Their Destiny is Ours

Spring’s big bang has melded to summer and the riverwalk path is smudged with mulberries.  Motherwort blooms, the sweet fragrance of wild grape hangs in the woodland.  In late evening Canada geese gather in the pond near the house, motionless, bellies full. They’ve cropped the grass around the pond as short as a putting green and for the past hour have been dabbling duckweed.  The air is heavy and has a summer stillness as the geese settle in for the night. A wood thrush sings a final song. Bullfrogs begin their serenade.  

After dark we run a bat survey for the DNR. We drive a 20 mile specified route and the Anabat computer picks up chatter from about a dozen feeding bats.  The number is low, but not surprising in the big ag country we survey. No habitat, no bats. We see few insects in our headlights. There will be more later in the season, we say, as new generations are born. But insect numbers are not what they were a decade or two ago, which is true of too many wild things. 

We’ve come off a week of drenching rains and now it’s hot. Dangerously hot. Further west the drought deepens and fires rage. In the far north, tundra burns.

Volatile herbicides from area crop fields curl the leaves on our garden tomatoes, burn the tips of other veggies, defoliate some of our flowering shrubs.  The chemical companies call it “drift”, and it happens even when application protocols are followed to a T.  It’s an Achilles heel for operators, who can be held liable for damage, but a risk justified for the sake of weed free fields.  

In exchange for geese on the pond we have a manure speckled patio and annual flowers nipped to the ground by foraging fowl. In exchange for the efficiencies in an industrialized food system we have chemical drift, degradation of soils and water, massive destruction of habitats, dead zones in the oceans.  In exchange for an endless stream of conveniences and comforts made possible by fossil fuels we pollute our environment, modify our climate, and keep landfills humming.  Everything has a price. 

The Cornell ornithology lab developed an app to aid in bird identification. Among its features is a sound ID, which uses a smartphone to match songs with birds.  On our walks, the app typically picks up a half dozen or more songbirds at any given time, and without it we might never know we were passing a prothonotary warbler or northern parula or warbling vireo.  

We trade hours of field study for the luxury of pressing a button and having a bird identified, and in so doing we support the extraction of “blood minerals” our smartphones require. Few of us think about the cheap labor used to assemble our phones, or the likelihood they’ll someday join a mountain of toxin-oozing gadgetry discarded by a society that fails to embrace a cradle to cradle mentality.  Most of us don’t consider the data centers “in the cloud” consuming massive amounts of energy to process information so we can have the collective knowledge of the world at our fingertips and say, with no field work or study invested , “that’s the voice of a great crested flycatcher.”  

Early in the month I was mowing in the south field, collecting mulch for the garden, and nearly ran over a fawn not more than a day or two old. At the last moment it leapt up on uncertain legs and stumbled to safety among the brambles.  I found it later, bedded down, chin flat to the ground, watchful eyes locked on me.  

Written in those eyes was a 10,000 year history of an herbivore crucial to apex predators and critical in providing food, clothing, and tools for indigenous tribes and European settlers.  Its predecessors survived a massive population decline resulting from habitat destruction and market hunting that reduced their numbers to no more than 500,000.  Today their population has rebounded, 30 million strong, because we wanted them back. 

In the fawn’s eyes lay a question: What value do we give less loved species whose welfare rests on the whims of our land use practices and policies?  Despite a recent history of appreciation and protections for things wild, we still treat the natural world much like a modified version of Jenga, removing individual pieces as the tower draws closer to collapse. Fully functioning ecosystems rely on bats and birds and insects and countless others to provide ecological services essential to us. We control their destinies, and they will determine ours.