Monday, September 30, 2019

Where Have All The Birds Gone? Bad News for The Earth.


“A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.”
--John Burroughs, Naturalist, essayist

It’s been quiet at my backyard bird feeder these past few springs and summers.

The boisterous and noisy crowd of bright red cardinals and squawking blue jays and nimble yellow finches and sharp beaked woodpeckers: they just don’t visit as often, or as frequently, as in past years. Once I could not keep the feeder filled fast enough to keep up with demand. Now, year after year, the feeder stays full, longer. The backyard is hushed, some days with little or no bird song. It’s eerie, this silence.

The birds have fled.

Now I know this absence is not just in my imagination. The birds are in fact dying off and in larger numbers than ever before in modern natural history. Those are the findings of a report released last week in the journal and magazine “Science”. “We were astounded by this net loss across all birds on our continent, the loss of billions of birds,” said Cornell University Lab of Ornithology conservation scientist Ken Rosenberg. He headed up an international team of scientists that analyzed population trends for 529 bird species. The results: since 1970, the number of wild birds in North America has collapsed, the total population declining by some 30 percent, or 2.9 billion of our winged friends. Almost one in three birds gone. This mass species wide die-off is unprecedented.

Individual species have gone extinct. In the 19th century the passenger pigeon was the most abundant bird in North America, possibly the whole world.  Its numbers were so huge that newspapers reported it could take a day or more for a flock to pass by a given spot, millions of birds blanketing the sky, blotting out the sun. But the pigeon became so popular for hunting and eating that within just two generations, the last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. 
The last bird.

And all for human development, human growth, human appetites, human “progress”. Today’s birds are dying, not because of hunting, but largely because of the loss of habitat.  All those new houses going up on the next street or block over? High rise apartments? Oversized McMansions? The stand of trees felled for those developments once hosted the birds. And the new farmlands dotting the landscape to feed a growing world? Those meadows and forests were home for the birds, the places where they once lived and raised their young.

Humanity marches forward.  And the birds flee. And the birds die.

This news of this environmental collapse should not have shocked me, I suppose. We are living in bad times for God’s Creation. The current regime in Washington, D.C. gleefully, unashamedly, is rolling back decades of environmental regulations that protect the earth. We once led the world in caring for the planet. Now we are encouraged as citizens to use as much energy as we want, to build as big as we want, to exploit any and all natural resources, as if Mother Earth can just absorb all of this overuse. Something’s got to give.

The birds.

Their loss breaks my heart, makes me fear deeply for the future of this third rock from the sun, and brings to mind a prescient Bible passage. The writer has an apocalyptic vision of living in a world desolate and de-created, a land devoid of any life, a land ravaged.  He writes, “I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void....I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled.” (Jeremiah 4)

What will it be that will finally wake us up as a species to the truth that we are slowly but surely destroying our own home, this precious gift that God has given us? What will it take for the science deniers and the moneymakers to finally admit that when profits trump the planet, every species, including homos sapiens, is in danger of mass extinction? What will be the tipping point, the place at which there is no turning back, no hope for the earth?

For me, it’s the birds. The birds that have fled. The birds that have died.

I so miss hearing them sing.



     

  
       

  

  

Monday, September 23, 2019

Bad News, Good News and The Death of Out of Town News


“Sudden change, even if it is for the good, is disruptive.”    --Mahathir Mohamad, Prime Minister, Malaysia

It’s the place where I’ve met many a blind date, a place to nervously page through newspapers and magazines as I wait for a mystery woman to show up. It’s the place to meet my Goddaughter for dinner, as I take the “T” in from the ‘burbs and she strolls over from the Yard. It’s the place I rarely shop anymore but a place whose presence, sure and steady, strong and true, right in the heart of Cambridge’s Harvard Square…it’s a place that I will miss when it closes up shop at the end of next month.

It’s Out of Town News, a purveyor of all things journalistic: newspaper broad sheets and tabloids from all over the United States and the world, a seller of hundreds of magazines, everything from Popular Mechanics to Playboy. The place to buy a map if you are a tourist, cigarettes if you are smoker, or a Coke to slake your thirst on a hot summer day.

First built as a subway entrance in 1927, in 1954 it opened its narrow doors for business in a squat brown building that sits at the busiest intersection in the square. For sixty-five years it’s sold the news, from near and far. Like New York City’s Grand Central Station clock, Out of Town News is a place that most everyone knows, is easily recognizable and an absolute perfect landmark to meet. 

But on October 31st, unless some last-minute Halloween miracle saves this venerated institution, it will go away, the building staying, but the business shuttered for good. It wasn’t a zoning problem that closed Out of Town News, nor sky high rent. Cambridge, which owns the building, is planning to renovate that piece of valuable real estate and the current owner of the store has said he will not renew the lease.    

Yet beyond this seemingly simple business decision, what really killed Out of Town News is me, and you, and millions of other folks who still consume the news, read the news, follow the news but now do so through our screens. Who needs actual physical containers for the news—made of paper and ink--when with a tap on a smartphone or computer mouse we can get the news and so much faster and more up to date and all so conveniently?

The fancy term for this type of social shift is “disruptive innovation”. Though the entrepreneurs who create and exploit such innovation in 2019—think Amazon, Uber, or Google—might imagine they are the pioneers of such disruption, the truth is that disruptive change has been going on forever. It’s hard baked into the human condition. God gave us brains to think and so we do just that and we constantly build upon the innovation and creations of the past to move into tomorrow.

