Friends,
I feed the birds in Towson, Maryland. Those that
show up for the feedings are generally starlings, sparrows and ravens and/or
crows. It is rare to see a blue jay or a cardinal. But on Tuesday
morning, March 24, there was a cardinal munching away with the others.
Just like Tom Englehardt, I was in awe of that cardinal. Imagine s/he
visited my feeding station. And like Tom, I am very concerned about the
decimation of the birds. This is just another reason to get involved in
the climate chaos movement.
Kagiso,
Max
Tuesday, March 24, 2020
In Memoriam: A Planet of Missing Beauties
"The
skies are emptying out."
In Memoriam: A Planet of Missing Beauties
commondreams.org/views/2020/03/24/memoriam-planet-missing-beauties
The
other morning, walking at the edge of a local park, I caught sight of a
beautiful red
cardinal,
the first bird I ever saw some 63 years ago. Actually, to make that sentence
accurate, I should probably have put either “first” or “ever saw” in quotation
marks. After all, I was already 12 years old and, even as a city boy, I had
seen plenty of birds. If nothing else, New York, where I grew up, is a city of
pigeons (birds which, by the way, know nothing about “social distancing”).
Nonetheless, in a different sense, at
age 12 I saw (was struck by, stunned by, awed by) that bright red
bird. I was visiting a friend in Connecticut and, miraculously enough, though
it was 1956, his parents had a bird identification book of some kind in their
house. When I leafed through it, I came across the very bird I had seen, read
about it, and ongoing home wrote a tiny essay about the experience for my sixth
grade teacher, Mrs. Casey (one of those inspirational figures you never forget,
just as I’ll never forget that bird). I still have what I wrote stuffed away
amid ancient papers somewhere in the top of my bedroom closet.
Six decades later, in this grim
coronavirus March of 2020, with my city essentially in lockdown and myself in something like
self-isolation, I have to admit that I feel a little embarrassed writing about
that bird. In fact, I feel as if I should apologize for doing so. After all,
who can doubt that we’re now in a Covid-19 world from hell, in a country being
run (into the ground) by the president from hell, on the planet that he and his
cronies are remarkably intent on burning to hell.
It was no mistake, for instance, that,
when Donald Trump finally turned
his mind to
the coming pandemic (rather than denying it) as the economy he had been bragging
about for
the previous three years began to crash, one of the first groups he genuinely
worried about didn't include you or me or even his base. It was America’s
fossil-fuel industry. As global transportation ground
down amid
coronavirus panic and a wild oil price
war between
the Saudis and the Russians, those companies were being clobbered. And so
he quickly reached out to them with both empathy and money -- promising
to buy
tons of extra crude oil for
the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve (“We're going to fill it right to the
top”) -- unavailable to so many other endangered Americans. At that
moment he made it perfectly clear that, in an unfolding crisis of the first
order, all of us remain in a world run by arsonists led by the president of the United
States.
So, a cardinal? Really? That’s what I
want to focus on in a world which, as it grows hotter by
the year,
will only be ever more susceptible to pandemics, not to speak of staggering fires, flooding, extreme
storms,
and god knows what else. Honestly, given a country of closed schools,
self-isolating adults, and the sick and the dying, on a planet that seems
to be cracking open, in a country which, until recently, couldn’t
test as
many people for Covid-19 in a couple of months as South Korea could in -- yes,
this is not a misprint -- a day, where’s my sense of proportion?
A Secret Life
Still, if you can, bear with me for a
moment, I think there’s a connection, even if anything but obvious, between our
troubled world and that flaming bird I first saw so long ago. Let me start this
way: believe it or not, birds were undoubtedly the greatest secret of my
teenage years.
On spring weekends, my best friend and I
would regularly head for Central Park, that magnificent patch of green at the
center of Manhattan Island. That was the moment when the spectacular annual
bird migration would be at its height and the park one of the few obvious
places in a vast urban landscape for birds to alight. Sharing his uncle’s clunky
old binoculars, my friend and I would wander alone there (having told no one,
including our families, what we were doing).
We were on the lookout for exotic birds
of every sort on their journeys north. Of course, for us then they were almost
all exotic. There were brilliant scarlet
tanagers with
glossy black wings, chestnut-and-black orchard orioles (birds I wouldn’t see
again for decades), as well as the more common, even more vivid Baltimore
orioles. And of course there were all the warblers, those tiny, flitting,
singing creatures of just about every color and design: American redstarts,
blackburnians, black-and-whites, black-throated blues, blue-wingeds, chestnut-sideds,
common yellowthroats, magnolias, prairies, palms, yellows.
And here was the secret key to our
secret pastime: the old birders. Mind you, when I say “old,” I mean perhaps my
age now or even significantly younger. They would, for instance, be sitting on
benches by Belvedere
Castle overlooking
Belvedere Lake (in reality, a pond), watching those very birds. They were
remarkably patient, not to say amused (or perhaps amazed) by the two teenaged
boys so eager to watch with them and learn from them. They were generous with
their binoculars, quick to identify birds we otherwise would never have known
or perhaps even noticed, and happy to offer lessons from their bird books (and
their own years of experience).
