The Economy...For the Birds

I was sitting at my desk this morning. It was a beautiful fall day in the Bay Area...the kind of day you can open the doors and let the fresh air in. As I did just that, I was struck by a sound. Birds--hundreds of them, chirping and twittering and clucking and squawking. I stepped out side to find the source...a large elm tree to the south of my office filled with what seemed like thousands of birds, though I could not see but one or two. I closed my eyes to focus on the sound. It was quite similar to what I imagined the South American rain forest to sound like. It was loud and complicated like an orchestra without a conductor, and amidst the randomness of the sounds and the diversity of types of noise, emerged a sort of swirling pattern. It was wondrous. I have never heard so many birds, making so much noise so near to me. I paused for several minutes just to listen and observe what I could through the foliage. Then suddenly, as if on some prearranged cue, the tree shed itself of every bird as they roared off to the south in a well defined group, soaring at first high, and then swooping downward, before setting off to some other tree, perhaps some miles away. Perhaps they had stopped for a bit of lunch or a rest in the protective limbs of the great old tree and when the break was over, they headed off as if on some sort of schedule. Perhaps an unseen predator was near. Perhaps they had liberated the tree of its surplus bug population and it was time to dine elsewhere. In any event, when the signal was given to go....they did.

How difficult, I thought, it must be to be a bird nowadays. Large trees capable of holding hundreds of birds are few and far between. With vanishing habitat, global warming, and pollution complicating the lives of birds, and other creatures with as much right to be here as we humans, it must not be easy to be a bird just now. And just when there is momentum toward taking the threats seriously, a serious recession, perhaps a global depression, we may, in fact, turn to trying to eat them. Instead of tackling climate change and global warming, we will instead do what ever it takes to keep the economy moving ahead, including lowering the price of gasoline, so that automakers can continue to turn out fuel thirsty cars.

We will assist automakers, to keep them up and running, without demanding that they begin to retool and begin producing cars that respect our diminishing fuel supply, and stop belching greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. We will burn coal instead of erecting windmills. Solar energy will have to wait a bit longer before its day in the sun. And every day of inaction brings us closer to the day when it will no longer matter.

The news continues to be bad in the economic world, and when we speak of the global economy, it appears perhaps more than people around the world are affected. Perhaps the bad economic news spells trouble for the birds as well...and the frogs, and the polar bears, and the fish in the sea.