FreeLists / va-richmond-general / [va-richmond-general] Re: Article from Today's New York Times

[Caroline Coe <cccoe@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for the post Barbara.  The article is based on the Audubon's Common 
Birds in Decline report and press conference last week.  For more information 
on the 20 common birds in the report check out www.audubon.org  and the 
featured news story link. 
   
  And for anyone who has participated in Breeding Bird Surveys or Christmas 
Bird Counts, consider that your citizen science is the basis for this important 
report.
   
  Caroline Coe
  Chesterfield County
   
   
  Barbara A Williamson <barbaraawmson@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
      New York Times
      Editorial Observer
  Millions of Missing Birds, Vanishing in Plain Sight  writePost();    
  By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
  Published: June 19, 2007
    Last week, the Audubon Society released a new report describing the sharp 
and startling population decline of some of the most familiar and common birds 
in America: several kinds of sparrows, the Northern bobwhite, the Eastern 
meadowlark, the common grackle and the common tern. The average decline of the 
20 species in the Audubon Society?s report is 68 percent. 
  Forty years ago, there were an estimated 31 million bobwhites. Now there are 
5.5 million. Compared to the hundred-some condors presently in the wild, 5.5 
million bobwhites sounds like a lot of birds. But what matters is the 25.5 
million missing and the troubles that brought them down ? and are all too 
likely to bring down the rest of them, too. So this is not extinction, but it 
is how things look before extinction happens. 
  The word ?extinct? somehow brings to mind the birds that seem like special 
cases to us, the dodo or the great auk or the passenger pigeon. Most people 
would never have had a chance to see dodos and great auks on their remote 
islands before they were decimated in the 17th and 19th centuries. What is hard 
to remember about passenger pigeons isn?t merely their once enormous numbers. 
It?s the enormous numbers of humans to whom their comings and goings were a 
common sight and who supposed, erroneously, that such unending clouds of birds 
were indestructible. We recognize the extraordinary distinctness of the 
passenger pigeon now because we know its fate, killed off largely by humans. 
But we have moralized it thoroughly without ever really taking it to heart. 
  The question is whether we will see the distinctness of the field sparrow ? 
its number is down from 18 million 40 years ago to 5.8 million ? only when the 
last pair is being kept alive in a zoo somewhere. We love to finally care when 
the death watch is on. It makes us feel so very human.
  Like you, I?ve been reading dire reports of declining species for many years 
now. They have the value of causing us to pay attention to species in trouble, 
and the sad fact is that the only species likely to endure are the ones we 
humans manage to pay attention to. There was a time when it was better, if you 
were a nonhuman species, to be ignored by humans because we trapped, shot or 
otherwise exploited all of the ones that got our attention. But in the past 40 
years, we have killed all those millions of birds or, let us say, 
unintentionally caused a dramatic population loss, simply by going about 
business as usual.
  Agriculture has intensified. So has development. Open space has been sharply 
reduced. We have simply pursued our livelihoods. We knew it was inimical to 
wolves and mountain lions. But we somehow trusted that all the innocent little 
birds were here to stay. What they actually need to survive, it turns out, is a 
landscape that is less intensely human.
  The Audubon Society portrait of common bird species in decline is really a 
report on who humans are. Let me offer a proposition about Homo sapiens. We are 
the only species on earth capable of an ethical awareness of other species and, 
thus, the only species capable of happily ignoring that awareness. So far, our 
economic interests have proved to be completely incompatible with all but a 
very few forms of life. It?s not that we believe that other species don?t 
matter. It?s that, historically speaking, it hasn?t been worth believing one 
way or another. I don?t suppose that most Americans would actively kill a 
whippoorwill if they had the chance. Yet in the past 40 years its number has 
dropped by 1.6 million.
  In our everyday economic behavior, we seem determined to discover whether we 
can live alone on earth. E.O. Wilson has argued eloquently and persuasively 
that we cannot, that who we are depends as much on the richness and diversity 
of the biological life around us as it does on any inherent quality in our 
genes. Environmentalists of every stripe argue that we must somehow begin to 
correlate our economic behavior ? by which I mean every aspect of it: 
production, consumption, habitation ? with the welfare of other species. 
  This is the premise of sustainability. But the very foundation of our 
economic interests is self-interest, and in the survival of other species we 
see way too little self to care.
  The trouble with humans is that even the smallest changes in our behavior 
require an epiphany. And yet compared to the fixity of other species, the 
narrowness of their habitats, the strictness of their diets, the precision of 
the niches they occupy, we are flexibility itself. 
  We look around us, expecting the rest of the world?s occupants to adapt to 
the changes that we have caused, when, in fact, we have the right to expect 
adaptation only from ourselves.