Stupidity Street

 When we were waiting in the hospital the other night, my mom said that her go-to way to feel better in an emergency was to watch bird videos on her phone. Live streams of nesting egret families are her form of digital comfort food. 

Likewise, one of my dad's happiest nights before he went into the hospital was when we went out for a picnic amidst the Florida wetlands and watched the varieties of avian life at sunset. I spent minutes filming a roseate spoonbill that came by, as it made its curious swinging sweeps in the water for food. 

My dad beamed all evening, because he felt connected in that moment to all life and its continuity. 

These experiences gave a particular sharpness to my sense of outrage yesterday, when I read in the New York Times that populations of birds are dying out in the United States even faster than scientists had previously thought. 

The decline appears to be swiftest in warmer areas—suggesting climate change has something to do with it. But the use of pesticides in agriculture is also a factor, as is the sprawl of inhabited areas, with the resulting loss of habitat for birds and the growing number of windows and objects for them to collide with. 

I have never been a particular bird-watcher or bird-fancier myself—or even much of a nature-lover. I tend to ignore my surroundings and plow ahead with my inner thoughts of the moment, regardless of where I am. 

But seeing the joy that other people find in these things, particularly in times of adversity, it was suddenly keenly painful to me to read of the havoc our species is wreaking upon birds. It just seemed like such an idiotic, blundering waste. 

 I saw [...] Singing birds sweet / Sold in the shops of / Stupidity Street, as Ralph Hodgson put it. He devoted so much of his poetry to preserving the lives of birds and other nonhuman creatures from the ravages of the economic "Moloch," as he called it. And clearly, his mission is still unfinished. 

"The American dream turns into the American nightmare as we start to look at what we’re doing to biodiversity and systems that we depend on as humans," as one of the conservation experts quoted in the Times piece puts it. 

I thought of all those generations of bird life in the wetlands being wiped out by new developments, by forests cut down for farmland, the wetlands and habitats being displaced. 

"O if we but knew what we do/ When we delve or hew," to quote G.M. Hopkins. And we echo his petition from another poem: "Let them be left, / O let them be left, wildness and wet; / Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet."