Ultimate Concerns

                                   

Paul Tillich (in Systematic Theology, 1967, p. 3-14) concluded that one’s ultimate concern is one’s religion. Because he was a believer, his religion was theological, or spiritual, that is God-related.  In his day it had long seemed the better part of valor to join the crowd and rationalize what might transcend animal existence; our minds seemed otherwise inexplicable.  So the concept of God and creation by fiat were invented as a first paradigm of how existence on this planet operates. But Tillich saw that both religious orthodoxy and fundamentalism may fail to be ultimately concerned if they elide aspects of the interpretation of one’s situation.  He concluded, for example, that we should not personalize God, since the best we could do was to postulate God as the ground of being.  Some of the orthodox declared him an atheist for that.

What, therefore, might the creative self-interpretation of existence now be for a secularist mentality, one that sees little basis for asking the question of God?  We are, after all, a long way from the prophets of Judea, the Roman emperor who instituted The Church of Rome, and the natural history of Aristotle. There may be a question of ultimate origins—some pre-Big Bang status quo-- but this is lost in time, so currently beyond any promising imaginary capability for a recent species like ours. It may also involve unlearning the indoctrinations of the religious system one was brought up in.  And unless one becomes a specialist, this may take half a lifetime. Few therefore get to it; only the rather old can undertake it, and only if they have persisted in their questioning.

Indeed, this creative task may have heretofore been impossible because the essential historical perspective on the nature of existence was lacking. This is the tragedy of unlucky circumstances for those generations who experienced that long interregnum.  Darwin gave us a clue in 1859, but it is the insights of the evolutionary science he launched 150 years ago, and the new science of neurobiology that are at last providing the perspective we need.   

The Darwinian insight is simply that we are all related, i.e., descended from a common ancestor.  One still  needs an understanding of the processes of existence: how these operate aside from the reproductive cycle  we  may also partake of as individuals.  A. N. Whitehead gave us that, but not until the 1920s, when he showed that all Earthly existence is a reworking of the same building blocks of existence, the atoms and molecules. We borrow from past evolutionary accomplishments, thus creating a short-lived present during which we perhaps add a bit of style , then pass things along. “The many become one and are augmented by one, ad infinitum,” Whitehead said.  The accumulation of innovations drives the continuing creative synthesis. Natural selection of the fittest shapes  particular  populations to environmental change imposed  by the atomic energy of the planet. This energy is focused in insolation and the plate tectonics that sets the stage for so much else. And it is itself a byproduct of the waning energy of the sun that gave us birth.  We are  embroiderings of stellar dust, but we know nothing of eternity. We have a rough idea of Earth’s beginnings, and we can anticipate its end when our sun’s energy is expended.

So, it is not origins, but the continuing drive for change and its innovative possibilities that is the mystery of existence on this planet.  We need first to be mindful of the long evolution of the processes that prepared the way for us.  

A predecessor of Whitehead’s at Harvard, Charles Sanders Peirce, said that everything we know is an example of the habits of Nature.   Habits take time to form.

 When the stellar gases that escaped our sun’s formation had cooled enough to allow atoms to form, interactive energetic and physico-chemical  processes (presumably common to the broader universe) shaped the results: they produced, initially,  this sterile planet with a different atmosphere than we now enjoy.  After a few more billion years of experimental change, self-organizing natural processes which we began by denying, produced life in the shallow seas about 4.6 billion years ago.  For some 80% of its subsequent existence, life existed only at the microbial level, unknown to us until the microscope was invented, and Louis Pasteur first identified germs in late 19^th Century.  Not until about 460 million years ago did plants begin colonizing and reshaping  land surfaces. This paved the way for animals to also migrate out of the marine environment. Only 125 million years ago, mammals evolved, and only 65 million years ago, after dinosaurs were eliminated by Earth’s collision with an asteroid, did mammals radiate and multiply in the vacated niche .  This made room for us. 

Our  lineage, the Hominids, appeared about three million years ago, and our own species, Homo sapiens, less than 200,000 years ago, when some  genetic saltation provided  the larger skull that made room for the larger brain that enabled the development of a mind with superior reflective memory which makes us unique in several respects.   And only in the last 10,000 years or so have we evolved, socially this time, to become quasi-civilized, though inheritors of most of the sensibilities of the hunter-gatherers we were until so recently. The most recent genetic change in ourselves may be that for blond skin and hair that surprised our brown progenitors only about 10,000 years ago in Scandinavia. 

                                      

For a naturalist then, one who knows something of the amazing diversity of life on the planet, all of it best explained by evolutionary processes, it suffices that we are evolved simians. No need for the exceptionalism of special creation. Indeed, it should be humbling that the evolutionary  processes had to give us such a high reproductive  potential, apparently to enable us to survive natural hazards while the big brain’s potential was slowly actualized . And again humbling that we have not yet learned to adapt this reproductive potential to the changed circumstances of an over-populated world, even as we boast of the big brain.

The problems  of existence are thus of two kinds.  As a species produced by the environment, we are best adapted to  given environments.  We should perhaps ask why Western civilization has made presumptions about  basically flawed personalities such  as  Christianity’s notion of  original  sin, or Freud’s  unconscious,  concepts that seem to bother  

Asian societies much less.

Though the big brain has made us remarkably adaptive, and we can reshape many environments, there are many limits. Even 2000 years ago Aristotle said that intelligent existence involves living within the limits of our environment, whatever that be. Just as biologists have identified half a dozen life regions on the planet, each with a different assortment of climates and plants and animals, our political economy needs to recognize different carrying capacities, and help people refrain from overextending themselves in environments with limited carrying capacity. The niggardliness of nature so many, including economists, complain about, is mostly a problem of human overpopulation.

Secondly, the political economy of nations, since it has to do with the rational expectations of varying carrying capacity, must respect the existing natural constraints. Finally, and probably most difficult, the greed of a minority of the population must be democratically fenced in.  An economy based on the utopian notions of a free market do not do this. Compounded by overpopulation, this is probably the central dilemma of Western civilization.

So what is the ultimate concern of a reasonably conscientious secularist today?  If a concept of God comforts you, why God bless you. It may have been helpful for me to share  my family’s notion of God when I was young, but it no longer explains anything I need explained.  Existence is its own reward.  The world is fascinating, and my circumstances have provided a reasonable opportunity to explore and exercise my capabilities.  I have not willfully hurt another person, and have tried to be helpful.  I feel I have attained control of my own will, which some consider a mark of spirituality.  Like Emily Dickinson, I feel that instead of going to heaven at last, I’ve enjoyed it all along because the journey itself sufficed.  I have more cosmic piety than most people, and my concern has been to do things as well as I could. 

WHAT BIRD IS THAT?

Apparently oblivious to the significance of form in identifying species, an American student interning at the British Museum is said to have put the label “Trumpeter Swan” on a 1585 watercolor John White painted in Virginia on one of the early expeditions to what became colonial America.

This, despite the fact that Kim Sloan, curator of the John White Collection at the British Museum, had already pointed out that the bird in question had a knob, which is characteristic of the Mute Swan. Neither the Trumpeter nor the Tundra Swans have knobs. A 1960s identification of this same painting by University of North Carolina staff was apparently also mistaken as Trumpeter Swan because the bill color was black. Sloan pointed out that 16^th Century watercolor pigments included lead, which often turns the original colors black. So, beware of identifications.

We easily overlook that we have been imprinted by Roger Tory Peterson’s 1934 interpretive methods in A Field Guide to the Birds, now in a 4^th edition (1980). Peterson focused all diagnosis on the “field mark.”  This was a useful methodological trick he learned from an illustration in Two Little Savages, a book by Ernest Thompson Seton who taught a prior generation about Nature. But Peterson copyrighted the field mark, and dominated the field as Seton never could.

Field marks are handy, especially for people in a hurry, like Americans. But people learned to identify birds for themselves long before Peterson provided that short-cut.  A plate of bird drawings in the French dictionary, Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustre (p.715 in the 1938 edition), shows lovely illustrations, including a Mute Swan without a knob. The artist apparently simply considered this an unnecessary detail in a plate that would in any event be greatly reduced for reproduction.

Problems of misidentification have been rampant. In the 1930s George J. Wallace planned a life-history of Bicknell’s Thrush, a bird restricted to the mountain tops of the Northeast U. S. and adjacent Canada.  To his dismay, he found that a significant fraction of the specimens in museum collections had been misidentified, even though originally collected by the experts of the day. That frustrating experience gave us a delightful little book on bird taxonomy instead of a life history.

Likewise, in browsing through the bird skin collections of the Department of Ornithology at Cornell University a few years ago, Kenneth Parkes, a former student there who had meanwhile become the distinguished curator of birds at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, made a surprising discovery. He saw that a specimen labeled immature Bonaparte’s Gull was actually an immature Little Gull, a European vagrant. Almost embarrassing was the fact that the bird had been taken on Cayuga Lake by three of the most notable bird students of their day:  Arthur A. Allen, the first full-time professor of ornithology in America; Louis Agassiz Fuertes, the greatest bird  portraitist of early 20^th Century; and Ludlow Griscom, one of Allen’s first graduate students at Cornell who later showed all of us how to identify birds without shooting them, the same man Roger Peterson would call the court of last recourse in bird identification.

A more recent conundrum in bird identification is of course that of  the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the Arkansas River bottoms of the old Mississippi River Embayment. In 2004, after fifty years without confirmed reports of this great bird, two supposed sightings initiated highly-publicized, large-scale field investigations in order to at last confirm the presumed persistence of a pair or more of these woodpeckers. If the birds had indeed survived all these years, they would warrant a massive conservation effort to ensure continued well-being.  But two full seasons of field work by scores of competent searchers uncovered nothing, so the effort sputtered.

It is perhaps inevitable that with increasing public interest in any human activity, there will be an increase in questionable testimony and commentary in that field. Ready or not, people like to have a say in things. Especially will this be so where funding may be available to pursue the pros and cons. In such a broader context, questions of bird identification are mere examples of  a process. The problem becomes truly complex and stubborn when premature assumptions involve social attitudes..

In late 20^th Century, the growing urban population in advanced societies, now eager to demonstrate a concern for “the environment” which events increasingly posed as threat, sprouted a phobia, “the threat of invasive species.”  Scientists had of course been complaining about aspects of this problem for several decades. The threat is meaningful, but the public phobia is mostly based on naïve perception.

All three of planet Earth’s dominant civilizations—Chinese, Indian, and Western—have overpopulated their worlds, and thereby dramatically disrupted the evolutionary communities of  all the climatic regions. Although long neglected and discounted, there is now no escaping the fact that  most plant and animal populations—except that of humans  and a few adventives---are in drastic decline. This means that our take-over of  the environment to nurture our swollen billions has already eliminated a significant fraction of  the larger organisms produced by evolutionary experimentation. The survival prospects  for what remains are dire, and there is little alternative to being dubious about our ability to alter that march of events we set in motion, especially some 10,000 years ago, but more specifically 500 years ago in Europe. This, of course, is when we invented that economic system based on endless accumulation which we call Capitalism.

Invasive Species, so-called, are the “less desirable” or “out of place” plants and animals that come to compete unfavorably with the familiar, and therefore preferred-because-adapted-to, prior aggregations we call life communities. Although modern instruments currently enable us to contend over the complexities of these evolutionary processes, most species emerge because units of existing populations become isolated enough to allow the differential accumulation of  genetic changes. Such changes, whether physical or psychological, often suffice to prevent interbreeding. For the last century, this geographical isolation of population segments has been our criterion of what constitutes a biological species. At the level of micro-organisms, such invasions are often considered no more than infections.

Until “just now” we have been oblivious to the fact that our inveterate mania for road-building, mostly to provide access to resources of one kind or another, has so modified the continents that we have destroyed much of the spatial isolation that enabled species to form and persist in the first place. We have homogenized habitats, to the fatal disadvantage of  habitat specialists, and the dismaying advantage of  those generalist species we call unfriendly invasives. Besides, especially since the Age of  Exploration in the 16^th Century, but the more so the more mobile we are, we have moved species around, willy-nilly, and set the stage for the massive era of invasives we now complain about.

Finally, it seems likely that our unsophisticated  concern about invasive species has redounded to a focused abuse of  one bird species in particular, the Mute Swan. In the 1930s, someone doing field studies in Rhode Island, rediscovered the obvious fact that a species new to the area tends to compete for food and space with prior residents. The Mute Swan was expanding its Long Island Sound populations at the time. A decade or two later, the state wildlife commissioners of that Northeast region became concerned about this intrusion into new territory, and recommended that the swan’s numbers be stabilized before it got out of hand. This seemed reasonable, and several States agreed to limit their swan populations to a number they felt acceptable, especially in view of the fact that the general public values this swan as one of the few large birds that can be approached. The same public should of course be taught that so large a bird will likely be insistent on its “personal space,” and might be dangerous if its territory is foolishly invaded.

A few State wildlife agencies, or even staff acting individually, unfortunately went to extremes and announced that the Mute Swan must be extirpated. This was notable in Maryland and Connecticut. That some groups had different agendas in mind became plain when, about 2005, it became known that they really wanted to eliminate Mute Swans in order to introduce Trumpeter Swans from the northwestern U.S. This was a bird they considered “nobler” in bearing, and thus a better trophy bird for the drastically declining hunting clan that heretofore provided local license fees for State budgets, and political support. But this looked like swapping one “invasive” species for another. It certainly elided the fact that waterfowlers who valued the “split rail traditions” of their sport had long refused to shoot “flying pup tents,” as they called Mute Swans.

