Echo-Systems and the Vociferous
Laura England | 2020
My daughter has been obsessed with birds since she could speak—likely longer, it just took her acquiring words for us to know it. I will never forget that trip to the North Carolina coast when my two-year-old Celia, with windblown ringlets framing her dimpled cheeks, toddled after long-legged shorebirds exclaiming, “I catch a bird, I catch a bird!” She was so gleeful, confident, and hopeful; I felt a twinge of guilt rooting for the birds. Lately, I find myself rooting for the birds daily, especially since last October when leading ornithologists documented North America’s loss of nearly 3 billion birds in the last half-century.
Thanks to the Great Acceleration, a period of exponential growth in the human enterprise, much of the natural world—not just bird populations—is a mere shadow of what it was just half a century ago. Today’s children are growing up in “echo-systems”—muffled, muted, smothered landscapes where vibrant forests, marshes, and grasslands formerly flourished. Most kids don’t know any better thanks to “shifting baseline syndrome,” a downgrading of perceived ‘normal’ environmental conditions with each new generation. The danger of this cross-generational amnesia is that we are seriously underestimating the actual scale and scope of long-term damage to all living things and our shared home. I sometimes envy my young son and daughter, not aware of what they’re missing. Observing such losses over the decades is seriously distressing.
But I firmly believe that bearing witness—to see, hear, and be with the lives of others—is a profound form of love. “Mom, watch this!,” may be the phrase I’ve heard most often from my children, and they don’t seem to be growing out of that need to be witnessed by me. Whether it’s Celia’s flipping dismount from the swing under the apple tree or Gabe’s mountain bike wheelie across the clovered yard, my tuning in makes them feel not just seen, but loved. And in turn, my heart swells with affection, adoration, love.
Bearing witness to the Anthropocene stirs a different swell of emotions entirely. Dread and anticipatory grief, or “mermerosity,” emerge. In addition to giving us “solastalgia” to name our sorrow over ecological losses, Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht named an entire assemblage of Earth Emotions. Albrecht defines mermerosity as a “chronic state of being worried or anxious about the possible passing of the familiar” and emphasizes how unsettling that feeling is for our sense of place. With every new study I read that documents biospheric decline, the mermerous undertow tugs at me. Yet I cannot look away.
Witnessing the birds of spring on my morning walk on Mother’s Day 2020, I had a flash of self-insight. A hairpin curve in the road led me high above the Watauga River floodplain where Barn Swallows flitted for insects, their backs iridescent flashes of blue. An Indigo Bunting, the bluest of our blue birds, swooshed across my path. A Carolina Wren high in the sycamores repeated a phrase of love and longing. I wondered, as I have before, why it is so important to me to witness these lives? A new answer occurred to me. Could it be because I have long been missing my own number-one-witness—my mother? That I never grew out of that need, and am filling it in reverse?
******
Whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will. I never actually got to see one, though these native nightjars headlined summer nights throughout my childhood. Growing up in the woods outside of Raleigh, North Carolina, I bodily identified with the crepuscular rhythms of these birds—dawn and dusk were the only times it made sense to be active during the sweltering summertime. The species’ scientific name, Antrostomus vociferous, perfectly captures the vigor and persistence of these avian singers. Their persistence is such that some consider their chant to be clamor rather than lullaby. Many an evening I drifted off with my windows open to all the forest sounds—crickets, cicadas, spring peepers, wind tickling leaves, and the occasional owl all anchored by Whip-poor-will melody. I never considered how much it meant to me to hear this bird’s song until it faded. Now it is a wistful echo of the time in my life when everything was still whole, or at least seemed so.
Back then, it was easy to take Eastern Whip-poor-wills for granted; they were so very common, if not to our eyes then to our ears. And they remain easy to take for granted under today’s taxonomy of threat. Though we have lost—actually, destroyed is more accurate—more than two-thirds of their population since 1970, Whip-poor-wills are not considered “endangered” or even “threatened.” Through many years of population decline they were listed as “least concern” until 2014 when the species was added to the North American Bird Conservation Watchlist. Their current conservation status is “near threatened.” It shocks me that this severe loss is so blandly labeled and therefore implicitly deemed acceptable.
Imagine if two-thirds of our kind were lost. As I write, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted human communities all over the world. By the end of 2020, the novel-to-us virus had taken more than 1.8 million human lives, about 0.024% of the global human population. Rightly, these tragic losses bring massive individual and collective grief and motivate action to reduce and eliminate the threat. We have rearranged myriad aspects of life as usual in order to save human lives. Why do we respond so little to extreme losses of more-than-human life? A tiny fraction of a percent of our kind have been lost so far to COVID-19. Why does it take three orders of magnitude (one thousand times!) greater losses of our avian kin before we even begin to register concern? We have been so careless with other life. Seemingly, we could not care less.
******
Last spring I heard a Whip-poor-will for the first time in many years. Mike and I were on a rare date night. We often choose hikes in our western North Carolina setting over dinner-and-a-movie or other conventional date night outings. While watching the sunset from Hawksbill Mountain overlooking Linville Gorge—the place where for twenty years the mineral remains of my mother have mingled with river and forest—we heard it. Whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will. I felt an intense and indescribable familiarity and loss intertwined. Nostalgia. Solastalgia.
Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. Joni Mitchell was another headliner of my childhood—my Mom’s favorite singer and songwriter. My feelings about Joni’s music were a good indicator of the evolution of our relationship. During my early teens I declared my growing independence from my Mom in safe ways, like deriding her music. As I was becoming an adult, I found my way back, both to my Mom and to the irresistible melodies of “Court and Spark,” “Ladies of the Canyon, and, of course, “Blue.” And then, tragically, Mom was gone, leaving behind atoms and echoes. Since then, Joni’s voice evokes a mountain of loss, including the extraordinary person my mother was, along with the warp and weft of her life that extended into the lives of so many others. Loss leaves tatters.
The Eastern Whip-poor-will’s voice also evokes a mountain of loss. Ecologists haven’t fully quantified the causes of its decline, though destruction of habitat and decline in insect prey populations top the list. Climate change induced mismatches in the timing of food availability for these insectivores is increasingly under suspicion. We have destroyed the homes and livelihoods for the majority of these birds, and their absence reverberates along the warp and weft of Eastern forest echo-systems.
How do I explain to my children all that the loss of my mother has meant to me? How do I explain to them all that the collapse of the Eastern Whip-poor-will and populations of so many other avian kin means for the world?
******
Following confirmation of the novel coronavirus, the whole world got a painful math lesson on exponential growth in 2020. On April 2nd, we surpassed 1 million confirmed COVID-19 cases globally. In early September—the six month mark for the pandemic in the United States—the world surpassed 11 million cases, which then mushroomed to more than 86 million cases by the end of this dreadful year. It has been such an unsettling time, watching the exponential growth of the COVID-19 pandemic in horror. I cannot help but imagine that this horror we feel now is perhaps how every other living thing has been feeling for the past several decades, watching in horror as nearly every dimension of the human enterprise grows exponentially, destroying their lives, livelihoods and lifeways.
Witnessing the community of life that I remain connected to has been a heartening balm for me during pandemic-induced isolation from my human community. The birds—including our Southern Appalachian residents and migrants passing through—have been particularly soothing to watch and listen to this spring. I swear I heard a Joni Mitchell inspired Eastern Towhee—instead of the usual hyper vibrato, his end of phrase vibrato was wide and luxurious. Apparently, a growing number of people are witnessing the birds during the pandemic, a trend that sparks a glimmer of something that feels akin to hope. Ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer asserts that witnessing is the beginning of reciprocity—“Attention becomes intention, which coalesces itself to action… Deep attention calls us inevitably into deep relationship.”
Could the mermerosity of millions motivate a murmuration—a swell of collective movement, i.e. a movement—with resolve to save the more-than-human lives? Mermerosity is preceded by knowledge of the threats and losses, the pattern of collapse that is shredding our biosphere—our home—and all the ways it nourishes us, body and spirit. Though it is difficult to keep showing up to teach and learn about these losses, more of us are doing so each year, despite the emotional toll. Wangari Maathai, the late Nobel Prize winning Kenyan founder of the Green Belt Movement, urged each of us to “be a hummingbird,” emphasizing that the least among us can have a great impact and that we should never allow feeling small to paralyze us. I’ll echo her call by urging each of us to be a Whip-poor-will and to use our voices with vigor and persistence. Be vociferous.
Vociferous means to be so loud or insistent as to compel attention. We must summon our voices on behalf of echo-systems before they are muted entirely. We must transform our mermerous murmur into a vociferous chorus urging care for all life. We must flatten ALL the exponential growth curves of the Anthropocene. We must actively create the Symbiocene, a period of re-integration of humans with the rest of nature. Witnessing and wit(h)nessing are the seeds of lifeways defined by mutuality and reciprocity, lifeways in which solastalgia, mermerosity and other painful Earth Emotions decompose into echoes.
