Sherry Chandler

Vanishing in Plain Sight

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.

The writer is Verlyn Klinkenborg, Millions of Missing Birds, Vanishing in Plain Sight, in yesterday’s NYTimes. He is writing about the new Audubon Society report on the reduced bird population in our nation: northern bobwhite down by 25.5 million over 40 years ago (only 5.5 million left), field sparrow down 18 million to 5.8 million, the population of 20 species down by 68%.

When I was a child, whippoorwills were so common around my Owen County home that they would sit on the doorstep at night and sing. My mother, who will be 90 on September 5, still lives there, but the whippoorwills are gone. I wrote a little poem about it several years ago. Not a brilliant poem, perhaps, but I think it says about everything I was going to say here:

You Can’t Go Home Again

The little house is still there
on the hill
but my cousin logged
the woods that ran
down to the creek
where I used to ramble
on my Tennessee Walker.
My mother has a neighbor now,
on the next hilltop.
A nice young man, she says.
He likes to party.
His bamboo torches light
the night, his pedal steel
has displaced
the whippoorwills that trilled
my raucous lullabies.
How my young sons cried
to hear them jarring in the yard,
my sons accustomed only
to the nighttime
hum of big rigs on the bypass.

— from Dance the Black-Eyed Girl (Finishing Line, 2003)

A day or two ago, Rosalie commented that we must learn to live differently on the earth. Whatever one may think of multinationals, Rosalie is right to say that we must change our ways. The Earth will survive and regenerate. She has done it before. But we’re the ones who will be gone, along with our brothers and sisters the birds and raccoons.

To let Klinkenborg finish the thought:

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.

Possibly related posts:

Mad Robert, Just Plain Bill

Erik Reece in the NYTimes

Follow up on disappearing honey bees

The news is a laugh riot

Birds in decline

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