If you think you’ve been sensing this spring and summer a diminishment of the bird population in Albuquerque, and have been aware over the years of what seems like the slow but steady vanishing of insects and amphibians along the Middle Rio Grande Valley, and are wondering if it’s all in your head, it’s apparently not.
A recent study in the journal Science, as reported in the New York Times, reveals that over the last fifty years the wild bird population in North America and Canada has dropped by some three billion, and this includes all birds from warblers to blackbirds, from shore birds to starlings. These findings have prompted some of us to now consider Rachel Carson and her book “Silent Spring” as not only a warning but a prophetic utterance. And, of course, as the New Testament tells us, prophets are not welcome in their own homeland.
It’s been a strange spring and summer anyway, with lots of political and even physical misery to go around. What makes everything worse, though, is when the messengers of real troubles are treated with disdain, like children crying wolf — the fate of Rachel Carson and her activist descendants.
This die off of birds is not an inevitable event of biological entropy, and therefore is not a ‘natural part of life,’ as some would claim dismissively. It is a massive death event caused willfully by poisoning, by acts of fatal malice and indifference by powerful entities, like chemical corporations and even the military. These acts of ecocide, the willful ruining of habitat, and the callous use of pesticides, are both crimes against nature and crimes against humanity.
And they are almost always whitewashed by commercial and national security artful dodging. It’s not only the denial of harm, or the denial of the culpability of harming and having harmed, that is so insidious and full of actual malice, it’s also the bald faced, programmatic regularity of outright lying arising from a formal and, one suspects, a mandatory policy of bureaucratic fudging and outright deceit and the manufacture of alternative “realities” by economic elites.
Take the oh boy, gee wiz story on Kirtland Airforce Base last week in the Albuquerque daily. It told of how Kirtland was going to celebrate its own existence into the 2040s by sprucing up its roadways, its flood control, and its wireless communication systems. How wonderful Kirtland is, the morning daily crowed covertly, how much it does for our community, how much money it pours into our economy. It’s not until the very end of the piece, the last three paragraphs that any mention is made of Kirtland’s most notorious reality — the unforgivably slow, so-called “clean up” of the largest jet fuel spill at any American Airforce facility, weighing it at some 24-million gallons and right near the sweet spot of the city’s drinking water wells. Rather than clean it up, the DOD would much rather bury it in hoodwinks and fancy techonobabble and hope everyone forgets it. It must be a formal policy, as it does the same thing at every other Airforce base in the country, and all of them, by reckoning, have jet fuel spills and other forms of ground water contamination.
It’s not as if this was any revelation. Eloquent environmental philosophers and prophets have been crusading against pollution and contemptuously ignored for decades. Wendell Berry, for instance, has eloquently linked economics and the environment in almost all his many writings. “What we must do above all, I think, is try to see the problems in its full size and difficulty…Every economy is, by definition, a land-using economy. If we are using our land wrong, then something is wrong with our economy.” In a city like Albuquerque, the economy of which depends in large part on military spending, something is terribly wrong if a major Daddy Warbucks is also a major polluter and denier.
An economy like that reminds me of these lines of a poem, Exile III, by playwright and exile from Nazi Germany Bertolt Brecht: “And they were sawing off the branches on which they were sitting. While shouting across their experiences to one another on how to saw more efficiently. And they went crashing down into the deep. And those who watched them shook their heads and continued sawing vigorously.”
Three billion birds gone. 24 million gallons of jet fuel in Albuquerque’s drinking water. Insects and amphibians going. That saw is getting red hot.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
According to National Geographic magazine domestic cats are killing billions of birds annually in the United States along with many other animals. Yes, billions with a B . It would help in New Mexico if people would just put out water for birds especially during the dry months.
As you and so many others have made very clear in recent analyses, nothing will slow these extinctions, much less stop them, but a relevant workable strategy to combat global warming. Birds and insects are like the canary in the coal mine, but all species are interconnected and interdependent. I have all but given up hope that our generation will take on the task… and, especially as a great grandmother, I am frightened of the habitat we are leaving to future generations. Thanks you V.B. for always giving us the information we need to move forward. Now if only we could do that…