Yet another Cassandra responding to the maelstrom

The famous ecologist and author Aldo Leopold found that "One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds."  

This passage once dwelt in my mind misremembered, to the effect that having an ecological education is always to feel wounded oneself.  And so it is. To some, when nature is assaulted it feels personal. The pictured American Chestnut stump and its blight-doomed shoots bear testament.  In 1904, an indifferent commerce introduced a killing fungus in horticulture shipments, and so stripped a dominant tree from eastern U.S. forests. It wounds many of us to be bereft of the tree's heralded majesty, or its ancient old-growth forests that once resounded with now-extinct Passenger Pigeons and Carolina Parakeets and the bugling of extinct and extirpated elks.  

Leopold went on to explain: 

Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

There is a whiff of Thoreau in this passage, that of a cognizant author viewing askance a clueless population trampling away the Wildness. Leopold's words, written three generations ago, clang loudly today when the  republic pretends away an existential threat that comes from trampling with an invisible gas even the entire atmosphere. 

Fellow gray-heads walking the woods often note that nature imprinted its bond during youthful hours spent unsupervised outdoors. And you needn't be particularly gray to have known a time, merely fifty years ago, when monitored reference populations of land-vertebrates were on average 40% larger than today, and those in freshwater a whopping 500%.  Even insects, among the most successful forms of life on earth, in some places were 400% larger only one generation ago.  In the same time-frame, the human population has more than doubled.  With such staggering growth eliciting such stunning loss well within a lifetime, where is this going?

You may forgive cognizant oldsters in the woods who look askance at a population on which not nature has made its imprint, but strip malls and electronic gizmos. 

Yet, when bonds are strong one is compelled to testify, and electronic gizmos convey all messages, even those recorded here.