The following reflections were inspired by Dennis Paulson's thoughtful
posting (July 22). Dennis said, in part: "We are putting a lot of effort
into helping birds by creating wildlife refuges and preserves, and many
species of birds and some other wildlife species are surely benefitting from
that, at least on a local scale. I would maintain that with continued human
population growth, we will eventually have nothing but these preserves,
islands of wildlife habitat in a matrix of human habitat (for a long time it
was the other way around). You may call such statements "alarmist," but I
guess I call it facing the facts. Short of massive human population declines
as a consequence of epidemics, I can't think of any other plausible
scenario. I assume I don't need to cite the evidence for human population
increase or habitat destruction."

I recently had an experience that illustrates his point. Tom Aversa and I
went into the Quilomene/Colockum Wildlife Area overnight on 31 May-1 June.
[Interested in our bird list? e-mail me off-list and I'll send it.] Once you
leave the Old Vantage Highway you are in what most people would consider
"wild" country, and indeed parts of it -- a slope here, a small drainage
there -- still are. You don't have to look too closely to be aware of the
human impact, however, beginning with the stony track upon which you are
driving. Evidence of human intervention is everywhere, in the form of
abandoned structures, broken-down fencelines, stands of fruit trees and
other domestic implants at failed homestead sites, overgrazed land now
abandoned to cheatgrass.... But most of the time you have the impression
that nature has won out over human hubris and folly and is making a
comeback. Nowhere else in Washington have I seen such a dense and healthy
population of Yellow-breasted Chats, Lazuli Buntings, and Bullock's Orioles
as along the riparian growth in some of those spectacular canyon bottoms.

And yet, as you come up to the ridgetops for a look toward the east, the
Columbia reservoirs dominate the landscape, with the cultivated fields of
Grant County extending beyond them to the horizon. When you continue out
onto West Bar from the mouth of Tekison Creek you see that someone learned
the hard way -- or was it by "heroic effort"? -- that dryland wheat farming
does not succeed on that glacial gravel, and destroyed a unique
micro-ecosystem in the process. Well, surely you can still appreciate the
majestic sweep of the great bend in the Columbia and the sheer basalt cliffs
across the river, looking much as they must have done when the first
Europeans arrived? They did the last time I was out there six or seven years
ago, but not any more. Giant mansions are under construction at the rim of
the cliffs, repurposing what used to be a natural feature into some kind of
human barrier just as menacing as the Berlin Wall or the Tijuana border
fence. I suppose this new territorial claim is an indirect consequence of
the server "farm" Microsoft is building near Quincy, a site chosen because
of the availability of cheap electricity from the Columbia dams?

Then driving back out to the west, one climbs to the top of that massive
east end of Naneum Ridge, now crowned with giant windmills under
construction that look for all the world like the piers of the perimeter
fence of some colossal prison. Soon to come will be transmission lines and
towers stretching from the new generators to tie into other, taller towers
of the Bonneville power grid. The wide roads to serve them are already in
place, sliced across the steppe as if to prepare the way for an invasion of
a thousand armored divisions.

All the way up, elevation 4000-5000 feet, you reach open conifer forest
dominated by ponderosa pine and larches. Here is where you are going to
camp. There is little sign of encroaching industrial civilization. Your
sense of unease abates. Until the sun goes down, that is. Then, as you
explore for owls and other night activity, you look out and down and around
and realize you are hemmed in by a web of artificial lights. Wenatchee glows
eerily to the northeast. The Kittitas Valley glimmers to the southwest. You
can follow the river and the roads by connecting the lighted dots.

At that moment what had always been for me an enchanted tract of wilderness
became an island, cut off from its relation to the larger scheme of things.
I lost the sense of connecting with nature in that place and will never be
able to recapture it. Instead my mind has reprogrammed itself with a
different paradigm -- the overwhelming experience of nature turned against
itself.

Hal Opperman
Medina, Washington
hal at catharus.net