Dear Tweeters,

Ouch. This thread touches a nerve with me. Everywhere
I go I see the buildings going up. It's always the
same thing.

The hayfield west of my house has a huge new
three-storey "barn" going up on its edge. The building
will house some big RV's, I think. It's on the edge of
the field, but it won't take much more nibbling at the
edges before meadowlarks stop feeling comfortable out
there in the shrinking middle.

Out on the Butler Flats (Skagit County), there are all
kinds of new houses and other structures being built
on the edges of the farm fields. Those are acres lost
to agriculture, and acres lost to birds, not counting
HOSP, HOFI, and EUST (apologies to
anti-acronymonians). The big Whimbrel flocks are no
longer stopping in those fields as it is. Last year I
think the biggest Whimbrel flock I saw had eleven
birds, max. Again, it won't take much more before they
just skip those fields altogether.

All of this is just the same stuff I started noticing
as a little kid back in the sixties. I would read
things like "Silent Spring" and wonder, why don't
people stop doing all this stuff? I read Thor
Heyerdahl's warnings about ocean pollution back then,
too, how his Ra Expedtion crew found all these blobs
of oil way out in the mid-Atlantic. Today we have
whole dead zones appearing in the seas. We could see
those dead zones coming at us forty years ago.

It is all falling into place, decade by decade, the
transformation into ugliness. Luckily, it happens
relatively slowly, even by the reckoning of a human
lifetime, so it is possible to forget the horror of it
all for days at a stretch.

Slowly, that is, except when one has an experience as
I did three nights ago. I took a walk and ran right
into a clearcut that had appeared with no warning.
Boom! and it's gone. Guess I won't see Great Horned
Owl fledglings in there any more.

Most of the time, though, even we who appreciate birds
and the wild Earth live each day, noticing our Curlews
and our Grosbeaks, and forgetting the onslaught that
surrounds us and our avian friends. It is just too
painful to dwell on it for very long.

One of the frequent contributors to our list signs off
with something like this: "Once we were few and they
were many; now we are many and they are few." It is a
charming quotation--from Confucius if I recall
aright--but I don't think it applies to this shambles
we are making of the Earth. The many who perform the
destructive acts far outnumber the few who decry them.


I hate to be so pessimistic, fellow Tweeters, but the
indelible-ink handwriting is on the wall.

=====

Yours truly,

Gary Bletsch

near Lyman (Skagit County), Washington

garybletsch at yahoo.com


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - File online by April 15th
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html