For 13 long days, I have listened to bulldozers and brush hogs having their way with the land across the road from me, where almost 150 acres of “Designated Forest Land” (DFL) is being destroyed.
I am very sorry for the devastation, yet you and I, who conceivably live in structures made of wood on land that was once forest, are complicit, no?
Q: What's the difference between a developer and a conservationist?
A: A developer wants to build little houses in the woods. A conservationist already has their little house in the woods.
I'm not really meaning to attack you. I'm just pointing out that there are so many of us — and our numbers are still increasing — that we will continue to impact the "unspoiled" areas that we hold dear.
Until collapse ensues. Let it come quickly, while there are still wild areas left!
2) The small and small-ish trees they are taking out (along with ALL the underbrush) are not trees that can be turned into lumber. They will be burned or chipped. This is to comply with F'd up DNR policies of "forest management."
3) Why did they have to do it during nesting season?
4) > 50% of the housing where I live is 2nd homes, homes that either get rented to tourists (when the owners aren't using them) or sit empty. Homes big enough for multiple "conservationists" to live in.
Yes, I'm as guilty for being alive and taking up a modern human's space on this planet as any other human on the planet. We can't help the circumstances into which we are born. But we can point out how utterly horrific it is.
I've had countless people say to me "Why don't you just kill yourself then?" when I talk about the harms that humanity is doing to our Mother Earth. I hope I can do more good by offering the land where I live as a refuge to all wild beings who choose to live here, and protecting it with everything I have while I'm still here.
Thank you for your gracious reply to what might have been taken as an attack.
I do appreciate your point that this was a nascent forest, which in many ways, is more productive of wildlife than a mature forest.
Don't get me started on the whole "2nd homes" thing. Why are they even allowed, while young people can't even afford their first home? It seems to me that everyone should be housed before anyone is allowed seconds.
Same with food. Why are there starving people in the world, when it only takes a walk through a Mall•Wart store to see that many Americans could stand to not have seconds until everyone in the world has had firsts?
I guess I'm just not very good at being a capitalist. My bad. :-)
Beautifully said. Thank you. Until we learn to be more thoughtful of the impacts of our presence in the natural world our footprint will continue to indiscriminately squash things of beauty and value. You and I see a rich, complex, and beautifully-tuned forest ecosystem where the power company and its insurers see financial risk and loss or a real estate developer sees foregone profits. Nature (a very real entity) always loses out to money (a total fiction). In the Global Operating System, the Matrix (financial capital, human & cultural capital, social capital, and manufactured/built & intellectual property capital) always receives more consideration and attention than does natural capital. That’s why the Matrix is not sustainable.
What pain! It’s enough to drive one crazy. I really feel for the lives destroyed, and for you as their caring neighbor. Beyond that dealing with anger, and the hypocrisy about saving the climate, the Amazon, etc. Please continue to speak out and challenge this madness every step of the way. We can at the very least give voice to the voiceless.
So sorry. We have lost lovely moderately mature forests nearby. For one cut, we were told the trees were hauled to Georgia to be used to generate electricity. In our neighborhood, power company crews have been trimming trees that conflict with electrical wires. Bad timing. Right when birds are nesting. Humans are so clueless.
Power company crews have been doing the same here too, for the past two years all the roadside habitat from low brush to large, old trees are being destroyed. I know this happens all the time, everywhere, but listening to the sound of these machines for 13 straight days has made me much more desperately sad than normal about the cluelessness of humans. I'm so sorry about your losses where you are. Our daily experience is now loss.
Each morning, I wake to a world quieter than the one I remember, a mere sliver of the one before memory. The dawn chorus—once a layered, living symphony—has thinned to a few hesitant voices. The robins still sing, but fewer. The once common wrens are down to one couple. Even the flickers, loud and brash, seem subdued.
The bulldozers and brush hogs across the road continue to work steadily through what was once tangled habitat—just as birds are trying to nest, feed their young, and find shelter. I listen and watch, helpless, as the last hiding places are destroyed in the maws of machinery.
This isn’t just my street, or my sadness. All over the world, birds are vanishing. A study published in 2019 revealed that in North America alone, three billion birds have succumbed to the march of human progress just since 1970. That’s one in four. A new study from 2025 of almost 500 birds finds that three quarters are declining. “Almost all species showed areas with population increases and areas with declines, often with the strongest declines occurring in areas where species were most abundant. Most species were declining overall, suggesting a worsening situation for birds.” These aren’t just rare species—they are sparrows, swallows, warblers. The ordinary birds that filled our days with sound and movement.
Their absence is a kind of unraveling. The silence that falls in their place is not peaceful. It is the quiet of billions of lives missing. The eerie hush of the land being sterilized. What is progress when it requires the extermination of so many?
We’ve normalized this silence. We’ve forgotten what it sounded like to live in a world teeming with life. It’s been many generations since the morning chorus rang in vital fullness and glory. My own baseline of what morning chorus “should” sound like is but a pathetic fragment of the symphony of song when every songbird was singing.
This morning at 5:45am the brush hogs began their murderous chewing once again. The tiny snippets of bird song remaining in the morning chorus are easily drowned out by the steady drone of the cutters as they gnaw through alder, baby firs, salal, ferns, Oregon grape, ocean spray, willow, dogwood, serviceberry, wildflowers, and the many wild beings who call the woodlands home. I imagine the blood soaked blades, spewing out the fragments of these bodies, these once living beings now reduced to slash.
5:45am. The death machine that is civilization rumbles on, replacing morning chorus with the soundtrack of a horror movie.
I am very sorry for the devastation, yet you and I, who conceivably live in structures made of wood on land that was once forest, are complicit, no?