It also elided the fact that native species, like ducks, said to be disadvantaged by the Mute Swan’s “competition,” have mostly been victims of dispossession by agriculture on their breeding grounds, and may soon be further decimated by drought.

The process became nasty when two ladies joined forces to challenge the lack of “due process” in permitting this carnage. They sued the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service.  And they twice won in court!  So the old-boy network circumvented the need to tell us what is really going on by getting a collusive Congressman to help change the law. The trick is well-known. Simply add an addendum, surreptitiously, to some complicated bill that has already passed muster. No discussion necessary.

Perhaps the real tragedy of this debacle lies in the public confusion being generated. A full century of  public education about the importance of conserving wildlife may be at stake  The irrationality of the present campaign against the Mute Swan is grotesquely illustrated by the demonization perpetrated  against this bird by none other than the National Wildlife Federation’s long-admired magazine for children, Ranger Rick.  An illustration whose demonic imagery appeared in a 2007 issue of Ranger Rick, is testimony to this strange credo.       

                                                                               

Nature's Design

Shortly after reorganizing itself in 1934, the National Audubon Society adopted a promising credo, stating intriguingly that, “We believe in the wisdom of nature’s design.”  I was headquarters biologist for the society from 1958 to 1977, but at no time were any of  us challenged to spell out the implications of that motto. It was essentially forgotten.

This is tragic, because neither did the rest of American civilization have any inkling to the guidance such a credo might have provided.  Rather, we transplanted Europeans continued hell-bent on developing every acre we had wrested from the original Amerindians. Our national parks are now called “The best idea America ever had,” but that brief epoch of  park creation, mostly in early 20th Century, was the work of a small minority, pursued over the objections of a vociferous majority. North America’s central prairie is the largest patch of deep black soil on the planet, a chernozem, but we have yet to agree to preserve a sample of its grasslands and biota in a suitable national park.  

The threat of global warming that now hangs over us is a byproduct of centuries of such neglect of the  rest of The Creation. Our notions of special creation almost obliterated awareness of the fact that we are just one more recent product of a continuing evolutionary process of species creation.  Every species is essentially an experiment in more creatively using the same building blocks of nature, the atoms and molecules, each  in its time. Evolution progresses by innovation.   We are, in a sense, embroiderings of the stardust of the universe!  We should, therefore, as a primary obligation of cosmic piety, safeguard the natural systems that produce such marvels. This is what Nature is: a set of processes and their products. The design we detect in nature is the patterning we see in the processes. So, as participants we must not truncate systems, nor their varied, tentative accomplishments: what we call biodiversity. This cumulative diversity is the potentiality of the future. We know no destinies, not even our own, so we must learn to live in concert.  

Having first evolved in southeast Africa, we became strangers to one another by dispersing to all the continents while still pedestrians. Newly aware of this, we must now, as fellow humans, forge social systems built on mutual respect; in time to join in limiting our numbers to leave room for other created things. This is the most sincere way of expressing a collective appreciation of  the creative process itself.   In less than ten thousand years of civilization we of course accumulated lots of amateurish  misinterpretations. Time changes things, so what seemed appropriate a thousand or a hundred years ago may need reinterpretation.

Because we venerated them so, our early religious ideas may need more recasting. Our more recent scientific notions tend to be self-correcting, since we argue them from the beginning. And we abandon them more readily, since they are obviously of our own making, Religious notions seem so ancient that we have forgotten what inspired them.   Having experienced two major economic depressions in one life-time, I consider the early Church’s ban on usury a wise constraint we should have maintained against our more greedy compatriots. We let them obfuscate issues by chattering about “animal spirits.”  

Indeed, it is high time we recognized that in the 20th Century, at least in the U.S.A., the economy became our religion. Paul Tillich warned of this in mid-century when he reminded us that, functionally, our ultimate concern is our religion, no matter what other we profess. Reasserting such awareness may help our churches update their views and provide the leadership we need in creating a new sense of natural togetherness.

To untangle the false commitments we were talked into, especially since World War II, let us place our economic system in historical perspective. It helps to remember that the system is only about 500 yeas old. It dates from The Reformation, when The Church’s   control over domestic affairs was cast off. We cannot say that “we’ve always done it this way.” The price of this “freedom” was high because The Church had at least insisted on a wage sufficient to maintain a family. More than a minimum wage, or even a living wage.

Economists, however, have often wanted to believe that they dealt with complex economic behaviorisms in an atomic fashion, like real scientists. This leaning, often called “physics envy,” caused them to develop an acute form of reductionism, i.e., focusing on parts of the puzzle rather than the whole. All things are indeed so complex that beginning with the parts is often a necessary methodology. But it poses the problem of  not forgetting that parts don’t constitute the complex things we’re trying to understand.

For example, to make Economics seem more objective, the complexities of the natural processes referred to above were discounted, and economists considered all non-human things mere “natural resources.”  Such resources are said to have no innate value (ends) of their own. The morality of exploiting such resources is thus elided.  Should you quibble, the economist will say that there is no way of agreeing on the value of anything except by measuring your willingness to pay for it.  No one asks whether you have the ability to pay. A sort of put-up-or-shut-up stance.  

Mainline economists then became enamored of mathematics, another form of abstraction, since numbers are poor substitutes for the complexity of real things. But they called theirs the real world. Finally, thanks partly to the triumphal afterglow of “winning the Cold War,” many economists endorsed the efficiency of moving production abroad to take advantage of cheaper wages. But this undermined our own consumption levels and aggregate demand fell. Corporate managers, grown too big to constrain democratically, reduced production and invested in an orgy of financial speculation instead. Granted deregulation by compliant, ideologically-inspired regulators and politicians, they invented fictitious (dishonest) credit money which they called financial innovation (junk bonds, securitization, credit default swaps), and thus built the credit bubble that burst in late 2008, dragging the world into depression.

Western civilization has thus embarked on a 21st century with problems of formidable complexity,  almost all of them problems of its own making.
(1) Our numbers now exceed the planet’s carrying capacity: there is no sustainability. This is a consequence of sheer numbers;
(2) of  inequities of wealth and income which “dumbs-down” a majority of  the population by excluding people from adequate education ; and
(3) of the misapplication of destructive technological inventions, many of them mistakenly considered blessings of our civilization. For example, the internal combustion engine is disrupting the climate (not just warming it), and after World War II heavy draglines and bulldozers initiated large-scale drainage of wetlands and all kinds of other disruptive landscape alterations. And
(4) a defunct but still politically dominant economic system. These problems interact as positive-feedbacks, so it is likely that no one of them can be solved by itself.

 Having learned a lot about our deep history in just the last century, however, we may be almost ready to reintegrate ourselves into the evolutionary scenario. It would take imaginative leadership, but our religions might reinvigorate themselves by adopting the new, scientific creation story, and keep it open this time.  We would need to agree on reducing human population so that it can be accommodated by natural surpluses, but be wise enough to realize that this would first require a much more egalitarian support system, so that all people would feel advantageously involved. We may wish to retain the price-setting functions of capitalism, but would otherwise build fences to prevent abuses of free-market entrepreneurship. We would zone the uses of  Nature, both terrestrial and marine, so as to preserve biodiversity and more general ecological services. We would take Adam Smith’s neglected advice to keep the firm small, so as to make it serve the public interest, not just profit-making. It wouldn’t be Heaven-on-Earth, but a lot better than what we now struggle with.

BOOKS…

                                                 

The public library in Fall River, Mass., where I grew up, had inscribed above its portal,

The People’s University.  For me, who soon became an omnivorous reader, this was verily my first university. It was the early reading I found there that shaped my outer world, beyond family and the ethnic enclave that nurtured me. Even so, the perspective was regional. But as Emily Dickinson wrote, “Even the queen thinks provincially.”

Learning to read a book a week, almost for the rest of my life, of course complicates the

task of picking out that handful of books which most influenced me. A book may have

been impressive for its illustrations rather than text. Given my interest in birds, any book illustrated by Louis Agassiz Fuertes would remain imprinted.

* What most shaped my early outlook, even a subsequent career, was the outpouring of  natural history books by Ernest Thompson Seton, beginning with Two Little Savages, and all self-illustrated. I became a Seton Indian. I made my own bow and arrow and went out to kill a woodchuck, just to prove that I could. But I never became a hunter.

During a somewhat  parallel experience with Boy Scouting, I was intrigued that Seton’s “go-light” approach was eclipsed by Daniel Carter Beard’s “pioneering” approach, wherein scouts were tutored in cutting the sapling growth of  southern New England to build bridges, towers, and shelters. This reflected the American temper but lost most of us the opportunity of learning to live in harmony with nature.

* I like to think I learned English by reading Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and most of his other works. It helped that we shared interests in natural history and both  lived in southeastern New England.

*William Beebe, made famous by his use of the bathysphere in the Caribbean, among other adventures of a rich career in biology, introduced me to the splendor of the planet

by writing  The Edge of the Jungle in 1921.    It was years before I could go see for myself.

*Robert Cushman Murphy’s Oceanic Birds of South America (2 vol.) was probably the most exciting book I acquired, thanks to the exhortation of  William Vogt, who gave it a glowing tribute in Audubon Magazine in 1934. The introductory chapters were a short course in oceanography, first acquainting me with oceanic zonations and El Nino events. I got to know Murphy and later circumnavigated South America with his volumes in hand.

*Aldo Leopold’s reflections on the wildlife conservation task first appealed to me in

his Game Management (1937), but like everyone else I did not appreciate his poetic

philosophical insights until the posthumous Sand County Almanac  appeared in 1949. I had hoped to do graduate work with him, but he died the year before I graduated from Brown University. I worked on California Condor problems with his son Starker; and knew his youngest daughter, Estella, who was a paleobotanist.                                                                                                               

*Charles Elton, thanks to his Animal Ecology (1927) and other works, became my Charles Darwin, though I did not discover him until I studied wildlife management at the University of  Massachusetts, Amherst, a decade after that publication. I corresponded with him about lemming cycles from Canadian Labrador during World War II, and had the pleasure of meeting him at Oxford in 1966. Having suggested that I come for afternoon tea, he came out to greet me when my taxi arrived and said, “How shall I introduce you? Are you a doctor?”  When I said No, he said charmingly, “Oh, you’re a mister, just like me.”

*Although I have been a great admirer of Alfred North Whitehead and that handful of other Process philosophers, and although my friend Charles Hartshorne considered him an incomplete philosopher, I feel more kinship for George Santayana’s  Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923), especially because he saw soul as us seen from the inside. In his novel, The Last Puritan, he suggested that although “experience speaks through the mouth of older men…the best experience that they can bring us is that of their salvaged youth.”

*Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879) introduced me to economics. I learned of  the book through a fellow weatherman at an isolated Air Force weather station in the high subarctic of Labrador during World War II. George, who was known as “the single taxer,” advocated keeping land in public ownership, and renting it for use in lieu of taxing income. This made so much sense to me that I decided to study economics in order to learn why his proposal was not implemented. The short answer is “Entrenched practice.” This insight became a foundation for my studies and conservation practice in ensuing decades.              

  

*Paul Shepard’s Nature and Madness (1982) is, I feel, a must-read book on the psycho-history of the founders of western civilization, a tour de force in human ecology. It is sad, but symptomatic, that the Sierra Club, the book’s publisher, soon remainded it. Paul bought these remainders and doled them out to friends and enquirers.

*I began reading historian Immanuel Wallerstein in 1985, thus being introduced to the ambiguities of capitalism and making better sense of why this ruling economy has abused both people and the environment for five hundred years. His 1999 book, THE END of The World as We Know It, is my favorite introduction to the complexities of this theme.                

Again, it was my pleasure to come to know Manny when he retired to Yale as a Research

Fellow. We lunch together now and then, and discuss the human condition.

THE LAKE

                  

The first environment away from home that provided me with a warm sense of place was a summer cottage—a tar-paper shack—my father built for us on Cranbury Neck cove, on the east side of South Watuppa Pond, the southern half of a long glacial lake southeast of Fall River, Massachusetts, in southern New England. The northern half of the lake was

retained as a drinking water reservoir.

This sense of place I speak of is born of important events that happen to us there. Our memories wed the event to the place, and we recall it as magical. There is of course a flood of such important events when we are young and so much is new. 

For example, when I was seven or eight, before having learned to swim alone, I crawled over the rocks of the lake’s shallow zone, and these were mountains to me. Indeed, because I was also learning to read English (a second language) at that time, and had somehow been introduced to the highest Andean peak (Acongagua of Chile), a brown-tipped rock that rose slightly above the others in the ice-push zone of  my lake is still Mt. Acongagua in my mind, even though I have since seen the actual Chilean peak.

When we were oral people, such places were said to speak to us. Today we can say that we speak for such places.

The cottage on the lake was a godsend for a dozen years. It allowed all of us to escape the gray surround of Fall River for two months and more every summer. Barefoot time.  We seven siblings, each in our way, swam, boated, and fished the lake. Surprisingly, however, only I built on that experience to became a naturalist

It was here, at age eight, that I first came face to face with a wild bird and lost my heart to this colorful tribe. I came to see this as an epiphany. The bird was a male Black-and-White Warbler, only five inches long. It landed on the porch railing, four feet away. I froze and it eyed me for less than two seconds before flying off. It seemed to me to focus all the energy of  existence itself! I knew I would have to learn all I could about  these amazing kin.

I have identified nearly 2500 bird species since then, and though I no longer chase them, I never tire of them, at home or abroad. They are my firmest tie to Nature, but not alone in providing a sense of commonalty with the world.

A surprising sequel is that I met no one else interested in birds until I joined the Boy Scouts six years later. But gradually, thanks to that chance meeting when I was eight, I introduced many to birds by learning to make a career of Audubon Society education work, even devoting a dozen years to warning of the threat of chemical pesticide uses that

killed so many birds.

Melting Pot

                                                                                                             

The parochial school I first went to was only a block from our home. But a long block. Long enough to be dangerous for a skinny kid who had entered school a year late because of frail health. The danger, for me, inhered in the fact that an occasional bully from the Irish neighborhood, not far away, liked nothing better than bloodying the nose of a vulnerable Canuck. All he had to do was catch a victim in mid-block, too far to retreat homeward, and not close enough to run for the school, where others would offer protection.  I suffered at least two bloody noses before learning to pace myself carefully and learn to identify dangerous lurkers from afar. And I learned to run.

This hazard, of course, was a version of the perennial social play for territorial advantage.  All species face it, but it is made worse by economic inequities in human groups.  As in most of the Northeast in those days, the dominant group was Anglo-American, that Protestant elite which Max Weber, the sociologist, saw as ideal capitalists.  They were those who had come earliest and accumulated more, learning how to maintain their advantages and passing them along. Their children were advantaged from the start, so did not have to compete with other groups, only among themselves. In Fall River, they occupied the Highlands, well above “the other side of the tracks.”  They owned the cotton mills and the banks, important sources of money-making. James Chase provided a revealing introduction to the advantages and difficulties of  this life style, right there in Fall River, in a book I think is entitled What We Have Lost.

Advantaged social groups devote almost daily attention to the invention of apt reasons for their good fortune.  This is one practical role of country clubs and Rotary Clubs. They tell us that they are “more entrepreneurial, more prudent, harder-working, just better-fitted to be leaders of the community”.  With considerable help from academic theoreticians, these self-fulfilling rationalizations become the conventional wisdom of the day and are energetically propagated. It is itself a good investment to pay others to praise your practices, especially if these have an iniquitous bite.

What then made wealth-accumulation reasonably secure was, not only early access to land and its resources, but, especially, a ready supply of cheap labor. From the 1850s onward, wave after wave of European immigrants innocently submitted themselves to the vagaries of an unfamiliar American economy.  Crowded out by population growth and stagnant economies back home, they became the exploitable, landless proletariat. In southern New England, first came the Irish, then Germans, Italians, Poles, Portuguese, and others. Blacks, not yet African-Americans, were of a special case. They were scarce in New England until the technical revolution in agriculture, mostly after World War II, forced them to seek refuge in northern cities. Latinos also came later.

My parents were wed in Canada, but the economic promise for a musician like by father were so obviously low up there that my mother suggested that he visit cousins of hers in Massachusetts. That way he found a church organist’s job, and concluded, rather innocently, that by teaching piano in addition, he would make ends meet.  He apparently did not much consider the size of the family that would soon need support.  The Church advocated  large families, oblivious to the fact that providing more hands when people were mostly farmers might be helpful, but that in an industrial society it simply meant more mouths to feed on inadequate wages, whether in cotton mills or elsewhere.  Sizeable French-Canadian enclaves grew with the mills of southern New England, and this was my milieu.

    

I soon became aware of the socio-economic problem this posed for me.  Being first-born of seven living children, I was needed as a wage-earner to help the family’s standard of  living from sinking too low. So, instead of going to high school, that standard preparation for earning a living in that day’s economic system, I was sent to a two-year business school.  My meager wage helped, but it meant delaying the pursuit of my own interests for a decade and more. I became a bookkeeper, took dictation, was a file clerk, and begged for a small raise annually, or perhaps more often, as needed.  It taught me about the business world, and the more I learned, the less it satisfied me. Escaping these conditions meant, somehow, escaping the ethnic enclave that had nourished me.  I realized that if I married here, I would probably be anchored for life. Besides, my bookkeeper’s salary would not support marriage!  So I avoided girls.

The nasty side of my dilemma was driven home to me when I lost my job in 1933. This forced me to seek work elsewhere. By sheer good luck, a small group of us who were studying birds for a Boy Scout merit badge, were taken to outer Cape Cod by our counselor. There, in North Eastham, was a small private ornithological research station operated by Dr. Oliver L. Austin, Sr. of Tuckahoe, New York, for the benefit of his son, Oliver, Jr., who had recently graduated from Harvard University with one of the early PhD degrees in the study of birds.  They banded birds and focused on population studies of the Common Tern.

The Austin son had had a falling-out with his father, and the station was being managed by Maurice Broun, a talented non-degree, all-around naturalist who had worked for Edward Howe Forbush, state ornithologist for Massachusetts, during the preparation of the three-volume Birds of Massachusetts. It was winter, so Broun cheerfully took time out to show our group this sandy Pitch Pine terrain between the open Atlantic Ocean and the semi-enclosed Massachusetts Bay.  At one point, I apparently impressed him by “calling” my first flock of Oldsquaw Ducks as these sped by offshore.

When, a bit later, Broun said that he was looking for an assistant to help with his studies, I asked “How about me?”  He agreed to try me if Dr. Austin, Sr. approved.  The good doctor made what was for me my first incoming long-distance telephone call and after a bit of haggling over details, hired me. I was 21. Broun, recently married to the daughter of a local sea captain, was six years older. He was friendly, helpful, and fair, but a strict task-master. I learned fast and felt that I had at last become quasi-professional in the bird world.

Unfortunately, this adventure was short-lived. The Austin son soon discovered that working for others was less fun than being his own boss, so he set about undermining Broun’s performance in phone calls to his father. Broun would not stand for this and quit hardly a month after I joined him.  I too quit, two weeks later. But new windows had been opened. Broun went on to become the distinguished resident naturalist of Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in eastern Pennsylvania, and the Austin Station is now a Massachusetts Audubon Society sanctuary.

My old office job was reactivated and I returned to bookkeeping for a while, but I now wanted out.  When, a few months later, I gave notice that I would quit and go back to school to professionalize my interest in birds, the office manager I had dutifully performed for all these years offered  me twice as much as he was paying me if I would stay. I only later learned to call this my “surplus value,” but it was no less insulting. This withholding of most wage-earners’ surplus value supports the endless capital accumulation of the relative handful of people who dominate the economic system. Later, when  conservationist policy became a responsibility, I studied this system more systematically.  It is the overlooked cause of the conservation problem itself. 

                                                                                                          

My 98th Birthday

Women

   With age, more men hopefully accept the fact that women are the more important half of the human race. Women stabilize us and keep the social system going despite the follies we men impose in pursuing short-sighted objectives. But it behooves us to express more appreciation that this is so, particularly because the focus on technological innovation of recent centuries makes all our lives increasingly tenuous. Indeed, so bent on control have men been that we may, in this 21^st century, have spelled our own doom, at least as a civilization, if not quite a species.

