Week 7 Blog Update

Jonathan Franzen started by talking about his history of being an environmentalist, and a lot of the frustration and anger that came with the title of being an environmentalist. He would have a lot of frustration toward climate change and the little amount of change. Then he started to turn his attention towards birds, and grew a profound love and interest for these creatures. He became part of the board of the American Bird Conservancy, and met a lot of conservationists, who, while he identified more with their causes they were fighting for, he saw a flaw with a monolithic obsession with a single issue. He then saw a bigger need to put resources and our attention towards resilience and adaptation. Fishing, deforestation, wetlands, and many more have been more prominent issues that had nothing to do with climate change. Then he begins to talk about the bird, the magenta petrol. When he first saw it, it was the only time the bird had been seen in nearly a century. 

He then shares the story of Chatham island, and the story of the Tyco bird, who was able to become saved from extinction through the efforts of sheep farmers, who saw a need to protect these birds, and by eliminating invasive species around them. 

I definitely enjoyed Franzen’s ideas that we shouldn’t approach climate change as the be all end all, when there are much more things we can do and put our resources towards. Yes, climate change will affect a lot of things, but it would be just as, if not more helpful to allocate more resources towards issues we can solve right now. 

I definitely think I can use some of Franzen’s ideas into my own advocacy project, especially from “Why Birds Matter” because my species is about crows, and his reasoning for why people should care about birds at all is a great source of information for even common birds like the crow. 

Until next time,

Happy birding!