How can you say that you’re not responsible?
What does it have to do with me?
What is my reaction, what should it be?
Confronted by this latest atrocity
Hide my face in my hands,
shame wells in my throat
My comfortable existence is reduced to
a shallow meaningless party
Seems that when some innocent die
All we can offer them is a page in a some magazine
Too many cameras and not enough food
‘Cause this is what we’ve seen
Protest is futile, nothing seems to get through
What’s to become of our world, who knows what to do?
Driven to tears — Sting , 1981
This week we got the sad news of a reality that we knew was coming: thousands of eagles dying due to lack of salmon spawning along the coast of British Columbia. Eagles are being found on the ground, unable to fly. Thousands more are searching for food, trying to avoid the same fate.
Innocence and experience are contrary states, different ways of seeing and dwelling in the world. Roman augurs based prophesies on bird flight, and shamans were able to give the community direction based on signs in nature. The signs we see in nature are not about seeing into the future, but seeing the dead or dying birds and animals that demonstrate that there is something wrong here. By the time we see it, we don’t know what to do, or it’s too late to do anything. We find ourselves at odds with a material civilization that has removed us from nature. It takes wildlife dying in front of our eyes to even get our attention, a fairly weak attention that is quickly distracted away to something else.
What did we inherit from our forefathers? For they systematically and with clear intent effectively extinguished the bald eagle from the Northwestern U.S. by the 1960s. The reasons they did this and all that revolved around it has slowly sank into the realm of the unspeakable … those dark occurrences that nobody wants to talk about, for even mentioning it will raise questions … questions that people don’t want answers for.
So the news of thousands of eagles starving, of eagles sitting on the ground too weak to fly because their main food source of spawning salmon didn’t show up, is but another blip on our internal radar. We don’t know the reasons and we don’t want to know the reasons. The eagles are left to die, as millions of years of evolution and salmon runs that arrived like clockwork have ceased to exist. Consequently, the eagles must take a page out of Darwinism and adapt to survive, so they go to our garbage dumps to feast on our toxic remains. This provides a diet that keeps the eagles alive but it’s not a food source that they are going to ultimately survive with. Our National Symbol of Freedom, the bald eagle, has been stripped of its freedom to live in the natural world and is more and more forced to eat human waste and die slowly. Many eagles, of course, never reach this point, as they are electrocuted on power poles, shot at by wannabe hunters, hit by cars and trucks, or die from eating other animals and birds that have ingested toxins themselves.
Some of you may remember the TV commercial back in the ’70s where a Native American stands on the side of the road, someone throws a bag of trash out of their car, and it lands at his feet. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psq5mcjWcg) The people who have seen this TV commercial are moved; they say it’s powerful, but within hours the impact is forgotten. So I guess the realization of how quickly we forget things helped to temper my disappointment in the Seattle Times, who in the midst of all these eagles starving and dying off, chose to print a “feel good” article about how Seattle has so many more eagles to see this year. Sitting at a desk, I guess the Times writers couldn’t understand that these extra eagles were in their city because they were starving and looking for food.
Of course, this type of media indifference has only degraded further because newspapers have no budget for research that would illuminate what is really going on. Editors see research as wasted money being spent on information that will only lead to news they can’t print anyway, as you can’t bite the hand that feeds you.
Such is the power and the failure of our media to get through to the masses the true direction of our decisions. As Thomas de Zengotita argues, “The airwaves, the internet are bombarded daily with a mediated reality of the day’s events. There was a time when the TV was set up for the whole family to watch, the conversations of our culture start to happen on the TV sets. The content is controlled by a select few, and designed to appeal to the masses. Conversations are always entertaining, even the serious ones (look how political debates are drawn down from long reasoned responses to sound bites), the conversations are punctuated by blocks of 30 second commercials, and these conversations shape our culture of irrelevance, incoherence and impotence.”
Earth Day was established in 1970, but instead of stepping on the brakes, we instead kept our foot down on the accelerator. As de Zengotita points out, “The end of nature is a spiritual catastrophe … the appeal of mediation (main stream media) rests in large part on its capacity to distract us from the monumental grief and guilt we would feel in the presence of this loss, if we were not distracted. It is no accident that, as we succeed in conquering the world, the trope of conquest falls from fashion. We don’t want to talk about it that way anymore, our complicity, though obvious, must be disguised. People who are least concerned with protecting nature, people who want unrestricted drilling and logging and hunting and snowmobiling, they are the ones who come closet to experiencing nature as real. For them in their ignorance, it still registers as an inexhaustible given.”
