In this new century Tim Gallagher from Cornell University’s Ornithological Laboratory and Bobby Ray Harrison, a professor at Oakwood College, and a few others, revived the search for the Ivory-billed woodpecker. These people stubbornly based themselves on the slim chance that /Campephilus principalis/ still hangs on in remnants of once vast old-growth bottomland forests of the south. Gallagher mourns the loss of those forests.

"Back when people were saving Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the giant redwoods, they didn’t even think about the southern forests. Logging companies took countless millions of board feet of lumber from the Atchafalaya, year after year. And even as late as 1940, when we had the chance to save a remnant of primeval swamp forest at Louisiana’s Singer Tract, we didn’t do it. We let it go." (1)

In their forays in the remnants, which were formidible enough, they met Bill Fought who had lived in the Singer Tract along with panthers, bears, wolves and turkeys, even ivory-billed woodpeckers. Asked how he felt about its destruction, Bill said, "It ruined my life, if you want to know the truth about it. It takes hardwoods so long to grow. It’ll never be the same. I wish my kids could have seen it."

Why do so many people mourn losses of the primeval? Bambi Syndrome? No. The Bambi plague is a media phenom, a caricature of the real, a matter of cozy, bug-eyed mammals, a commodity created with great care and launched into the world’s populations in the name of profit. Highly infectious, the collateral damages are enormous.

Please bear with me while I repeat myself from an earlier Zephyr rant (Ivory-bill Truth, June/July, 2005). We are actors in evolution, there is no way of standing aside from that multi-billion-year process of tremendous organic changes. And, we are more than a recent footnote, our roots reach far back inside a fantastic story of animal and plant multitudes, the friendly ones and the ones who don’t give a good goddamn about us and those we have yet to meet, and those who blinked out prior to the moment when the curtain rose on the human scene.

I was getting the above into print when E.O.Wilson appeared on NPR’s "On Point" program where he appealed to religions, especially the Evangelicals, to join with the scientific community in defense of endangered species, aka biological diversity. I was, of course, reminded of the Zephyr’s call for MAHBU: Mormons and Heathens for a Better Utah.

Wilson asked whether people can get deeply interested in the fact that two of the five species of rhinoceroses are endangered. That question was left hanging throughout the program while callers called and pastors talked about their processing biblical and scientific data for their congregations.

Wilson made two good comments: Women everywhere must have free access to birth control (didn’t mention other linked aspects of women’s liberation). Second, saving biodiversity must take root in society at large, can’t be handed down. Pause for Eugene Debs. "I will not lead you into the Promised Land because later on somebody else will come along and lead you out." (Not a precise quote, but pretty close).

It was left for the last caller to On Point to get down to cases. She said that people who get well acquainted with a tree are more apt to be willing to take a stand for the earth and its critters.

That got me to thinking there might not be a global one-size-fits-all answer. Humans concerned about Black rhinos and who are acquainted with the few survivors and their territory will have a differnt take on endangerment than humans in California who try to save the Flower-loving fly or Thorne’s hairstreak butterfly from extinction. Rock bottom defenders of species will be a varied lot. Their reasons for standing up for The Others will be expressed in different dialects, different languages, will have emerged from a variety of cultures and religions. Within each of those categories it is an individual’s experiences and how she judges those experiences that nails things down, creates staunch conviction: slow dawn or sudden light.

Abstractions handed down from a noted scientist or a popular preacher will most likely have an affect on a listener, but will it make a make a rock bottom defender? That’s a crucial question, because we need passion, we need active defenders, and soon.

On second thought, might there be, after all, a universal aspect of those varied experiences that lead people to a partisan stand for wild nature? If there is, it does not lie in the disneyfication commodity realm. Nor will we find it in the infotainment world. Nature tours? Not the high adrenaline or eco-challenge or "learn the real you" varieties. Those are way too self centered. City streets? That’s a possible, because on those streets are people, our species. It might be that we have to begin there.Who are we?

Abstractions handed down from a noted scientist

or a popular preacher will most likely

have an affect on a listener,

but will it make a make a rock bottom defender?

That’s a crucial question, because we need passion,

we need active defenders, and soon.

Let’s take another run at the question. The United States and many other countries have managed to withhold some areas from exploitation: national parks, national forests, wilderness areas, military reservations. But even these are not enough to save grizzlies, bison, wolverines, elephants, tigers, mountain lions, whales, sea turtles and many other animals who travel great distances in search of food or places to raise the next generation. The conclusion can’t be dodged. Rhinos and condors and black-footed ferrets can’t wait forever. Neither can we: the Kyoto Agreement is, by the latest calculations, not nearly enough to moderate our share of global warming and our nation hasn’t even signed onto that. The Others, and we, need some real help pretty damn soon.

A standard counter argument is that we have enough troubles without loading them with sentimental concerns about a few or even a few thousand species blinking out. Extinction--remember the dinosaurs?-- is nature’s way. Not to worry.

However, if we pursue this a little further into our own endangerment the question gets kind of sticky. We already live in the future, an impoverished world, bombed, bulldozed, minutely divided into private exclusions, drilled, drained and dammed, a country where we take children to petting zoos and aquariums or bring them captive fish to put in a bowl or cute little animals to keep in cages. Charlotte, North Carolina offers artificial rapids where kayakers can learn or hone skills. If you can pay, a chopper will set you down on pristine alpine slopes. We can buy jungles, mountains and scary beasts, enemy soldiers and terrorists from video hucksters. Families visit national parks to cluster around dioramas, listen politely to rangers telling them about the wonders they will see through their car windows. And rangers, I’m sure, often wish they were on duty in the wonders under sky and clouds, smelling the smells, listening to the sounds.

Do I exaggerate? I don’t think so.

"Visitors to King County’s Marymoor Park in Redmond can walk past the Group Health Velodrome, order food at the Subway sandwich shop, surf online in Microsoft-sponsored Wi-Fi areas and read a trail map bearing the Starbucks mermaid logo.

"For the past two weeks, they also could hunt for 30 two-foot, foil-covered fake burritos hidden in the park as part of a dual promotion for Chipotle Mexican Grill and the county’s redesigned parks Web site.

"The burrito promotion and other corporate partnerships are the brainchild of King County Parks’ three-member Strategic Partnership and Enterprise Initiatives team. Its job: Come up with ideas to make money and increase the visibility of county parks.

"That often means teaming with a company for sponsorship —— everything from big-tent performances by Cirque du Soleil to selling naming rights for parks facilities." (2)

That’s one example. Here’s another.

"When the "Wise-Use" movement was created sixteen years ago, transferring the management of America’s National Park System to the Walt Disney Company was listed as item #11 of their 25 point agenda" For more on this story and other shockers see <ssilver@wildwilderness.org>

This second world offering fake safety and total dependence

on environments and adventures made by unseen others

explicitly for profit, is a poor, even dangerous,

preparation for what lies ahead.

Impositions like this are taking up more and more living time of millions of Americans and Europeans. Our planet is harboring a second world, contrived and built of astounding simplicities, nothing like actual forests, swamps, mountains and animals, and the work of people who live on the land and people who work the land and the oceans. This second world offering fake safety and total dependence on environments and adventures made by unseen others explicitly for profit, is a poor, even dangerous, preparation for what lies ahead.

Compare these ridiculously simple adventures with the Ivory-bill searchers’ struggle. They move as silently as possible through tangles of second-growth timber, sometimes wading over their boottops in muddy water, keeping an eye out for rattlers and, especially, the silent cottonmouth, stopping often to listen to the forest, its faint whispers and loud calls,its surprises, its knowns and unknowns.

"It’s amazing how slowly time can pass when you’re deep in the swamp. It’s a fluid kind of place, all of your visual references are gone ... The only way to cope is to give in to it ... I got into the rhythm of the place. There’s something about hearing the slap of a beaver’s tail, the snort of a deer, or the call of a great horned owl or a barred owl ... the swamp no longer seems alien; you feel like part of it." (3)

I hope the searchers finally get a recording of an Ivory-bill’s call or of the bird itself that will settle once and for all our anxious doubts. Whether the searchers succeed in their Quixotic quest, or fail, they are privileged people, alive and alert in the wide world. I suspect that they think of their work as maneuvering in a very complex game loaded with half sensed, partly known variables, requiring constant shifts of strategy.They love it too, at times, that’s obvious. Can you love a video game? A fake burrito?

Those fanatic birders are giving us a most telling set of experiences of intense engagement. For them the hard part is the struggle for a kind of innocence, the ability to see and hear without being swamped by previously installed pigeonholes of thought. Those pigeonholes are necessary too, rich stores of past sensations, thoughts, conclusions. The searchers are caught in a dynamic between innocence and experience, and as difficult as that is, there’s more, the body: heartbeat and breath, all senses on high alert, muscle and nerve, body wisdom working.

We all are acquainted with that dynamic, but innocence, the hard part for us super-sophisticates, needs emphasis. Pause now for Henry Thoreau.

"I do not get nearer by a hair’s breadth to any natural object so long as I presume that I have an introduction to it from some learned man." (4)

(1) Tim Gallagher, /The Grail Bird. Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker/. Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

(2) Lisa Chiu. Seattle Times - Saturday, August 19, 2006, quoted in <ssilver@wildwilderness.org>

(3) Gallagher speaking, page 195.

(4) Journal, October 4, 1859.