And, for me at least, those birds were
indeed a wonder. They were genuine beauties of this planet and in some odd way
my friend and I grasped that deeply. In fact, ever since we’ve grown up --
though this year may prove to be the self-isolating exception -- we’ve always
tried to meet again in that park as May began for one more look at, one more
moment immersed in, the deep and moving winged beauty of this planet of ours.
Of course, in the 1950s, all of this was
our deepest secret for the most obvious of reasons (at least then). If you were
a boy and admitted that you actually wanted to look at birds -- I’m not sure
the phrase “bird watch” was even in use at the time -- god knows what your
peers would have said about you. They would -- we had no doubt of this -- have
simply drummed us out of the corps of boys. (That any of them might then have
had their own set of secret fascinations would never, of course, have crossed
our minds.) All you have to do to conjure up the mood of that moment is to
imagine our president back then and the kind of mockery to which he would
certainly have subjected boys who looked at birds!
Now, so many decades later, in another
America in which the coronavirus has already reached pandemic proportions
(potentially threatening staggering
losses,
especially among old folks like me), in which the stock market is already
tanking, in which a great recession-cum-depression could be on the horizon, and
our future FDR -- that is, the president who
helped us out of the last Great Depression in the 1930s -- could an
over-the-hill 77-year-old former vice president, it seems odd indeed to write
about beautiful birds from another earthly moment. But maybe that’s the point.
Fini?
Think about it this way: as last year
ended, Science magazine reported that, in North America, there were
three billion fewer birds than in 1970; in other words, almost one out of every
three birds on this continent is now gone. As Carl Zimmer of the New York
Times put
it,
“The skies are emptying out.” Among them, warblers have taken one of the
heaviest hits -- there are an estimated 617 million fewer of them -- as well as
birds more generally that migrate up the East Coast (and so have a shot at
landing in Central Park). Many are the causes, including habitat loss,
pesticides, and even feral cats, but climate change is undoubtedly a factor as
well. The authors of the Audubon Society’s most recent national
report,
for instance, suggest that, “if Earth continues to warm according to current
trends -- rising 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 -- more
than two-thirds of North America’s bird species will be vulnerable to
extinction due to range loss.”
Extinction. Take that word in. They’ll
be gone. No more. Fini.
That, by the way, is a global, not just a North American, reality,
and such apocalyptic possibilities are hardly
restricted to
birds. Insects, for instance, are experiencing their own Armageddon and while --
monarch butterflies (down 90% in the U.S. in the last 20 years) aside -- we
humans don’t tend to think of them as beauties, they are, among other things,
key pollinators and crucial to food chains everywhere.
Or think about it this way: on Monday,
March 8th, in my hometown, New York City, it was 68 degrees and that was
nothing. After all, on February 19th, in Central Park, the temperature had hit
a record-breaking
78 degrees in
the heart of winter, not just the highest for that day on record but for the
month of February, historically speaking. At the time, we were passing
through a “winter” in which essentially no
snow had fallen. And that should have surprised no one.
After all, January had started the year with a bang globally as the hottest January on record, which again
should have surprised no one, since the last five years have been the warmest
ever recorded on
this planet (ditto the last 10 years and 19 of the last 20 years). Oh, and 2020
already has a 50%
chance of
being the warmest year yet.
And by the way, soon after that
68-degree day, in our parks I began to notice the first crocuses and daffodils
pushing through the soil and blooming. It was little short of remarkable and, in
truth, would all have been beautiful, not to say glorious -- the weather, the
flowers, the sense of ease and comfort, the springiness of everything -- if you
didn’t know just what such “beauty” actually meant on a planet potentially
heating to pandemic
proportions.
How sad when even what’s still truly
beautiful on this globe of ours increasingly tells a story that couldn’t be grimmer.
So, think of this as my in-memoriam essay about the planet I thought I grew up
on and the birds I thought I knew. Consider it a kind of epitaph-in-advance for
a world that, if the rest of us can’t get ourselves together, if we can’t rid
ourselves of arsonists like Donald Trump and his crew or those fossil-fueled
CEOs that
he loves so much, may all-too-soon seem unrecognizable.
In the meantime, consider me --
semi-locked in my apartment -- to be, in my own fashion, in mourning. Not for
myself, mind you, though I’m almost 76 and my years on this planet are bound to
be limited, but for those I’ll be leaving behind, my children and grandchildren
in particular. This just wasn’t the world I ever wanted them to inherit.
In truth, in this coronaviral moment of
ours, our world is being transformed before our eyes into one of missing
beauties. Given my teenage years, I want to leave my grandchildren the pleasure
of entering Central Park in some distant May, long after I’m gone, and still
seeing the brilliant colors of a scarlet tanager. That's my hope, despite
everything.
Tom
Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs
the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His
sixth and latest book, just published, is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch
Books).Previous
books include: Shadow
Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World (with an introduction by Glenn
Greenwald). Terminator
Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (co-authored
with Nick Turse), The
United States of Fear, The
American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, The
End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond, as well
as of a novel, The
Last Days of Publishing. To stay on top of important
articles like these, sign up to receive the latest
updates from TomDispatch.com here.
© 2020 TomDispatch.com
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center,
431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607;
Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to
gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and
everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment