Part of the ‘Hope to action’ series
Mohawk Park lies in the northern part of Tulsa County, Oklahoma. Situated within the park sits the Oxley Nature Center, a place that has been an important part of my father’s life for as long as I can remember. However, a poignant early memory for me took place elsewhere within Mohawk Park: at the Tulsa Zoo. My feelings about zoos tend to be somewhat mixed. I do believe, especially in our day and age, that they serve an important role in education and conservation. The animal attractions are the “hook” to hopefully engage visitors to consider our role in sharing the planet with the variety of exotic creatures on display and to bring awareness to the plight of the many species at risk of extinction due to habitat loss, climate change, poaching, etc. For me, this significant memory I alluded to is not of an exotic big cat, or elephant, or in fact anything alive. Within one of the Tulsa Zoo buildings was a small, solemn display of the extinct Passenger Pigeon.
Seeing this lonely stuffed bird and coming to the realization that we were responsible for its disappearance touched me deeply. Learning that this inanimate thing before me was dead, not just A dead thing, it was a dead species, imparted a profound sense of loss. It also seemed to me an incredibly precious thing that should be somehow protected as a memorial of what was lost, and as a reminder of what should not have been taken for granted by earlier generations.
After decades of overhunting and habitat loss, the last Passenger Pigeon died in captivity in 1914. One individual from the generation that bore witness to the Passenger Pigeon’s extinction was Aldo Leopold (1887-1948). Leopold is considered by many as the “father of wildlife ecology” and he wrote with an eloquence and wisdom that still rings with truth. In May of 1947 the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology erected a monument to the Passenger Pigeon and Leopold wrote a moving essay for the occasion. The entirety of the essay is worth reading, but the opening pinpoints the loss with a deftness I could never hope to replicate myself.
“We have erected a monument to commemorate the funeral of a species. It symbolizes our sorrow. We grieve because no living man will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from all the woods and prairies of Wisconsin.
Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.
There will always be pigeons in books and in museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights. Book-pigeons cannot dive out of a cloud to make the deer run for cover, or clap their wings in thunderous applause of mast-laden woods. Book-pigeons cannot breakfast on new-mown wheat in Minnesota, and dine on blueberries in Canada. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all.”
Aldo Leopold, “On a Monument to the Pigeon”, from A Sand County Almanac
Leopold’s “On a Monument to the Pigeon” essay was included in his book A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949. In Part III of the book Leopold describes a “land ethic.” I believe that, in part, Leopold’s argument was that our tendency to think of “nature” (or his term “the land”) as distinct from us is misguided. At the very least, he declares that we are but a part of a complex interconnected system that we have no inherent sovereign right over. He says:
“A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these ‘resources,’ but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.”
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
The Aldo Leopold Foundation website summarizes his land ethic as follows:
“In Leopold’s vision of a land ethic, the relationships between people and land are intertwined: care for people cannot be separated from care for the land. A land ethic is a moral code of conduct that grows out of these interconnected caring relationships.”
https://www.aldoleopold.org/about/the-land-ethic/
Now, nearly 75 years later, we have still been unable to adopt the land ethic that Leopold proposed. A recent report published by the World Wildlife Fund indicates that our broken relationship with nature has resulted in “an average 69% decline in the relative abundance of monitored wildlife populations around the world between 1970 and 2018.”
“The pressure we are placing on the natural world is driving an escalating nature crisis which, in turn, is undermining its ability to provide crucial services, including climate change mitigation and adaptation.”
https://wwflpr.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/lpr_2022_full_report.pdf
A 2019 publication highlighted the startling losses to bird populations in North America: “wild bird populations in the continental U.S. and Canada have declined by almost 30% since 1970.” Rather than attempt to summarize, I strongly suggest you go and have a look through these (I’ll be waiting here for you to come back):
The 2022 State of the Birds report published by the North American Bird Conservation Initiative (NABCI) echoes similar findings. The report includes a thoughtfully written essay by J. Drew Lanham entitled “A Convergent Destiny for Birds and People.” In the essay Dr. Lanham states the following:
“The dire circumstances at hand demand we activate affection, profession, and obsession into policy and practice that mitigate the storms that stall flight and ditch so many species into seas of declining despair.
Consider this: At some point in our not-so-long-ago history, someone looked skyward and dismissed the uncountable hordes of birds darkening the skies as inexhaustible, and in doing so, arrogantly dismissed abundance, even as avarice brought billions to one, then none. The Passenger Pigeons cannot be recovered, that road has long since closed. But we do have a chance now to act with science, managers, birders, and the public at large to co-produce (teamwork interdependently) saving solutions that will benefit us all, birds and human beings.”
J. Drew Lanham, https://www.stateofthebirds.org/2022/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/state-of-the-birds-2022-spreads.pdf
And what is the alternative? I can think of few people who have done more to transmit the sheer joy and appreciation of the beauty of nature to masses of people than Sir David Attenborough. In a 2020 interview with Anderson Cooper he was asked “Can you be optimistic at all?” Attenborough responds in his “sonorous and soulful, reassuringly familiar” voice by saying “We don’t have an alternative. I mean, what good is it to say ‘oh, to hell with it, I don’t care?’ You can’t say that. Not if you love your children. Not if you love the rest of humanity. How can you say that?” Later in the interview he says “Young people, who can see what is happening to the world and demanding that their government should take action. That’s the best hope that I have. Obviously my generation failed. We’ve allowed it to happen.”
