Birding the Apocalypse
On a beautiful, sunny morning it's so easy to forget...
We live and play in the midst of a mass extinction event.
Our human awareness is such that we perceive time as moving both far more slowly than it actually is, and far faster. A beautiful sunrise one morning can make you forget about the choking blanket of wildfire smoke that dampened so many sunrises last summer. Needing to bundle up with thick socks, a scarf and an extra layer can help convince you that a half-degree of warming a year is really, probably not that big a deal.
We are the frogs in the pan on the stove and the temperature of the water we sit in is rising slowly enough that we can comfortably lean back, look out upon the unfolding day and be truly touched by the majesty of it all. Just a little hot tub soak to welcome another beautiful morning, eh? Maybe I should take a pic and post it to my Instagram.
There are some hiccups, of course.
Occasionally, while completely surrounded by a flood of beauty, another of those stark reminders which may actually be quite beautiful itself, and which only confuses us about the urgency. To wit, the image above.
A few days ago, just after Christmas and hours of relentless, cold rain, a beautiful, cloudless, blue sky.
And a lifeless, Canada Goose, neck curved hard to the left and tucked under its rain-damp wing. A shiny, moist and oddly beautiful goose foot protruding from under a feathery arc. Almost certainly, avian flu.
Out in the bay, beyond, twenty more, living, swimming Canadas, a dozen Red-Breasted Mergansers, a half dozen Horned Grebes, a few cormorants and seventeen amorous, comical, courting, Barrow’s Goldeneyes. All within a hundred or two yards of this deadly contagion vector. Crows and Glaucous-winged gulls everywhere.
There was no sign of our local bald eagles, thank goodness, for this is just the sort of ready made meal an enterprising eagle could appreciate first thing in the morning. Those eagle eyes would likely have spotted such an opportune feast during their dawn reconnaissances and by the time I came wandering into the scene, three-quarters of an hour after sunrise, already have consumed most of it.
Small blessings.
Being continually on guard is new to these eyes.
New-ish.
I mean, I did grow up constantly looking out for poisonous snakes, hornets, tornados and the occasional scorpion, but these were really just a ‘be careful’ part of the fascinating, larger menagerie of life. I was also looking for horny-toads, leopard frogs, bluegills, little brown bats, meadowlarks, salamanders, grasshoppers, five-lined skinks, cowkiller ants, black widows and box turtles. (We used to be able to smell box turtles before we saw them in Oklahoma; a tale for another day.)
So here we are just a few days into this new set of days and I’m trying to ‘drop a pin,’ some thoughtful place to begin from. So many polite inquiries, pronouncements and conversations over the holidays about plans for the new year, most of which are weighed and judged, and ‘properly envied,’ based on some complex and infinitely malleable formula of distance, expense, uniqueness, jet-fuel consumption, tanks of unleaded gas required, number of airports, known traveller credentials, shortest Global Entry lines, etc.
It may just be the circles that I’ve happened into lately, but I do not recall even one person at one holiday-adjacent gathering talking about plans that take global warming and/or the connection to fossil fuel consumption into account as they approach this new year. Goose egg. Nada. Zero. Plenty of folks my age. But especially young people. So much more to lose. God help us if we think the twenty and early thirty somethings are going to curtail even one jet-fueled mile of exotic locale, humble-bragging, travel to help slow Earth’s quickening pace toward a tipping point. They want theirs and fuck anyone who would dare stand in their way or point out the absolute irony of their privileged insistence on having travelled at least as much by the age of thirty as their parents had by the age of fifty or sixty. (Only, you know, worded ever so much nicer.)
I like many of these people. Some of them I absolutely adore.
I worry a little about the absolute gut-wrenching fear and pressure that they will have to fall asleep with and wake up to, day after day when they finally have little ones whose dreams will likely need to be so much smaller than theirs were. I woke up in a cold sweat all the time when I had little ones to feed, nurture, keep in doctor and dentist appointments, and cute outfits, nurse through fevers and injuries, read stories to, teach to think, hold their own in conversations and disagreements, ride bikes, throw balls, act responsibly, face their fears, and dream big dreams, …because.
Worrying over loved ones changes everything. And once you fall in love with children, your own flesh and blood whom you pray will outlast you and live amazing lives, well there is an energetic force field that arrives with them and grows and deepens, so that every painful setback, every externally imposed limitation in their lives feels like a dagger in your own heart. Imagine that in combination with environmental collapse, scarcity-caused wars and new waves of destabilizing diseases that appear, morph and flourish in an increasing unhealthy planet.
Some of these young masters will have their houses washed away in floods, or turned into toothpicks by increasingly violent tornadoes. Some may, even in their lifetimes struggle to find enough fresh water and untainted food to sustain their children’s growth and set them up for long and healthy lives.
Others will feel the constant pressure and fear of environmental displacement, as more and more places on our planet turn hostile and there is less and less land to feed and house more and more people. Diseases will increase with the crowding and death will come knocking for more and more as our planet attempts to shed some of the wild, consuming burden that has tilted things so far out of balance.
Watching the push-back, the resentments and the ‘absolute-minimum’ approach that amazed and horrified so many of us with the limitations, uncertainties, imponderables, risks and inconveniences of Covid should give us clues to the future behaviors of masses of humanity who will need to compete for fewer and fewer resources and spaces in which to live, create families and thrive. People pushed can be horrible. Fear can transform even a ‘well-bred,’ well-educated soul with alarming rapidity.
But we are so over all that.
And those who feel that their shot at treating the world as their oyster is NOW, so they’re gonna get theirs while that is still possible are almost certainly playing into a series of eventualities that will speed up the fall of dominoes, making the possibility of their grandchildren living conflict-free, healthy lives something of a pipe dream.
It’s not so difficult to see the appeal of a savior scenario; “Jesus will come back to save us from all this before it gets too bad. Surely.” There are others, of course; all savior scenarios have certain elements in common. This just happens to be the one I grew up with, the one I was taught to count on since I was a toddler. Some think of me now as a backslider.
Some are counting on being raptured out of here. “Not my problem, Suckers sinners!” Then it will be the problem of those left behind… the dirty people, the mediocre, the ‘less fortunate,’ the ones who chose wrong …or were born wrong.
No eagles were harmed or exposed to deadly influenza in the observing or telling of this story, thanks to the generous efforts of a few rather wonderful bird lovers who seem intent not to just leave it all to the ‘rot in hell’ rantings of an embittered traitor or the rapture.
We can, each of us make some small difference, align ourselves with wildness, with awareness, with kindness, treating the furred and finned and feathered members of our family, with whom we share this breathtakingly beautiful planet as sacred, beautiful beings every bit as deserving as we to live amazing lives. May it be so.
Thank you David for this profound message of reality. It is a sad commentary on the human condition, at least here in ‘the west’ where there is so much beauty to behold if only one is willing to look for it, observe it, respect it and wish to protect it. ‘Looking after me’ seems too often to be the choice of the day….a very self-serving, short term vision. All that said, I still cling to hope, and savour the beauty. If I didn’t, I would probably spiral down into depression and give up.
So hard to be a naturalist these days and look most anywhere as we can see the struggles and demise of the beauty and harshness we came to love in our youth. We fear for the future of lives on this planet. I guess it has always been so for lovers of the wild and unrestrained. We just know it for ourselves today.