So, the horse and buggy were killed by the car. The telegram was killed by the telephone. The movies killed burlesque and then TV was supposed to kill the movies but now Netflix just might kill both the movies and cable TV. Facebook and other social media are radically reshaping how community is formed and so even the place I work, a church, a 2,000 plus year old institution—we are being radically disrupted too.

I will miss Out of Town News. Miss the visceral feel of the printed page as I flip through a magazine or newspaper. I still miss the black ink that used to stain my hands as a newspaper boy in Springfield, Massachusetts so, so long ago.

But the economy, all of life: it does not run on nostalgia, on looking backwards, on staying put. We cannot return to an era when America was supposedly “great” because that is not the way that time or the human experience works. We humans are a restless lot, created by a God who gives us the power to think, to change, to grow, to innovate and to reach for the stars. 

Along that path, as we shift from one way of doing things to another, it can be hard to bid farewell to the familiar and the comfortable and the known. But the truth is that innovation and disruption happen, and not just because some vague outside force wrenches us into the future.

Disruption happens because of us. Factories in the United States close not just because of corporate greed. They close because we demand cheaper consumer goods. Clothes that cost as little as possible. Appliances so inexpensive that when they break, we just throw them away. We demand the news: not a day late, not on a 24-hour timer, but now. RIGHT NOW!

We don’t buy the news at Out of Town News anymore.

And that’s a shame. And that’s reality. And that’s good and that’s bad and that’s the way this amazing world works. As to a new place to meet my blind dates: any suggestions?

     
    

 
      

Monday, September 16, 2019

Sometimes, We All Finish In Last Place


"Never give up, no matter what. Even if you get last place--finish."
 --long distance Olympic runner Louis Zamperini, P.O.W. survivor

It’s the very last place in the world I wanted to be.

In last place. I was the caboose. The guy who brings up the rear. The one left behind at the tail end of a race, as everyone else speeds ahead.

It happened last month on a warm Saturday morning. I was one of about 4,000 bicycle riders. We departed at 7 am from Babson College in Wellesley on a journey all the way to the Bourne Bridge, at the foot of Cape Cod.  I was so excited to start the day, to be part of the Pan Mass Challenge, the largest and most successful athletic fundraiser in the country.  It was my tenth year and ride.  I was an old pro: what could go wrong?

But then just three miles from the start, the long, narrow steel cable that controlled my shifter, that allowed me to seamlessly move up or down among 24 gears: it snapped in two. My bike was permanently stuck in one of the hardest gears.  No way I could ride 85 miles like that.  As I mashed the pedals up and down, pushed with all my might, riders began to pass me, first tens, then hundreds and I slipped further and further and further back.

The good news: I came upon a volunteer bike mechanic on the side of the road who said he could fix it.  The bad news: it took an hour and fifteen minutes, so by the time I got back on my navy blue 1997 Raleigh, I was solo, with almost no one else left on the route. That’s a really humbling place to be. 

There’s a cycling title for the last rider. I was the lantern rouge, the “red lantern”, like the light hung from the very back of a long freight train. 

Last place.

I felt like the 1962 New York Mets baseball team, who in their debut pennant race, lost an abysmal 120 games out of 160 played, finishing sixty games out of first place.  As I pedaled away and the hot sun rose high in the sky, I was mostly by myself, seeing other riders far in the distance, never able to fully catch up to them. I was tempted to plant myself on a personal pity-potty, go all “woe is me” but then I reconsidered.

Because in life, the truth is that someone always has to be last, at the back, at the rear of the line. You can’t have a winner without others losing. We can’t all be gold medal recipients. And to just compete, to try one’s best, to strive, to struggle, to leave it all on the field no matter what the outcome: that absolutely matters. Maybe more than winning.

Maybe being in first place isn’t everything. 

It reminds me of the story of a 46-year-old amateur runner named Red Hilton, from East Bridgewater, who last April competed in her very first Boston Marathon. She ran for a cause and through her courageous effort to complete that 26.2-mile race, she raised more than $6,000 for the Boston Medical Center. And she was in last place. She was the very last runner, out of more than 33,000, to cross the finish line on Boylston Street. She did so more than nine hours after leaving Hopkinton.
To me, that absolutely makes her a winner, a big winner, a brave winner, who stuck to it and finally made it all the way.  There to greet her, in the chill of a spring evening was her son, who embraced her with a big hug and was so doubt very proud of his Mom.

A wise teacher of religion long ago proclaimed that the first shall be last and the last shall be first; that anyone who wants to be first in the eyes of God, must go to the very back of the line, in humility and service to others. In a world that is forever lionizing first-place finishers—the very rich, the multiple award winners, the pompous self-promoters, the selfie-taking celebs convinced that they are “all that”—it’s important to remember the rest of the folks in line. The average, the low key, the humble, the servants, the poor, the quiet, all the folks who just show up and suit up and participate every day.      

At day’s end I finally rode into Bourne nine and a half hours after I left Wellesley. I wasn’t last.  After showering, I walked back out to the finish line and saw a handful of folks waiting and they told me there was one final rider about to arrive. He’d started 12 hours earlier. They lined up with big smiles, ready to applaud him when he finished.

The last shall be first. The first shall be last.  
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