Hm, I have the opposite feeling as well. In a heavily fragmented area without any primary forests left (Germany) I still find sooo many species that were invisible to me before I dared to look. I cannot imagine how it must have been before when humans hadn’t had such an impact on the ecosystem.

But then I also notice how all of these species exist despite our influence. How they try to keep on living in our cities. And that’s indeed very sad.

As a child, the ocean fascinated me. I wanted to learn everything I could. As I got older, and the world got worse, the things I learned grew more and more terrifying, until I eventually stopped trying to learn more because it was just too depressing.

I don’t know how Marine Biologists and Oceanographers do it. To be surrounded every day with thousands of indicators and unquestionable data that all shows our oceans are fucked. And from hundreds of different ways too; it doesn’t even matter if you somehow fix global warming, there are so many other issues remaining that it’s still all fucked. It’s like if a guy walked into a hospital with every disease. Where the hell do you even start?

Heavy is the burden of the wise one, when no one believes a word that they could say.

With global warming we’re in triage mode now. Not every ecosystem is going to make it. Gotta focus efforts on the ecosystems that can survive… while there’s a bunch of maniacs in the operating room trying to set fire to everything.

The more I learn about local flora and fauna the more this hurts

I recently found a berry bush while on a trail of a kind of berry I hadn’t seen in years

It was bitter sweet

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. […]

This makes me think about golf courses…

:yea: Whenever I’m working next to a turf lawn, I always take the time to remind whoever I’m speaking to that living within 1.6km/1mi of a golf course increases your risk of Parkinson’s Disease by 126% and that sharing a water supply with them in our drought-stressed region increases the risk by 96%: https://www.parkinson.org/blog/science-news/golf-courses . Whenever a suburbanite reaches Peak American Psychosis and gleefully describes how they murder any wildlife that touches their property, I start going into cascading impacts and zoonotic disease. If I wasn’t a communist, the socioecological side of horticulture would force me to become a communist or a prepper. When you can see the world ecologically it’s just a world full of slow motion car crashes with all the drivers cheering at each other.

So was Wendell Berry.

I think Team Cherry might have read this excerpt.

Seems to me we need some Aldo “Raine” Leopold

ALDO!