On this morning’s walk in the pre-dawn darkness, I looked up to catch sight of a line of stars I had never seen before, and while I’m not an avid astronomer, I knew upon my first glance these were something out of the ordinary. Streaming in an evenly spaced queue to the east of Orion’s belt, I paused and looked at them harder, remembering one of my favorite quotes about the wild world: “Nature doesn’t often work in straight lines.”

It took a couple of seconds (as I had only consumed about half of the day’s first tumbler of coffee) to realize the line of stars were the satellites in the Starlink system now orbiting our globe, and they slowly moved in time as they made their trek in the direction of where the sun would rise in a couple of hours, its light beyond my vision providing their illumination in the darkness of the sky. Though they’ve been up there for several years now, it was the first time I had seen them, and they further cemented my realization that no part of our world — even the sky — remains untouched by the advancements of our technology.

Good, bad, or indifferent, our impacts are noteworthy, and I’ve covered many of them in the past 25 years of writing. Most frustratingly at the top of those topics is how we as a species have wiped out others through habitat degradation, only to try as hard as we can to bring them back from the brink to thriving populations once again. Our ability to ignore change and destruction that occurs with progress, and then with a mighty will reverse both after that progress becomes a routine part of life (and hopefully after our mastery of it, less damaging to our world), is perhaps one of our greatest combinations of flaws and strengths that we keep on applying. One need only look to the bald eagle, the wolf, and the lake sturgeon in the skies, lands, and waters of our region to see such examples of boneheaded brinksmanship followed by brave remedial conservation actions undertaken to reduce and reverse our impact. The maddening thing is that the same lessons we learn through those processes keep on getting forgotten and relearned every two decades or so.

Take for example the current administration’s repeal of the roadless rule, an executive action from about 25 years ago which was put in place to protect more than 58 million acres of forests and other untouched lands from mining, drilling and industrial development and stem the splintering of vital wild habitat in 38 states. These acres of national forest land include areas of virgin soils in and around North Dakota’s Badlands in the west and the Sheyenne Grasslands in the east, and stretches of woods in Minnesota’s Arrowhead region, along with those more noted portions of the Rocky Mountains and the vast wilderness of Alaska. The impact of building more roads into these regions has already been seen through loss of wildlife habitat, pollution from mines and oil rigs, and countless examples of erosion and soil degradation from the building and rebuilding of access routes and the splinter trails that grow from them to exploit the stores of timber and minerals which lay at their ends.

The lessons learned in the mid and late 1900s are seemingly forgotten by an administration that looks to make up the shortfall in the country’s income caused by its recent tax breaks for the same wealthy companies which would exploit these resources and mar the landscape, with paths cut into the darkness of virgin conifers like a line of artificial stars slicing through the sky. In turn, our wild places would be degraded and populations of game — both large, such as those caribou, moose, and elk of the western ranges, and small, like the last pockets of prairie chickens and spruce grouse in North Dakota and Minnesota — would be put at risk. As there is little the general population can do about executive orders and their implementation and reversal, as that power is vested in that branch of our government, our limited hope rests with a paralyzed congress taking action on its own to pass more permanent legislation to protect these regions. As things sit now, that might take another 20 years.

So, the cycle continues: warring political parties, shifting pendulums of public policies on progress, spaces and species pushed to the edge of destruction, and the idea that if we try really, really hard when things get really, really bad two decades from now for some poor plant, bird, fish or mammal we like to see, catch, or hunt, we can jerk the wheel at the last second and save from a single seed or the lasted mated pair what we’ve nearly wiped out. But even then, if we continue to be so lucky to save what was lost, it’ll still be tough to miss the marks we’ve made … on our outdoors.