Increasingly, the world's independent scientists are coming to understand with greater clarity and urgency the importance of the Cabinet-Yaak country to the surrounding ecosystems and wildlife populations particularly the grizzly bear βbut as ever, the wind that's always been in our face remains ever thus: only a hundred and fifty humans reside in the upper Yaak.
Without great gobs of cash, though, how are we to influence a president, or Senators representing million people? How, even, are our seventy-five members able to help influence management direction on 2. With so many elements, so many pieces fractured or disassembled how can there not be a desire, a challenge, to put them back together? Surely not with the original elegance of design, but still, just as surely, in some more complete fashion than the present disarray?
We hurl ourselves at these issues, year after year and decade after decade, not just by saying No , but by offering proposals, solutions: all the while, drawing immeasurably and intangibly closer to our goals of wilderness protectionβwe can sense this, can feel it with our Yaak-intuition in almost the same manner that, on some certain days, you can catch the scent of a band of elk that has just passed through the forest in front of you, or even the sweet scent of a torn-up rotting log, claw-ripped by a grizzly moments earlier, the ants still swarming from the logβand yet all the while, we watch the hour-meter of our lives spin faster and faster, watch our lives spill out beneath us, as if through some never-patched rend.
The land still has a chance of healing, of someday closing in again on itself, and being repaired, even if a hundred or two hundred years from now.
And every year that goes by without it is another loss. I have come to realize that for my own self, I have been following what I think of as the Four Stages of Anonymity.