******
My now eight-year-old Celia continues to be drawn to our avian kin. Near daily, she showers our flock of hens with attention. One day last month, she was devastated to learn that it was to be our rooster’s last day. Not yet ready to talk with me about her feelings, she went outside and expressed them as the birds do. From behind a curtain I witnessed her sing, “where do all the souls go?” as she cupped lavender balls of bergamot blossoms and communed with the tens of bumble bees feasting on nectar. Later that night, a tiny, fuzzy gray feather appeared on the kitchen counter, and no question of how it got there—the latest addition to Celia’s collection. As ornithologist J. Drew Lanham recently noted, “Some days, it's all about a single solitary thing. Watch. Revere. Repeat.”
Sources
1. Rosenberg, K. V. et al. 2019. Decline of the North American avifauna. Science 366: 120–124.
2. Steffen, W., P.J. Crutzen and J.R. McNeill. 2007. The Anthropocene: Are humans now the overwhelming force of nature? Ambio 36(8): 614-621.
3. Jones, Lizzie P. et al. 2020. Investigating the implications of shifting baseline syndrome on conservation. People and Nature 2(4): 1131-1144.
4. Albrecht, Glenn A. 2019. Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
5. North American Bird Conservation Initiative, U.S. Committee. 2014. The State of the Birds 2014 Report. U.S. Department of Interior, Washington, D.C.
6. BirdLife International. 2018. Antrostomus vociferus. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2018: e.T22736393A131617918. https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2018-2.RLTS.T22736393A131617918.en. Accessed on 19 July 2020.
7. Fears, Darryl. 2020. “Amid the pandemic, people are paying more attention to tweets. And not the Twitter kind.” Washington Post, 22 May 2020.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/05/22/amid-pandemic-people-are-paying-more-attention-tweets-not-twitter-kind/
8. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2014. Returning the gift. Minding Nature 7(2): 18-24.
9. Maathai, Wangari. "I Will Be a Hummingbird.” YouTube, uploaded by Michael Kirkpatrick, 25 September 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT98uQ74X1c.
10. Boscacci, Louise. 2018. Wit(h)nessing. Environmental Humanities 10 (1): 343–347.
https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-4385617
11. Lanham, J. Drew. On observing his favorite bird, the Loggerhead Shrike. Facebook, 29 November 2020, https://www.facebook.com/j.drew.lanham. Accessed 29 November 2020.
Laura England | 2020
My daughter has been obsessed with birds since she could speak—likely longer, it just took her acquiring words for us to know it. I will never forget that trip to the North Carolina coast when my two-year-old Celia, with windblown ringlets framing her dimpled cheeks, toddled after long-legged shorebirds exclaiming, “I catch a bird, I catch a bird!” She was so gleeful, confident, and hopeful; I felt a twinge of guilt rooting for the birds. Lately, I find myself rooting for the birds daily, especially since last October when leading ornithologists documented North America’s loss of nearly 3 billion birds in the last half-century.
Thanks to the Great Acceleration, a period of exponential growth in the human enterprise, much of the natural world—not just bird populations—is a mere shadow of what it was just half a century ago. Today’s children are growing up in “echo-systems”—muffled, muted, smothered landscapes where vibrant forests, marshes, and grasslands formerly flourished. Most kids don’t know any better thanks to “shifting baseline syndrome,” a downgrading of perceived ‘normal’ environmental conditions with each new generation. The danger of this cross-generational amnesia is that we are seriously underestimating the actual scale and scope of long-term damage to all living things and our shared home. I sometimes envy my young son and daughter, not aware of what they’re missing. Observing such losses over the decades is seriously distressing.
But I firmly believe that bearing witness—to see, hear, and be with the lives of others—is a profound form of love. “Mom, watch this!,” may be the phrase I’ve heard most often from my children, and they don’t seem to be growing out of that need to be witnessed by me. Whether it’s Celia’s flipping dismount from the swing under the apple tree or Gabe’s mountain bike wheelie across the clovered yard, my tuning in makes them feel not just seen, but loved. And in turn, my heart swells with affection, adoration, love.
Bearing witness to the Anthropocene stirs a different swell of emotions entirely. Dread and anticipatory grief, or “mermerosity,” emerge. In addition to giving us “solastalgia” to name our sorrow over ecological losses, Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht named an entire assemblage of Earth Emotions. Albrecht defines mermerosity as a “chronic state of being worried or anxious about the possible passing of the familiar” and emphasizes how unsettling that feeling is for our sense of place. With every new study I read that documents biospheric decline, the mermerous undertow tugs at me. Yet I cannot look away.