Shape how, you may ask? Neil Postman summarized this pattern with the conclusion, “The public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference.” The indifference is reflected in our actions, as he asks the questions: “What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in Afghanistan? On Wall Street? On our dependence on foreign oil? What do you plan to do about deforestation or urban sprawl? About eagles starving to death? Etc … I shall take the liberty of answering for you … you plan to do nothing.”
This behavior was shown to me in real time just the past week, as our posts in the Salish Sea facebook page came to light. The facebook post that asked people to take action and help do something got a quarter of the views that the other posts received.
The famous Canadian professor Marshall McLuhan says the environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. We have created an environment that is void of nature, void of understanding how nature’s web of life works, and void of respect for the web of life. So nature has no role in our environment, except to be exploited for profit. With our consumer society we have mortgaged nature — as we have our credit cards and refinanced home loans — to the point where we now are mired in deficit and debt. We’ve eaten our grandchildren’s fish, harvested their forests, and used up their clean water.
The disconnect could not be any more clear than the contrasting news coming out of Vancouver this week. Earlier in the week, a major poll rated Vancouver the most livable city in the world! Yes, that’s good for tourism and for real estate, overseas investors, and the like, but for the natural world, not so much. Remember when British Columbia was advertised as “Come Experience the Supernatural”? Even the Olympic coverage tried to perpetuate a mythic natural world image, with their helicopter shots and Nature Channel type footage. Nothing in Vancouver or the entire province could be further from the truth. Every tree, creek, river, lake, animal, fish, and bird is under siege from a barrage of multinational corporations, green lighted by the provincial government that collects the royalties in one hand, while its other hand keeps under its thumb any resistance from regulating agencies. Yes, as John Lennon said, “Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.” Nothing is wrong, nothing to get hung up about, for we live in the most livable city in the world. But this is only the corporate media view that most Canadians and some Americans reject.
Adam Smith’s fateful metaphor from the 1790s was “the invisible hand” for the emerging market economy, as the king’s scepter becomes “too heavy for mortal grasp, no more / to be swayed by visible hand.” This alludes to the king’s dealings not being visible to the common man. Of course, it is equally true today, as we got slapped with a hand that was said to be “too big to fail.”
A good example of the invisible hand was demonstrated with the so-called NAFTA agreement. All the agreement really did was make it easy for multi-national corporations to easily send their money and goods across borders. All the while, we’re still stuck in long lines at the border and continue paying duties and extra taxes, instead of opening our borders like the countries in Europe did.
It was only three years ago that the American Bald Eagle came off the endangered species list. Most biologists and eagle enthusiasts had some serious reservations about the change in status. The media tried to celebrate it as a big victory that we all could feel good about — “Mission Accomplished,” we saved the bald eagle! Yes, we saved it from extinction, but bringing the bald eagle population back to 10 percent of its historic levels really should not be a source of pride, but one of shame that we need to continue to work on.
What does that say about our natural environment that it can no longer support an eagle population that has been reduced by 90 percent? Yes, that’s right! The whole ecosystem is on the verge of extinction. Salmon, with their dwindling or extinct runs, are a keystone species that support 200 other species. We just don’t easily see the bears that have starved to death, or the Orca whales that suddenly don’t surface with their pod mates.
The Salish people lived on this land for 9,000 years before we took it from them in 1855. We were handed over a pristine environment that teemed with life: 10,000 bald eagles lived in the state of Washington versus about 2,000 today; 100% of old growth forests versus 3% today; 100% of wetlands versus 15% today; and all rivers without dams. The Salish people looked ahead seven generations to make sure they left to the next generation what they themselves had received. When we lose our jobs, most of us can’t last seven months.
All we have achieved in the last 150 years is to unleash an era of colonization within the New World, a Manifest Destiny that has burned like a fire across the landscape — an energy that fuels discovery, imperial conquest, and the rape of undeveloped land. Then we started the self-righteous spiritual conversion of the people who were the original caretakers of the land, a people who saw eagles as their brothers and who revered them as sacred.
So now, as eagles fall from the sky, one can only hope that somehow it will wake everyone up to our needing to change. Like it or not, we are good stewards of the land, the seas, the air, and all the life it supports. Yes, while we have become the fattest people on the planet, everything around us is starving. Our immoral fixation on short-term gains without regards for long-term consequences is now being seen in the dying eyes of eagles.
I’m angry, I’m sad, I feel ashamed of the state of our beloved eagles and what we have done to them. I can’t find anything to make me feel better. It’s a devastating loss that cuts deep into my soul. A friend sent me this poem that Lance Read wrote about the situation. I’ll share it with you here….