Saturday, February 13, 2010

Margaret Atwood Misses the Cause for the Effect



In recent piece in The Guardian, Margaret Atwood turns up her literary prowess to note that birds have always carried messages to men:

How to justify the ways of men to birds? How to account for their attraction for us? (For, despite Hitchcock's frightening hunt-and-peck film, The Birds, it is mostly an attraction.) Why is Chekhov's play called "The Seagull" instead of "The Sea Slug"? Why is Yeats so keen on swans and hawks, instead of an interesting centipede or snail, or even an attractive moth? Why is it a dead albatross that is hung around the Ancient Mariner's neck as a symbol that he's been a very bad mariner, instead of, for instance, a dead clam? Why do we so immediately identify with such feathered symbols? These are some of the questions that trouble my waking hours.

For as long as we human beings can remember, we've been looking up. Over our heads went the birds – free as we were not, singing as we tried to. We gave their wings to our deities, from Inanna to winged Hermes to the dove-shaped Holy Spirit of Christianity, and their songs to our angels. We believed the birds knew things we didn't, and this made sense to us, because only they had access to the panoramic picture – the ground we walked on, but seen widely because seen from above, a vantage point we came to call "the bird's eye view". The Norse god Odin had two ravens called Thought and Memory, who flew around the earth during the day and came back at evening to whisper into his ears everything they'd seen and heard; which was why – in the mode of governments with advanced snooping systems, or even of Google Earth – he was so very all-knowing.

Some of us once believed that the birds could carry messages, and that if only we had the skill we'd be able to decipher them. Wasn't the invention of writing inspired, in China, by the flight of cranes? Thoth, the Egyptian god of scribes credited with the invention of hieroglyphic writing, had the head of an ibis. In the ancient world, an entire job category grew up around bird reading: that of augury, performed by seers and prophets who could interpret the winged signs. When Agamemnon and Menelaus were setting out for Troy, two eagles tore apart a pregnant hare and ate the unborn young. The augur's prediction was victory – Troy would fall – but an ill-omened victory with a heavy price to be paid; and so it turned out. "A bird of the air shall carry the voice," says Ecclesiastes, with impressive gravitas, "and those that have wings shall tell the truth"; and we can bet that those bird-borne truths were momentous.

By the 1950s, when I was what's now called a young adult, respect for birds had dwindled considerably. Birds might still be thought to carry messages – "a little bird told me," we were fond of saying – but these messages were no longer from the gods, and they no longer concerned the deaths of kings and the fates of nations. They were more likely to be from the girl who had the locker next to yours, and to be about who just broke up with whom. "Bird-brained" meant stupid, and people with too obsessive a knowledge of birds were considered geeky and ridiculous . . .

. . . But times change, and we're heading back towards an older way of reading the birds. It's Fates of Nations time again, and ill omens seen through birds in flight – or the absence of them - and deadly prices to be paid for getting what you want. The birds have something to tell us again, and the truths are not comfortable ones.


Well said, but not enough said. You will notice, if you read the entire piece, that Margaret Atwood is very poetic and very literary, but she quite never closes in on the problem.

What is threatening birds? What is threatening the environment? Are the birds committing suicide? Are the forests?

No, that's not what is happening.

The birds and trees are not committing suicide -- we are killing them.

Sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes with regret, often without a thought.

And why are we doing this?

Is it because we are evil? Well yes, some individuals are evil, but most people are not. Most people are just trying to survive with as much stuff as possible, and with as little effort as possible.

Isn't that true for just about everyone?

And so we get down to the nexus of the problem.
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The problem is us, but it's not that we are "evil".

The problem is there are too damn many of us.



To give some idea of man's impact in the planet, I animated this map showing 2,000 years of history in just 15 seconds.

The data for this map originates with the late great demographer Nathan Keyfitz.

To be clear, I am very happy Margaret Atwood is speaking up for nature in general, and the birds in particular.

But isn't it long past time for us to drop the literary charade that all this wildlife and wild lands destruction is due to some invisible hand we are too delicate and too polite to actually mention?

To be blunt, the problem is not "industry" or "development" or "consumption".

If you are using those kinds of words, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

The problem is that there are too damn many of us.

Stop at two? How about stop at none?

The Center for Biological Diversity has taken a small step in the right direction in the form of handing out "Endangered Species Condoms" to bring attention to the connection between an exploding population and species extinctions. Extra points for the rhyme: "Hump smarter, save the snail darter."

But of course, condoms are not actually the answer are they?

Surely we are adults and can note that the most common form of family planning in the world is voluntary surgical sterilization, not condoms (which fail at their task at a 15% annualized rate).

And surely we are adults and can note that in the U.S., the main problem is not high birth rates, but unbridled immigration?

In fact, the U.S. has the fastest population growth rate of any industrialized country in the world, and more than 95% of that population growth is due to immigration.

But is the Center for Biological Diversity talking about that?

No, they are not. Instead, they are fighting secure fencing along the border -- despite the fact that it is the single most important enviromental action being taken in the U.S. today.

As I noted in a 2006 post entitled Drawing the Line at the Border for Wildlife's Sake, there were 33 million legal and illegal immigrants living in the United States, and those 33 million were a combined population greater than that of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, Dallas, San Antonio, Detroit, San Jose, Indianapolis, San Francisco, Jacksonville, Columbus, Austin, Baltimore, Memphis, and Milwaukee.

Thirty-three million people in the U.S. is 12 million more housing units, 15.8 million more passenger cars, 825 million more imported barrels of oil, and 75 million acres of forest cut to supply their paper and wood needs.

Can we talk about that? Not yet, apparently. Not yet.

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