Witnessing the birds of spring on my morning walk on Mother’s Day 2020, I had a flash of self-insight. A hairpin curve in the road led me high above the Watauga River floodplain where Barn Swallows flitted for insects, their backs iridescent flashes of blue. An Indigo Bunting, the bluest of our blue birds, swooshed across my path. A Carolina Wren high in the sycamores repeated a phrase of love and longing. I wondered, as I have before, why it is so important to me to witness these lives? A new answer occurred to me. Could it be because I have long been missing my own number-one-witness—my mother? That I never grew out of that need, and am filling it in reverse?
******
Whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will. I never actually got to see one, though these native nightjars headlined summer nights throughout my childhood. Growing up in the woods outside of Raleigh, North Carolina, I bodily identified with the crepuscular rhythms of these birds—dawn and dusk were the only times it made sense to be active during the sweltering summertime. The species’ scientific name, Antrostomus vociferous, perfectly captures the vigor and persistence of these avian singers. Their persistence is such that some consider their chant to be clamor rather than lullaby. Many an evening I drifted off with my windows open to all the forest sounds—crickets, cicadas, spring peepers, wind tickling leaves, and the occasional owl all anchored by Whip-poor-will melody. I never considered how much it meant to me to hear this bird’s song until it faded. Now it is a wistful echo of the time in my life when everything was still whole, or at least seemed so.
Back then, it was easy to take Eastern Whip-poor-wills for granted; they were so very common, if not to our eyes then to our ears. And they remain easy to take for granted under today’s taxonomy of threat. Though we have lost—actually, destroyed is more accurate—more than two-thirds of their population since 1970, Whip-poor-wills are not considered “endangered” or even “threatened.” Through many years of population decline they were listed as “least concern” until 2014 when the species was added to the North American Bird Conservation Watchlist. Their current conservation status is “near threatened.” It shocks me that this severe loss is so blandly labeled and therefore implicitly deemed acceptable.
Imagine if two-thirds of our kind were lost. As I write, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted human communities all over the world. By the end of 2020, the novel-to-us virus had taken more than 1.8 million human lives, about 0.024% of the global human population. Rightly, these tragic losses bring massive individual and collective grief and motivate action to reduce and eliminate the threat. We have rearranged myriad aspects of life as usual in order to save human lives. Why do we respond so little to extreme losses of more-than-human life? A tiny fraction of a percent of our kind have been lost so far to COVID-19. Why does it take three orders of magnitude (one thousand times!) greater losses of our avian kin before we even begin to register concern? We have been so careless with other life. Seemingly, we could not care less.
******
Last spring I heard a Whip-poor-will for the first time in many years. Mike and I were on a rare date night. We often choose hikes in our western North Carolina setting over dinner-and-a-movie or other conventional date night outings. While watching the sunset from Hawksbill Mountain overlooking Linville Gorge—the place where for twenty years the mineral remains of my mother have mingled with river and forest—we heard it. Whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will. I felt an intense and indescribable familiarity and loss intertwined. Nostalgia. Solastalgia.
Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. Joni Mitchell was another headliner of my childhood—my Mom’s favorite singer and songwriter. My feelings about Joni’s music were a good indicator of the evolution of our relationship. During my early teens I declared my growing independence from my Mom in safe ways, like deriding her music. As I was becoming an adult, I found my way back, both to my Mom and to the irresistible melodies of “Court and Spark,” “Ladies of the Canyon, and, of course, “Blue.” And then, tragically, Mom was gone, leaving behind atoms and echoes. Since then, Joni’s voice evokes a mountain of loss, including the extraordinary person my mother was, along with the warp and weft of her life that extended into the lives of so many others. Loss leaves tatters.
The Eastern Whip-poor-will’s voice also evokes a mountain of loss. Ecologists haven’t fully quantified the causes of its decline, though destruction of habitat and decline in insect prey populations top the list. Climate change induced mismatches in the timing of food availability for these insectivores is increasingly under suspicion. We have destroyed the homes and livelihoods for the majority of these birds, and their absence reverberates along the warp and weft of Eastern forest echo-systems.
How do I explain to my children all that the loss of my mother has meant to me? How do I explain to them all that the collapse of the Eastern Whip-poor-will and populations of so many other avian kin means for the world?
******
Following confirmation of the novel coronavirus, the whole world got a painful math lesson on exponential growth in 2020. On April 2nd, we surpassed 1 million confirmed COVID-19 cases globally. In early September—the six month mark for the pandemic in the United States—the world surpassed 11 million cases, which then mushroomed to more than 86 million cases by the end of this dreadful year. It has been such an unsettling time, watching the exponential growth of the COVID-19 pandemic in horror. I cannot help but imagine that this horror we feel now is perhaps how every other living thing has been feeling for the past several decades, watching in horror as nearly every dimension of the human enterprise grows exponentially, destroying their lives, livelihoods and lifeways.