   The British child-psychiatrist, D.W. Winnicott, was convincing in showing that, for all of us, survival depends on having a “good enough mother.”  But some of us are fortunate in having had a mother who was much more than merely competent in holding us to her bosom during those crucial first three years. Mine was such a mother. Whatever I accomplished in a long life seems to me a consequence of her having nurtured the self in me for over twenty years.  As I recall, the nearest she ever came to reproach was to ask, “Roland, do you really want to do that?”

    Born Angelina (Morin) Desjardins in Sorel, P.Q., the first of eight children, she gave up secondary schooling in order to help her mother cope with yet another child.  Marrying at 27, to a Belgian musician who had come to head the musical programs of a small Catholic college, she too had eight children, all of them in Fall River, Mass., where my father juggled being church organist and piano teacher (at $1 a lesson at first).

Economically marginal existence in one of the last of the stingy cotton mill towns of southern New England. Sheltered in an ethnic enclave, she never learned English!  But her five sons survived World War II, three of them managed college, and everyone led productive lives. 

   My good wife of fifty years (1947-1998), Muriel Crowley of Brooklyn, N.Y., was of English (Yorkshire) parentage. A graduate of Brooklyn College, she was on the swim team there, and as cadet nurse she earned a master’s degree at the Yale School of Nursing.  We met at a summer conservation workshop in East Greenwhich, Rhode Island, where I was naturalist  while at Brown University, and she was camp nurse. It was she who decided that I might make a good husband, and gently talked me into abandoning some thirty years of  bachelorhood. 

    Calm, frugal, and practical, she helped me manage the tenuous development of a post-war career as Audubon Society naturalist and executive. Not interested in sex, she was nevertheless always receptive, and immediately won my complete allegiance. We had three rewarding children. She befriended nearly a dozen attractive women I brought home. That way, the women did the hugging and kissing, but I enjoyed  them socially.  The star of that entourage was on the Board of the National Audubon Society while I was headquarters biologist. Knowing how economically marginal Audubon salaries were, she loaned us a cottage  on the northwest shore of Mount Desert Island, Maine, for twenty-five consecutive summers.  A godsend to the whole family.  She and my daughter Connie  became good friends.

  

    Muriel died at 78 in 1998, after a long bout with Parkinson’s syndrome. She had been school nurse, community activist (Norwalk), and a national leader in breeding, training, and showing Gordon Setters and black & tan English Cockers, which she called miniature  Gordons.  Despite the rather asocial focus on birds, nature conservation, and philosophical ideas I imposed during our fifty years together, she said “My only real disappointment with you is that you never learned to love dogs as much as I do.” I was 85.

   For three years I coasted on that half-century’s good relations, but then rather suddenly felt isolated and irritated by my aloneness. Our doctor had said, “You’re in very good health, but remember that you will continue to need someone to hug.”  Unfortunately, age makes us much less attractive, so my doctor’s prescription was only a desideratum.

   In 2001, however, I spent a month alone at a friend’s new house in Costa Rica, near the Panama border. It was their dry season, and I enjoyed the birds and a nearby botanical garden.  There I met a slender expatriate American women of sixty.  We soon discovered that we both suffered isolation, and she consented to be my doctor’s prescription. So at 89, she helped me rediscover women.  But 2000 miles of intervening geography is a real handicap. Neither of us wanted to change home base. I visited one more year, and helped her visit me once, but after that we limited ourselves to e-mails. She did say, when I thanked her, that my pleasure had been her pleasure squared.

   Guided by wishful thinking, I expected soon to find someone to hug nearer home, but instead I had half a dozen friendly refusals. Too old to be a significant other, I nevertheless met and enjoyed a fifty-year old artist who lived nearby. We became fond of each other and I learned that being a helpful “uncle” had its own satisfactions. 

ANGST – fear of what’s out there.

Robert C. Neville, in Reconstruction of Thinking, (1981 p. 20), describes the “terror of existence” as “the vague apprehension of nature’s blind forces only barely humanized by fragile forms of experiential causality.” And he then says that religious imagery addresses that terror.

 I call this so-called terror existential angst, and have never felt it onerous. I therefore feel little angst, and need less consolation since I don’t see life as a vale of tears.  I accept death, its most focused form, as a biological necessity.  Perhaps this is just good luck. Or it may be a naturalist’s appreciation that the life process, in nature, is mostly an example of successful cooperation.  Our human mental constructs  (interpretations) problematize  too much, perhaps because we have become too individualistic.

Science has made nature’s forces much less blind to us. We now know which areas of the planet are most prone to thunderstorms, tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, landslides, eruptions, fire, and even drought  These are not mere incidents, or Acts of God; there is a pattern to their occurrence. There may of course be no escaping all of these hazards during a lifetime, but the extensive damage and suffering we now complain  of could be greatly reduced by proper management of human uses of the land.

A chief cause of continuing damage to humans and their properties is thus ignorance, neglect, or actual disregard of known environmental realities, especially in the last century, since we should by now know better. The effects are of course worse among less educated people. But this is due mostly to the social failure to provide a sound general education, and to the political failure to regulate the use of hazardous zones, largely due to corruption of the political process by greedy exploiters of the land resource and the low state of public education.

Avoidance of hazardous zones would require self-limitation of the human population, so that there would be safe zones for everyone. People do not live on the slopes of Vesuvius, or in flood zones, by preference. But there is no excuse. Nor will religious consolations really help. We have an obligation to know the world we live in, and to live within its limits.  Aristotle saw this more than two thousand years ago.

LIFE STYLES

If, as I think, Paul Shepard was on target in giving credit to the hunter-gatherers for having invented a reasonable life style, the “vale of tears” we complain of may be assignable to  mistakes we humans made in rationalizing subsequent life styles, those of agriculture and the free market.

Paul, one of the first human ecologists, took a Yale PhD under Paul Sears in the Fifties, taught at  Claremont College in California, and wroteNature and Madness in 1982.  He concluded that the hunter-gatherers, each in their own way, had fortuitously given their young a long, untrammeled introduction to the intricacies of the natural world, and thus fostered a sense of appreciation and respect that made them responsible adults. The small groups of their thinly dispersed tribes had modest technologies and essentially lived off Nature’s surpluses. They scattered across the whole planet while still pedestrians, marveled at the night sky, and expressed an aesthetic sense in rhythmic tempos, body decoration, and cave paintings. Though Hobbes would later call their lives “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short,” the more we learn of their accomplishments, the more compelling Shepard’s assessment seems.  Not yet the vale of tears.

Agriculture changed all this, especially in the eastern Mediterranean some 10,000 years ago. We became sedentary, possessive of our land plots and their produce, calculatingly individualistic, divorced from Nature; and even saw Nature’s vagaries, like bad weather and climate swings, as inimical. Needing many hands for planting, warding off trespassers, weeding, and harvesting, the patriarchy imposed on women and the young. The new life style produced more food, thus initiating population growth, but life became more demanding, beset by new diseases contracted from that handful of mammals we domesticated and at first kept in sheds attached to our dwellings.  

