Metal roofs, banning hunting and fishing and other aesthetic decisions made in the name of the Environment.

I grew up forty-five minutes east of Portland, in the foothills of the Cascades, in a place caught between its past as a string of logging communities on the Columbia River, and its future as a recreational area and second-home destination for crunchy outdoor types. I, like the period around me, was somewhere in the middle. My parents were transplants from the Midwest, and unlike my peers at Skamania School, we didn’t have guns, dirt bikes, or God. The Gorge, as it’s called by locals, falls under the control of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, limiting development and ensuring its beauty. My dad was a realtor, selling mostly tracts of undeveloped land, and was consumed by a passion to connect a series of undeveloped private pieces of land with public ones and create hiking trails on them. I spent a bunch of time in the back seat of his Jeep Cherokee while he talked to bar oil-stained loggers and old-money Portlanders interested in conserving the beauty that they occasionally visited for an afternoon hike. The Gorge was in an economic decline. Logging peaked in the 70s and was now a shadow of its past glory. Despite rules being officially dictated by an overseeing organization called the Gorge Commission, a nonprofit called the Friends of the Gorge really calls the shots. Made up of wealthy donors from Portland’s West Hills, the Friends of the Gorge are often at odds with locals that live in areas they are committed to protecting. Their rules reflect a limited use case for the area that’s largely informed by the occasional day trip east along I-84 to go on a hike or mountain bike ride and grab a microbrew at a local brewery in Stevenson or Hood River on their way home.

In 2025, over 70 structures burned in two fires on the Oregon and Washington sides of the Gorge. Wildfires seemingly pick their victims at random, with little rhyme or reason as to which houses make it and which are turned to dust, but one common thread amongst the surviving houses was their metal roofs. For decades, roofing material guidelines under the building codes for the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area have stipulated that only non reflective materials can be used. A few metal options meet this criteria, but they are multiple times more expensive than uncoated metal roofs and asphalt shingles. The rationale is not a scientific one but an aesthetic consideration. Hikers on the other side of the river don’t like seeing reflections from metal roofs. In effect this means that 90% of houses have asphalt shingle roofs, which are far more susceptible to wildfires, all in the name of giving hikers from Portland peace of mind that they won’t see any reflective roofs on the occasional jaunts up a hillside when they pause and look back across the river.

From a popular hiking trail on the Rowena Plateau, I sat with Lillian and looked back across the river and watched through binoculars as skimmer planes picked up loads of water from the Columbia and dropped them on ridges and structures, hoping to stem the tide of the raging fire. The sheer scale of a wildfire and a howling 35-mile-per-hour wind is a massively destructive and humbling thing to witness, and for an hour, we sat and watched. Modern, metal-clad, Bond-villain-looking second homes seemed to have far better chances of surviving than the double-wides and old farmhouses of the permanent residence. My mom’s house and barn were one of the lucky ones.

“At least there are no annoying reflections!” I smirked.

A few weeks ago, I caught up with Lloyd Kahn. His energy and passion defy his age. We talked for 20 minutes about the good mushroom hunting season he was having, skateboarding, and a well-funded environmental group lobbying to ban fishing around his hometown of Bolinas, forty-five minutes north of San Francisco. This supposed grassroots organization, with an annual budget of 400k, had zeroed in on banning all fishing on Duxbury Reef and within 1000 feet of the low tide on the most accessible stretch of beach, which would in effect ban all fishing in Marin County. Lloyd was livid and was doing what he does best, helping organize in the community that he’s lived in since the late 60s and helping the locals with press.

After I got off the phone with Lloyd, I called up my good friend and fellow Bolinas resident, Mike Idell, General Sport Club , to get the rundown. “It’s just a continuation of the same shit that’s been going on in Marin since the 80s when they started going after the ranches.” Mike, an avid hunter and fisherman, catches striped bass each summer and takes his Boston Whaler out to catch salmon off the reef whenever the season is open. He explained, “It’s not about having a place where people live with the natural world, but a playground, or even a zoo, for rich people from SF to ride their fifteen thousand dollar road bike occasionally on the weekend. They don’t want to smell cow shit, and they don’t want to see people from the East Bay fishing from the shore at Stinson Beach.”

“They’d much rather have people buy farmed salmon from Chile or imported beef from a place in Brazil that just 5 years ago was a rainforest.”

“And if they really gave a shit about fish populations, they would boycott Sushi Ran.”

Just to the north in Oregon, Initiative IP28 is gaining national attention in hunting and fishing circles. IP28, or The Peace Act as it is called, seeks to ban all ranching, hunting, and fishing in the state. The initiative suggests offsetting the loss of income from ranching with taxpayer dollars but does not mention how animal populations will be managed without hunting. It’s supported by places like PETA and wealthy out-of-state donors, and as of mid-March 2026, it has over 100k signatures, just 10k or so short of the threshold to make it onto the ballot by July 2nd. My suspicion is that proponents of the initiative will jettison the ranching rules as a form of good will and focus on banning hunting and fishing. It will make it to the ballot and be rebuked, but it’s a sign of things to come. Critics of hunting and fishing’s unspoken issue is not the eating of meat but the process in which that meat is acquired, which ultimately boils down to aesthetic and class differences. As cities increasingly gain population and rural places continue to languish on a slow population decline, laws and guidelines championed by people with no meaningful relationship with the places and animals they claim to care about will ratchet up in intensity and severity.

These laws represent a clash of aesthetic and ideological principles, not science, and border on theology. When science is discussed, it’s often on a global scale, not a granular one where policy actually takes place, and it’s employed as a tool to pull at people’s emotions. Animals need management, people need food, local fishermen are not the ones hurting fisheries, and metal roofs are far better suited to handle fires despite their reflections being visible from hiking trails across the river. Often the rules promoted by these groups are stark contradiction to state and federal biologists. The connecting tissue of these three different issues is the prevailing wind that sophisticated urbanites know what’s best for uneducated people in rural places and have a responsibility to help them see the light. With all of the discussion of decolonization that’s been in vogue this last decade, this area, urban people dictating laws and conservation guidelines that don’t ultimately impact them, has never faced scrutiny despite being very much in the same spirit as missionaries saving indigenous populations from paganism and teaching them the wonders of modern life. Yes, these nonprofits and organizations certainly do some good, but it is undeniable that they add to the friction between urban and rural that increasingly defines American politics and is a major contributor to phenomena like bombastic right-wing populism.

My life has existed largely at the nexus of urban and rural. After growing up in the Gorge, my family moved into Portland for middle school and high school. Next, I moved to Maine and went to a small liberal arts college. After that, I moved to New York City for two years. Following that stint and the realization that megacities weren’t for me, I moved into my van and traveled the west for three years before settling back in the Gorge. Due to this ping-ponging, I’ve never fit-in in either. On my more extroverted days, I feel like an observer in both realms; on my introverted ones, an outsider. As someone that cares deeply about the environment and animals, I feel caught in the middle between these two forces but less and less understand the motivations of urban people masquerading with the best interest of the natural world despite living a life increasingly disconnected from it. Just as a women’s rights to body autonomy and the right to choose are topics that men can never fully fathom, I think that rural living, land use, and animal resource management are issues that require intimate familiarity to fully grasp.

In a blink my mid-twenties gave way to my late thirties, and my perspective followed suit. With the consideration for protecting the activities and places I love for future generations to explore, taking an increasing amount of bandwidth compared to my own personal enjoyment of those places and activities, I often find myself frustrated with institutions I once looked to to help protect those places. It is my belief that if you want people to care about something, you have to give them the opportunity to love it and interact with it. Groups of powerful people, dictating the terms by which untold future generations of people can engage with the natural world based on aesthetic and ideological bases, not science, drive me batshit crazy and will ultimately prove to undermine the very causes they claim to protect. Through all of this is an underlying stench of classism that emanates from these “grassroots” nonprofits and activists, like the smell of dogshit from the sole of a shoe. If the trustees and administrators of these nonprofits really cared about the areas they claimed to protect, they would live a life closer to them; instead, those places and topics largely remain a backdrop for their Instagram photos, discussion for dinner parties, and topics for fundraising emails. Rest assured that the blatant hypocrisy of supposed “environmentalists” locked in the paradox of “do as a say not as I do” flying around in private jets or transversing the world and making a stop off at congress to have a photo snapped of them with a sign that says “Protect our Winters!” is a topic I’ll address in another essay. Ultimately, I believe that if we want to have these beautiful places and animals around, we need to get people to care about them and live close together with them. This is not a new concept; indigenous people have lived like this for millennia. Back then, just like it’s happening today, groups of sophisticated urban people convinced themselves that they knew better for others and forced their aesthetic and idealogical world view on them. If it didn’t work then, why will it work today?