Q: What's the difference between a developer and a conservationist?
A: A developer wants to build little houses in the woods. A conservationist already has their little house in the woods.
I'm not really meaning to attack you. I'm just pointing out that there are so many of us — and our numbers are still increasing — that we will continue to impact the "unspoiled" areas that we hold dear.
Until collapse ensues. Let it come quickly, while there are still wild areas left!
1) I completely agree with you. And....
2) The small and small-ish trees they are taking out (along with ALL the underbrush) are not trees that can be turned into lumber. They will be burned or chipped. This is to comply with F'd up DNR policies of "forest management."
3) Why did they have to do it during nesting season?
4) > 50% of the housing where I live is 2nd homes, homes that either get rented to tourists (when the owners aren't using them) or sit empty. Homes big enough for multiple "conservationists" to live in.
Yes, I'm as guilty for being alive and taking up a modern human's space on this planet as any other human on the planet. We can't help the circumstances into which we are born. But we can point out how utterly horrific it is.
I've had countless people say to me "Why don't you just kill yourself then?" when I talk about the harms that humanity is doing to our Mother Earth. I hope I can do more good by offering the land where I live as a refuge to all wild beings who choose to live here, and protecting it with everything I have while I'm still here.
Thank you for your gracious reply to what might have been taken as an attack.
I do appreciate your point that this was a nascent forest, which in many ways, is more productive of wildlife than a mature forest.
Don't get me started on the whole "2nd homes" thing. Why are they even allowed, while young people can't even afford their first home? It seems to me that everyone should be housed before anyone is allowed seconds.
Same with food. Why are there starving people in the world, when it only takes a walk through a Mall•Wart store to see that many Americans could stand to not have seconds until everyone in the world has had firsts?
I guess I'm just not very good at being a capitalist. My bad. :-)
We need a LOT more people who are bad at being capitalists!! :-)
Beautifully said. Thank you. Until we learn to be more thoughtful of the impacts of our presence in the natural world our footprint will continue to indiscriminately squash things of beauty and value. You and I see a rich, complex, and beautifully-tuned forest ecosystem where the power company and its insurers see financial risk and loss or a real estate developer sees foregone profits. Nature (a very real entity) always loses out to money (a total fiction). In the Global Operating System, the Matrix (financial capital, human & cultural capital, social capital, and manufactured/built & intellectual property capital) always receives more consideration and attention than does natural capital. That’s why the Matrix is not sustainable.
What pain! It’s enough to drive one crazy. I really feel for the lives destroyed, and for you as their caring neighbor. Beyond that dealing with anger, and the hypocrisy about saving the climate, the Amazon, etc. Please continue to speak out and challenge this madness every step of the way. We can at the very least give voice to the voiceless.
As long as cities grows this will not stop.https://www.idiv.de/urban-growth-causes-more-biodiversity-loss-outside-of-cities/
So sorry. We have lost lovely moderately mature forests nearby. For one cut, we were told the trees were hauled to Georgia to be used to generate electricity. In our neighborhood, power company crews have been trimming trees that conflict with electrical wires. Bad timing. Right when birds are nesting. Humans are so clueless.
Power company crews have been doing the same here too, for the past two years all the roadside habitat from low brush to large, old trees are being destroyed. I know this happens all the time, everywhere, but listening to the sound of these machines for 13 straight days has made me much more desperately sad than normal about the cluelessness of humans. I'm so sorry about your losses where you are. Our daily experience is now loss.
The Silence That Falls
Each morning, I wake to a world quieter than the one I remember, a mere sliver of the one before memory. The dawn chorus—once a layered, living symphony—has thinned to a few hesitant voices. The robins still sing, but fewer. The once common wrens are down to one couple. Even the flickers, loud and brash, seem subdued.
The bulldozers and brush hogs across the road continue to work steadily through what was once tangled habitat—just as birds are trying to nest, feed their young, and find shelter. I listen and watch, helpless, as the last hiding places are destroyed in the maws of machinery.
This isn’t just my street, or my sadness. All over the world, birds are vanishing. A study published in 2019 revealed that in North America alone, three billion birds have succumbed to the march of human progress just since 1970. That’s one in four. A new study from 2025 of almost 500 birds finds that three quarters are declining. “Almost all species showed areas with population increases and areas with declines, often with the strongest declines occurring in areas where species were most abundant. Most species were declining overall, suggesting a worsening situation for birds.” These aren’t just rare species—they are sparrows, swallows, warblers. The ordinary birds that filled our days with sound and movement.
Their absence is a kind of unraveling. The silence that falls in their place is not peaceful. It is the quiet of billions of lives missing. The eerie hush of the land being sterilized. What is progress when it requires the extermination of so many?
We’ve normalized this silence. We’ve forgotten what it sounded like to live in a world teeming with life. It’s been many generations since the morning chorus rang in vital fullness and glory. My own baseline of what morning chorus “should” sound like is but a pathetic fragment of the symphony of song when every songbird was singing.
This morning at 5:45am the brush hogs began their murderous chewing once again. The tiny snippets of bird song remaining in the morning chorus are easily drowned out by the steady drone of the cutters as they gnaw through alder, baby firs, salal, ferns, Oregon grape, ocean spray, willow, dogwood, serviceberry, wildflowers, and the many wild beings who call the woodlands home. I imagine the blood soaked blades, spewing out the fragments of these bodies, these once living beings now reduced to slash.
5:45am. The death machine that is civilization rumbles on, replacing morning chorus with the soundtrack of a horror movie.
Elizabeth, sorry to hear about the destruction.