The West’s Christian religion was a byproduct of this new agricultural life style; part of its task was to rationalize it. We have too long neglected that the Church of Rome was instituted by Emperor Constantine 300 after Jesus preached in Galilee.  The emperor’s assignment was to pacify Rome’s population, grown restive because it was even then pressing against the limits of the land. To do this The Church had to invent persuasive stories about origins and purposes for an illiterate society; and where these were resisted, it made them dogma by calling them revelations.

No easy task in a philistine environment. The emperor’s lawyers, we are told, insisted on several church councils to perfect approaches and speed compliance.  It is tragic, then, that our innate dualism somehow led to an overemphasis on the spirit, and contention over sexuality. The Church sanctified only that sexuality devoted to reproduction; this for a regional society already suffering from too much reproduction! This inheritance became the central problem of the modern age, beginning about 500 years ago: agriculture fosters population growth, and population requires more agriculture, disrupting the planet’s natural systems and laying the ground for the disruptions of global warming.   But this dilemma has remained almost completely absent from discussions of the problems of our day.  Everything  else, we will soon learn,  is mere  talk.

As a way of life, agriculture collapsed when it was industrialized in late 20^th Century.  In the U.S., less than 3% of the population worked the land after World War II.  Worldwide, 50% of the became urban at the turn of the 21^stCentury.  Slum cities were born, and conflict increases.

The urban age’s central problem is a new version of the iniquitous disparity of income, now imposed by the “free market.”  This occurred when The Church’s constraints on usury were abolished.  Access to land once held in common, where people could eke out an independent existence, disappeared as these lands and their productivity were “privatized.”  The take-over continues.  The presumption that there is a natural scarcity of resources is an academic invention because at no time has it been acknowledged that it is this new economic system and the increased demands of population growth that dictates supply and demand relations.  

Today’s overpopulated world of course presses on a diminishing resource base.  We already consume  about one third of the planet’s total basic productivity just for ourselves. Things are out of kilter because  the dominant economy rationalizes  transposing  all natural products into exchangeable commodities.

 Given this no-exit dilemma of our own creation, we can all go down the slippery slope together, or argue and agree to share existing wealth accumulations while we reduce human population by at least one half, perhaps more; and change life styles again, this time viewing ourselves as guests on spaceship Earth, not its lords and masters.

 No easy task, given that our economic conventions foreclosed education for so many of us; but hopefully possible if we can meanwhile also put off global warming threats.    

The Audubon Movement

The origins of the Audubon movement, first at the State level in 1896 in Massachusetts, marked the articulation of a new awareness of the value of birds, and a demand that the attrition imposed by commerce in feathers generated by the millinery trade be halted. A similar popular movement developed in England at about the same time, so most of western society was somehow sensitized.

In the U. S. this became a twenty-year struggle, largely volunteer, because the nation’s outlook was primitively utilitarian.  Part of the story is well told by T.   Gilbert Pearson who first led the crusade nationally in a 1937 book, Adventures in Bird Protection. About twenty state societies organized themselves. They first formed a national committee to coordinate their voices, then a National Association of (State) Audubon Societies in 1905, with Pearson as its executive. This grassroots effort culminated in the passage of a Migratory Bird Protection Act in 1918.

The Great Depression of the early 1930s was rough on groups like State Audubon Societies and all but six of them succumbed to its economic ravages.  In 1934 the early Association was abandoned and a separate organization, the National Audubon Society was incorporated.  A new president, John H. Baker, was both a good amateur ornithologist, and a Wall Street veteran who had accumulated enough to be comfortable.  For him, Audubon work was a public service. He sometimes asked prospective employees whether they could afford to work for the Audubon Society.  He brought together a superlative staff and created several new imaginative programs.

Peter Mattheissen chronicled the slow development of wildlife protection in America in a 1959 book, Wildlife in America. And Frank Graham, Jr., in a 1990 book, The Audubon Ark, reviewed the history of  the Audubon movement which

provided so much leadership in its first half-century. He did not, however, question the basic assumptions of the movement.

The sad fact of a century of conservation/environmental activism is that, despite occasional local accomplishments, and the “rescue” of a few endangered species through captive propagation and other means, birds and other wildlife went into catastrophic decline during that century of increasing devotion to conservation..

World Birdlife’s insightful formula, 9-6-1, is indicative. It reminds us that of the more than 9000 bird species, 6000 are in decline, and more than 1000 face extinction in this new century.

William Vogt, an Audubon staffer during Baker’s first creative decade, later wrote The Road to Survival. This first neo-Malthusian text alerted us to the implications of human population growth, but Vogt saw no politico-economic connections among these problems. Neither did Mattheissen or Graham, writing decades later.   

The conservation/environmental movements have been sentimental because they fostered noble ends without adequate attention to practical means. These means are the social institutions (religious dicta, laws, rules of the game, traditions, etc.) we build to guide human behavior. The task is thus moral and political, not scientific or corporate.

 In several Audubon convention talks during the Sixties I tried to alert local Auduboners that their task was to become the ecological conscience of their communities. But Audubon’s education programs were not much modified thereby.

The challenge, then, is to understand why the first century of the movement failed in its broader objectives, and to articulate a fresh account of “the creation story” to capture the imagination of all the people of this smallish planet so as to prevent the crowding of too many more species out of existence. We are all fellow-travelers in an exciting evolutionary trek.

During its first half-century the Audubon movement did much to inspire the nation to conserve wildlife. But in 1968 the National Audubon Society  succumbed to the post-World War II notion of professional managerialism and unwittingly went bureaucratic. The new president, Elvis J. Stahr, even complimented the Board for breaking out of its bird-protection mode. He didn’t know birds and assumed that it would suffice to have someone on staff who did, to warn him of problems and opportunities. But he didn’t ask.

Professional managers, we have been slow to learn, are a social phenomenon

generated by our need to overwhelm the war-making capabilities of  both Germany and Japan during World War II.  Government set the goals and paid the bills, so all the managers had to do was produce and watch the bottom line.  This was most unlike running a business.  Unfortunately, this truncated sense of responsibility became the corporate world’s guideline after the war.

Stahr was a gentle manager. He fired no one. He learned quickly. During his first year in office he took me to lunch almost weekly to probe my biologist’s view of things. But he didn’t want to set policy. He readily admitted that he was a front man. “Don’t bring me problems,” he would say. “You’re a vice-president; solve them, then tell me about it so that I can raise more money.”  This unfortunately created a policy vacuum, and in an increasingly complex era it became easy for staff to go off on its own tangents. The Audubon Society no longer spoke with one voice.

The U. S. still has an almost blind faith in growth. For one thing, growth covers up mistakes. But organizational growth almost inevitably leads to bureaucracy, whether the organization be religious, governmental, corporate; or like Audubon, non-governmental, an NGO.

