provable forest management techniques. To sharpen that point to where it actually might sting: a district ranger who authorizes them in a designated wilderness area is demonstrating either his profound ignorance of wilderness laws and ethics or his inexplicable disregard for them. When one considers that tens of thousands of acres within Brown’s district are within designated wilderness that includes much of the most pristine headwaters of our Bitterroot River and is also some of the most prized wildlands in the country for its own sake and that his job is actually to promote wilderness values rather than degrade and ignore them, his statements and behavior are jarring. 

Even on Brown’s own terms, an actual “shaded fuel break” as a firefighting technique is supposed to be a couple hundred feet in width, not the size and shape of the logging project shelved by his district in 2014. His assertion that his only choices were to log the mouth of the canyon to protect the public from a fire not threatening them or to wait for the evil fire to advance multiple miles in wet weather and then punch an ugly dozer line in and  “kill all the trees” in a backfire is just plain fearmongering, and clumsy fearmongering at that. His absolute silence about Climate Change being the real driver in today’s fire behavior speaks volumes about his perspective. Logging mature trees to “save the forest” while ignoring the fact that those are the trees that actually have the best chance of survival after a fire (and did survive above Bass Creek campground notwithstanding his inexplicable statement to the contrary!) and that logging them for the sole and obvious purpose of feeding short-term profits to mills while eliminating what’s left of those real heroes of carbon-storage has been standard fare for foresters since the ‘90s. But to wink and nod at wilderness detractors and “golden-days” logging proponents by claiming he’s merely trying to take the forests back to the way native people used to manage it is just plain insulting to those of us who’ve felt the brunt of such winks and nods. 

In the past I have often told folks who complain about the Forest Service “letting fires roar out of the canyon” that they have nothing to complain about. Given the complexities these bigger and bigger conflagrations present to firefighters due to defending homes in the foothills built on the assumption that tax-funded fire suppression will be provided when politicians panic, along the Forest Service’s own reputation for muddle-headed bureaucracy, on-the-ground firefighters do an amazing job at protecting the public’s life and property year to year. If district rangers like Brown would pay more attention to science than politics and leave the fire-resistant, carbon-sequestering mature trees alone (the very ones the mills want) rather than create next decade’s weed patches and scraggle-forests by using fire as an excuse to “get the cut out”, they could extend their amazing job by decades. It’s too bad that “politically-correct forestry” like Brown’s undermines public confidence, and adds to their confusion.

Finally,  I understand that some of my language in this LTE is charged, but I have a long, informed connection with these mountains and canyons and this latest violation of trust comes on the heels of BNF’s proposed Bitterroot Front Project which could give the BNF the green light to turn our Bitterroot faces right up to their peaks into a hundred thousand acre “shaded fuel break”. Again, by his own terms, a “shaded fuels break” by definition has to be “retreated” every 10 years in order to be “effective”. Will Brown promise us any such multi-decades treatment even on this relatively-tiny logging project of his? Of course not, and so I can’t help but look at this Mill Cr. chop-job as a sort of pilot program for the whole forest and feel well within bounds to opine: Really, who does he think he’s kidding?

Thought for the Day

Ok readers...

...C'mon. Quit the BS. You know who you are. ...

Here's our thought for the day before the election where fascism is on the ballot and all the Talking Heads, who are getting paid more money per minute than you ever dreamed of getting for your house or first-born son, are predicting a win for fascism: 

If you can't laugh at your predicament, your predicament is too predictable.

Your welcome.

Home Sweet Home

I've been walking around these days looking for birds. Where I live is up against the Bitterroot Mountains, surrounded by old cow pastures with rotting tree stumps shot through them, testimony to a time, not long ago, when this spot where our home now sits was forest. Still, it's a relatively-intact ecosystem compared to many places in the country, and there used to be--and should still be--a lot of birds. But for the last few years I've been seeing less and less of the normal residents: chickadees, warblers, bluebirds, Western Meadowlarks. Especially the Meadowlarks. 

The lack of our common bug-eaters is scary enough if you're cursed with paying attention. Take a long-haul car trip in late-spring or early summer, for instance, and be amazed at how your windshield doesn't fill up with goobered insects between each fill-up anymore. This phenomenon is as recent as it is in-your-face. It's therefore no stretch to merely observe that there's something seriously wrong with the insect population you've just driven through, which is the definition of scary-enough. But the lack of ground-feeding birds like the Western Meadowlarks in areas where they used to be common but that are now infested with non-native California Quail should add the spice of anger to your fear. 

These quail are the result of sportsmen and women buying chicks and eggs from suppliers all over the country (Iowa, for example) for release into ecosystems that didn't previously have them for the sole purpose of shooting them, for pleasure. Each pair has two, sometimes three huge broods a year which, being birds, grow into adults very fast and become a moving carpet of eco-pox on the land, devouring whatever ground food remains in our compromised landscape that would normally help keep the native bird populations stable. Quail and Meadowlark habitat overlap. Is paying attention the specialized domain of "experts" then? I'm certainly no expert, so you tell me. I'm just sayin' what I see. 

I'm sure there are studies by now, although I won't look for or site them here. This paucity of (mostly) winged creatures is a personal observation on top of decades of personal observations in my Northern Rockies home, and is, more to the point, a deep and personal pain. How can I rejoice in the paradise within which I live when I know how very sick She is, possibly dying, because of our collective selfishness, neglect and, maybe most deadly of all, our inattention.

Let those who either know better or are addicted to putting a positive spin on catastrophes prove me wrong. I'd be glad if they would, because I dearly don't want to be right any more than I want to put in the work of being an "expert". I only want to write these lines and share what I think, which is this: too many of us who have been paying attention long enough to feel uncomforted by platitudes-with-no-visible-means-of-support are not angry enough about what we see unfolding in our beloved Land. I further think that too many of us are over-worrying the factoids and truisms which seem to be pedaled so cheaply, bought so blithely and bind our minds so thoroughly that no solution except more of the same seems possible. 

Remember bugs on your windshield? Meadowlarks singing from every other fencepost?

Here's an expert question then. What have we done to our beloved home?