Witnessing the community of life that I remain connected to has been a heartening balm for me during pandemic-induced isolation from my human community. The birds—including our Southern Appalachian residents and migrants passing through—have been particularly soothing to watch and listen to this spring. I swear I heard a Joni Mitchell inspired Eastern Towhee—instead of the usual hyper vibrato, his end of phrase vibrato was wide and luxurious. Apparently, a growing number of people are witnessing the birds during the pandemic, a trend that sparks a glimmer of something that feels akin to hope. Ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer asserts that witnessing is the beginning of reciprocity—“Attention becomes intention, which coalesces itself to action… Deep attention calls us inevitably into deep relationship.”
Could the mermerosity of millions motivate a murmuration—a swell of collective movement, i.e. a movement—with resolve to save the more-than-human lives? Mermerosity is preceded by knowledge of the threats and losses, the pattern of collapse that is shredding our biosphere—our home—and all the ways it nourishes us, body and spirit. Though it is difficult to keep showing up to teach and learn about these losses, more of us are doing so each year, despite the emotional toll. Wangari Maathai, the late Nobel Prize winning Kenyan founder of the Green Belt Movement, urged each of us to “be a hummingbird,” emphasizing that the least among us can have a great impact and that we should never allow feeling small to paralyze us. I’ll echo her call by urging each of us to be a Whip-poor-will and to use our voices with vigor and persistence. Be vociferous.
Vociferous means to be so loud or insistent as to compel attention. We must summon our voices on behalf of echo-systems before they are muted entirely. We must transform our mermerous murmur into a vociferous chorus urging care for all life. We must flatten ALL the exponential growth curves of the Anthropocene. We must actively create the Symbiocene, a period of re-integration of humans with the rest of nature. Witnessing and wit(h)nessing are the seeds of lifeways defined by mutuality and reciprocity, lifeways in which solastalgia, mermerosity and other painful Earth Emotions decompose into echoes.
******
My now eight-year-old Celia continues to be drawn to our avian kin. Near daily, she showers our flock of hens with attention. One day last month, she was devastated to learn that it was to be our rooster’s last day. Not yet ready to talk with me about her feelings, she went outside and expressed them as the birds do. From behind a curtain I witnessed her sing, “where do all the souls go?” as she cupped lavender balls of bergamot blossoms and communed with the tens of bumble bees feasting on nectar. Later that night, a tiny, fuzzy gray feather appeared on the kitchen counter, and no question of how it got there—the latest addition to Celia’s collection. As ornithologist J. Drew Lanham recently noted, “Some days, it's all about a single solitary thing. Watch. Revere. Repeat.”
Sources
1. Rosenberg, K. V. et al. 2019. Decline of the North American avifauna. Science 366: 120–124.
2. Steffen, W., P.J. Crutzen and J.R. McNeill. 2007. The Anthropocene: Are humans now the overwhelming force of nature? Ambio 36(8): 614-621.
3. Jones, Lizzie P. et al. 2020. Investigating the implications of shifting baseline syndrome on conservation. People and Nature 2(4): 1131-1144.
4. Albrecht, Glenn A. 2019. Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
5. North American Bird Conservation Initiative, U.S. Committee. 2014. The State of the Birds 2014 Report. U.S. Department of Interior, Washington, D.C.
6. BirdLife International. 2018. Antrostomus vociferus. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2018: e.T22736393A131617918. https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2018-2.RLTS.T22736393A131617918.en. Accessed on 19 July 2020.
7. Fears, Darryl. 2020. “Amid the pandemic, people are paying more attention to tweets. And not the Twitter kind.” Washington Post, 22 May 2020.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/05/22/amid-pandemic-people-are-paying-more-attention-tweets-not-twitter-kind/
8. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2014. Returning the gift. Minding Nature 7(2): 18-24.
9. Maathai, Wangari. "I Will Be a Hummingbird.” YouTube, uploaded by Michael Kirkpatrick, 25 September 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT98uQ74X1c.
10. Boscacci, Louise. 2018. Wit(h)nessing. Environmental Humanities 10 (1): 343–347.
https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-4385617
11. Lanham, J. Drew. On observing his favorite bird, the Loggerhead Shrike. Facebook, 29 November 2020, https://www.facebook.com/j.drew.lanham. Accessed 29 November 2020.