“Mill Creek filled till it was a river, and this waterfall, normally one of those diaphanous-veil affairs, turned into a cataract. It filled me with awe to stand there then, on the shaking ground, and think, This is what nature is capable of. But as I sat there this time, and thought about the dry summer we’d just come through, there was nothing awe-inspiring or instructive, or even lulling, in the fall of water. It suddenly seemed less like a waterfall than like a spillway to accommodate the overflow of a reservoir. That didn’t decrease its beauty, but it changed its meaning. It has begun or will soon begin to rain and snow when the particular mix of chemicals we’ve injected into the atmosphere adds up to rain or snow [...] I had no more control, in one sense, over this process than I ever did. But it felt different, and lonelier. Instead of a world where rain had become a subset of human activity: a phenomenon like smog or commerce or the noise from the skidder towing logs of Cleveland Road-- all things which I had no control over, either. The rain bore a brand. And that was where the loneliness came from. There’s nothing there except us. There’s no such thing as nature anymore-- that other world that isn’t business and art and breakfast is now not another world, and there is nothing except us alone.” - The End of Nature, Bill McKibbbon (1990)