When our government is spending over $93 billion on a program to go back to the moon one wonders if perhaps we don’t have our priorities straight. I’m sure there are arguments to be made, but it strikes me as an incredible waste of resources that could instead be directed to trying to do something, anything, to at least slow what feels like an inevitable march towards mass extinction. Besides, as Sir David rightly points out, there are no hummingbirds on the moon.
“Why would I want to go live on the moon? When I’ve got this world of badgers, and thrushes, and jellyfish, and coral. Why would I want to go live on the moon? Because there’s nothing else there but dust. I’d say, well thank you very much, I’ll stay where I am and watch hummingbirds.”
Sir David Attenborough, 60 Minutes
While I’m about half of Sir David Attenborough’s age, I’m inclined to lump myself in with him when he refers to a generation that has failed. I do worry, and at times can imagine a dark future where a single display of an extinct bird species sprawls into a long hallway of many, many more. I think of my own worrying not as some mid-life existential crisis, but perhaps as a mid-life awareness. I know that our time here on this extraordinary planet is limited, and I wonder more and more what legacy we are leaving future generations. As a parent I think that at least by trying to teach my own children about what is truly important, about the beauty of the natural world, about our place IN the world, OF this world, not merely as consumers, but as stewards, that I can retain some optimism, some hope of my own.
Now, let’s head back to Mohawk Park in Tulsa. This time though, let’s visit Oxley Nature Center. Bob Jennings (1939-2004) was the founding director of Oxley Nature Center, an accomplished naturalist, an ecological interpreter, and a man who I know had a great impact on many people, including my father. When Bob retired in 2002, the Oxley Nature Center Newsletter reprinted one of his “From the Stump” columns from September 1978. After being on the job for only a year (and prior to construction of the Oxley-Yetter Interpretive Building in 1979), Bob wrote the following:
“But most of all, and this is the really important part–
We are beginning to reach the young ones, with a place where they can touch and hear and smell and taste all those things that used to be pictures in Ranger Rick, where they can learn the importance of snail darters and whooping cranes, where they can see that spiders aren’t for squashing, and most of all, where they can see that they share this planet, and that sharing is a two-way street.
For them, and their children, and their children’s children, let this be the real beginning.”
Bob Jennings, Oxley Nature Center Newsletter – September/October 2002, reprinted from September 1978
Have no doubt, Bob is referring to me, and my peers, and our children, and their children. And the thousands of children who have been lucky enough to board a school bus for a field trip destined for the Oxley Nature Center. In Aldo Leopold’s essay “Goose Music”, he mentions his children and says:
“I hope to leave them good health, an education, and possibly even a competence. But what are they going to do with these things if there be no more deer in the hills, and no more quail in the coverts? No more snipe whistling in the meadow, no more piping of widgeons and chattering of teal as darkness covers the marsh; no more whistling of swift wings when the morning star pales in the east? And when the dawn-wind stirs through the ancient cottonwoods, and the gray light steals down from the hills over the old river sliding softly past its wide brown sandbars—what if there be no more goose music?”
Aldo Leopold, “Goose Music”
In 1994 the Oxley Nature Center published a collection of Bob Jennings’s writings entitled From the Stump, Thoughts of a Naturalist. With permission from the Oxley Nature Center’s board I present this gift from Bob Jennings.
Goose Music
Aldo Leopold called it ‘goose music.’ To me, it’s a song in praise of autumn.
I stand in the forest on a sunny fall day, drinking in the brilliant red of the sumac and the purple splendor of Black Haw. The wind smells crisp with the approaching snow, and I watch the squirrels dashing through the fallen leaves, hoarding acorns against the bitter times. If I’m fortunate, I’ll catch a glimpse of White-tailed Deer, drifting out of our sight on hooves as silent as shadows.
There are Blue Jays drifting through the tree tops along Flat Rock Creek, and the tangles of brush below ring with the ‘tinks’ of juncos. My old boots scuff through the layer of leaves on the forest floor, and I hunch my shoulders against the chill of the long afternoon. On such a day, there are times when I wonder at man’s place on this planet. Do we belong here, what role do we play? Nothing that is beautiful in this woods was made by my kind. The transparency of these clear days seem to cut deep inside me, revealing nothing.
Then, high above, out of sight beyond the canopy of the forest, I hear the song.
Geese.
Shifting chevrons dark against the October blue of the sky; singing to the passing world the praise I cannot put into words. They fly south, to spend the winter months on sandy shores, where the snow cannot find them. As they pass, they sing an ancient song of larger forests and bluer lakes, of prairies unscarred by roads, and of a sky that was theirs alone.
Below, anchored to the ground with chains I cannot break, I sing along. Here’s the stump, so sit, fumble for a match to fire the pipe, and listen to the song fade.
The geese pass swiftly, but the song does not. I sit in the growing dusk and remember the gift sent down. I cannot fly and I cannot match their song, but I can, for a moment, find their freedom within myself. It is enough.
Bob Jennings, From the Stump, Thoughts of a Naturalist, 1994
Birds of Kirkwood 