As the eighties ended, so did the first generation of Sierran use by Caucasian man. With only a few exceptions, the generation that replaced the Native Americans sought opportunities to use the resources they found. At first the number of people involved was tiny, and the resources of the Sierra seemed limitless. How could so few ever affect so large and richly endowed a place? Yet, after three decades, the pioneers had influenced the mountains and valley far more than most of them realized. They had destroyed the lifestyle and culture of the Native Americans, and thus ended the impacts of their activities, including their forms of hunting and vegetation burning. On the valley floor, the spread of farming had disrupted native vegetation and wildlife, and begun destruction of the riparian oak forests. So much water was being diverted for irrigation that before the century ended, Tulare Lake would go dry for the first time. In the foothills three decades of heavy grazing, with periodic droughts, had led to the destruction of the perennial native grasses and their replacement with less nutritious Eurasian annuals. Heavy grazing also had badly damaged many middle-altitude meadows and the high country. Much of the high Sierra had been so ravaged by domestic sheep use that it had been almost completely denuded. Along the lower edge of the forest belt, three decades of logging had begun to create significant gaps in the once-continuous forest, and much bigger lumber enterprises seemed imminent. Only a tiny fraction of the total forest had yet been affected, but in limited areas with good access to the valley, mainly around Grant Grove and on the North Fork of the Tule, the damage was locally appalling.

In short, everywhere one looked there was resource consumption and environmental change. In thirty years the pioneers, with their widely shared ethic of unlimited resource use, had changed the mountains forever. Against these trends had been raised only a few voices, and until the mid-eighties those voices had been easily ignored by a culture that saw itself as building a new civilization. But inevitably, as population and resource use continued to grow, the free, largely individualistic consumption patterns began to run into limits. The pioneer world was becoming increasingly complicated, and the perception of unlimited resources was beginning to unravel.