Anthony Downs, a sociologist who wrote Inside Bureaucracy, said that any organization that grows beyond the point where the president no longer knows more than half of his subordinates by their first names will behave bureaucratically.  Russell Peterson, who succeeded Stahr at Audubon, apparently understood this because he immediately told staff, “Call me Russ.”

Of course, the Seventies  were also the era of  a new environmental awareness. People joined Audubon and Sierra just to find out what this ecology stuff was about. Audubon membership climbed to half a million, but could not much exceed or long sustain that number, even though pollsters said that tens of millions of people were now interested in birds. The managers naturally complimented themselves on this growth rather than seeing it as driven by events. “We must be doing something right!”

If Audubon (as they now call it) is no longer  the leader it was, its promise is still great.  Birds can more easily be made exemplars of the wonders of the continuing-creation/evolutionary process to alert people. But this may mean that an NGO like Audubon will need at least as many poets and ethicists as it does managers. 

The best way to do that may be at the local level. Charismatic Audubon staffers are a starting point, providing they are often on the ground, interpreting local bird life, its habitat needs, and the marvels of migration and of existence itself.

Again, however, the task is a social one, not one of individual conversion. Of course, individuals must lead a social movement, but success comes only if they convince enough others to join in making the necessary changes in the system. It is the system that, in the past, frustrated our good intentions, and will continue to do so if we don’t reform it.  This is called institution-building, and governing-elites must do most of it.

Multiplying that local effort, rather than building larger managerial teams, may be the way to go. Decentralize the organization if that will accomplish the task. The task again? To learn to fit our (real) needs into the carrying capacity of Nature’s systems without crowding the other species unfairly. Aristotle saw that 300 years before the Christian era, and said it.  For him, this is what it meant to be reasonable.  He didn’t mention birds, of course, so we overlook the connection.

Our environmental ethics are the space we agree to leave for all those Others, birds included, when we take our God-given/evolutionary privileges seriously. Being “by nature” a social species, “We” is all of us, even though many will remain slow to learn. We must cajole them. 

It should, however, have by now occurred to you that we cannot “save the birds” without simultaneously making significant changes in the commercial mentality and practices that now dominate our use of the land and waters that have produced that birdlife  since before we came along.  The destroyers are no longer poor fishermen-turned plume hunters. The economic system on which we are all more or less dependent is now the source of our problems. But overpopulation also creates the demand for too much economic throughput.

We have hardly begun thinking in terms of socio-politico-economic systems, but this is what bird conservationists will have to learn to do if they are to conserve birds. Otherwise, more of the same talk about saving birds may make more people aware of the problem, but it will also frustrate them because they will be all too aware that bird populations continue to decline.

It was accidental that bird conservation was one of the first resource conservation tasks we tackled. The more fundamental problems were only beginning to surface, and we did not much recognize them until 1999, say. But most of us missed the signal they waved in Seattle that year.  

The Beauty of Birds

                                                                                                                          

Most of us who are interested in birds have heard the question, “Do you love birds?”  Vary the inflection and you will catch the puzzlement. I, for one, balk at such pigeon-holing, but perhaps mostly because that world love is so often misused. The word beauty is also too vaguely applied. Yet, we should struggle with these definitions. Both words seem central to the meaning of existence.

Once in a long while, someone comes along who has the sensitivity, and the poise, to say things convincingly and unforgettably. George Santayana, who taught philosophy at Harvard a century ago, had that mastery over words and ideas. He defined beauty as objectified pleasure. This may have said everything, but it may also require more spelling out, since the perspective is new.

A few years later, again at Harvard, Alfred North Whitehead, another import, taught that the term “life” has little meaning until we grant it purpose. Not an imposed purpose, but a self-generated purpose, a striving. The life process, he showed, borrows from the past, reshapes things in the present, and creates a definitive future; which then itself becomes past, an evolutionary accomplishment, ad infinitum.  The very process of existence, whatever its origin, now lost in time, is a creative synthesis, a process of continuing creation.  More pregnant than that one biblical event!

Reshaping things involves some appreciation of past accomplishments (what is), and some awareness of real possibilities (what could be). We are handmaidens to the creative process. All of us, that is: humans, beasts, microbes, and plants. This Whiteheadian  process philosophy says that we make propositions about the possibilities, then seek to accomplish (objectify) them. We are like performers in a large orchestral symphony. And if the performance is harmonious we call it beautiful because we feel it so. We have neglected these two insightful philosophers.

Despite a few hundred years of exaggerated scientific emphasis on objectivity, this creative process is not intellectual.  It is almost altogether aesthetic. It was going on long before human brains evolved. Indeed, our vaunted rationality often distorts the process. Witness our new knowledge of the atom: it is a threat to our continued existence! Our knowledge of chemistry, also less than a century old, is poisoning the world. Our skills in moving about the planet now homogenize life forms. We are destroying the insularity of habitats that gave most species their origins and their sustenance. We call the new competitors for space “invasive species,” almost oblivious to the fact that we set the stage and imported most of them ourselves.

Love, said Paul Tillich, is wishing you to be. It should be humbling that this gentle, philosophical theologian was declared an atheist by a trio of self-appointed, positivistic Inquisitors, here in America, a few months before he died!  We are so haunted by the undercurrent of love in this corner of the universe that it serves us as a concept of God!  Whitehead, obliged to Plato, saw God as the lure behind our strivings, necessary to the completion of the natural history of existence.

Every phylum in our catalogue of living things is an example of the exploration of possibilities accomplished by the evolutionary process, these last four billion years. All of us are variations on a theme, with slight but telling modifications of the DNA basic to all.  From yeast to naked apes!

The birds that fascinate some of us are just one exciting tribe.  Specialists in flight, though not alone in this, since the insects and bats are other specialists. But you hardly know what an accomplishment flight really is until you have seen one of the large albatrosses coursing a sub-Antarctic sea in a gale. Or a condor hissing down some cordilleran canyon in either of the Americas. Or, nearer home, a hummingbird hovering to observe you, close up!

Birds are often colorful, mostly wonderfully agile, specialists in making a living in varied habits, from sea-level to alpine zones. They sing and dance, often travel far. All the things we wish we could do better.

We love them because they are superlative exemplars of life’s possibilities. We need them to be, if only for the inspiration they provide, since the path is long, and we often lose our way.  We idealize them of course, just as we idealize one another when we are in love.

The beauty we admire in them is in us. It is an awareness, however vague, of the accomplishments they exemplify. Santayana (at one remove), Francis of Assisi, Louis Agassiz Fuertes (the bird painter), they all saw it.  For us birds are like the antipode of an electric spark, they at one end, we at the other. They too, the birds, are probably aware of this, in their own ways. We all see it if we look, though seldom in full focus..

And, of course, all those other tribes, from microbes to mammals, we perhaps more than most, are other exemplifications.  It is tragic that we have been so slow in appreciating that we need these beautiful things to lure us to new accomplishments. Hope, love, and charity are nourished by the world’s beauty. This is almost all the faith we need.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           RCC