The morning after the Brexit vote, as the status-quo-shattering results were becoming clear, Hamburger Morgenpost, the daily newspaper in Hamburg, Germany, rolled out a front page featuring a large portrait of Winston Churchill and a long headline in bold letters: Etwas aufzubauen mag die langsame und mühsame Arbeit von Jahren sein. Es zu zerstören kann der gedankenlose Akt eines einzigen Tages sein.
The headline is a translation of words Churchill delivered on September 29, 1959 in a speech to the Conservative Party Association in his constituency of Woodford: “To build may be the slow and laborious task of years; to destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.”
It took sixty years to build the European Union–and many more years of war and devastating loss before that to drive home the need for such a project; it took fifteen hours of voting to break it.
But in the larger scheme–in the grand sweep of European and world history–the EU itself has been the work of but a day, the accomplishment of less than a single human lifespan. Indeed all the unthinkable advancements of modernity, from the Newcomen steam engine of 1712 to the Mars rover Curiosity of 2012, are the work of only three or four human lifespans–a mere fragment at the tail end of hundreds of generations of human history.
In that context, modernity itself has been the work of a single day.
And while that day–this day, in fact; the day in which we are still living–has been one of stupendous growth and human advancement, it has also been a day of unequaled and irrevocable destruction, a great laying of waste to the work of years beyond number.
So as the media (having been diverted from the calamity of Orlando) howls itself hoarse at the thundering calamity of Brexit, and before it begins howling at the next calamity, I want to take some time to ponder a greater calamity that has befallen–and is befalling–our world.
In the middle of Wisconsin there is a typically pleasant mid-western rural county called Adams; its county seat is a village with the pleasant name of Friendship. In April of 1871–while France and Germany were wrapping up one of their several wars which set the stage for the EU–Adams county had just over 6,600 residents and a penchant for hops. The late 1860s had seen a huge boom in hops in Adams County, and thousands of seasonal workers would flood in during the hops harvest, picking and stripping hops by day, and enjoying hops houses by night. The boom was over by 1871, but hops were still hops, and Friendship was still the county seat.
Yet in 1871 this pleasantly agrarian place so far removed from the battlefields of Europe witnessed a calamity of its own .
The Wisconsin Mirror of Kilbourn City (a town in southern Adams county, now Wisconsin Dells) carried the story:
“The great pigeon roost this year is in Wisconsin. For three weeks, pigeons have been flying in flocks which no man could number. On Saturday, April 22, for about two hours before nightfall they flew in one continuous flock, darkening the sky and astounding people by the noise of their wings. Hotels at Kilbourn are full of trappers and hunters.”
The pigeons in question were passenger pigeons, creatures known for the enormous flocks in which they flew. One witness in Adams County in 1871 described the impression they made this way:
“The idea was to get into position before daylight. The indescribable cooing produced by uncounted millions of pigeons arousing from their slumber, was heard . . . [c]reating an almost bewildering effect on the senses, as it was echoed and re-echoed back by the mighty rocks and ledges of the Wisconsin bank. As the first streaking of daylight began to break over the eastern horizon, small scouting parties of the monstrous army of birds then darted like night spirits past our heads. Soon the skirmish line . . . swept past in small and irregular bodies. . . . We quickly ranged ourselves along the crest of a hill overlooking a cleared valley through which the birds would fly on their outward passage.
And now arose a roar, compared with which all previous noises ever heard are but lullabies. . . . The sound was condensed terror. Imagine a thousand threshing machines running under full headway, accompanied by as many steamboats groaning off steam, with an equal quota of [railroad] trains passing through covered bridges–imagine these massed into a single flock, and you possibly have a faint conception of the terrific roar following the monstrous black cloud of pigeons as they passed in rapid flight in the gray light of morning, a few feet before our faces.”
Passenger pigeons were an ancient species, with fossilized birds having been found in the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles where one also finds the remains of mammoths and saber-toothed tigers; at their height, they numbered in the billions–the most common bird in North America and perhaps the world. Their sheer overwhelming numbers made them an obvious and popular food source for America’s residents–both its first peoples and also its European immigrants.
Passenger pigeon reproductive habits contributed to their use as a food source. They bred communally. Each year, the massive flocks would settle in an area for a period of weeks (the locations varied year to year), and during that settled time, the birds would pair off and then mate, nest, lay, hatch, and fledge their young as pairs. All of these activities were more or less synchronized throughout the breeding colony, with many millions of bird pairs nesting, laying, and hatching simultaneously.
This approach to breeding made harvesting the birds quite easy. Once it was known where the birds were nesting, hunters and trappers could descend on the area in a flock of their own and take many of the nesting birds with little trouble.
The eyewitness in Adams county in 1871 recounted this particular aspect of the hunt:
“Leaving the rest of the party, we drove off a few miles further into a high wooded ridge, where the nests were located. Every tree containing from one to four hundred nests. The young pigeons . . . were hardly able to fly, and could be caught easily, when once ousted from the nest. Here of course were hundreds of thousands of single birds (probably the females), which could be shot one or two at a time, as fast as the hunter could load and fire. We saw more than a hundred trees that had fallen, by reason of the numbers of nests upon its (their) branches. Many of the young pigeons were dead in their nests, the mothers probably having been killed, and her young starved.
Thousands driven by hunger had managed to crawl or flop from the nest, and whose dead bodies lay thick upon the ground. Thousands of dead pigeons also were scattered around, having doubtless been wounded away from home, and flown to their young to die. It is estimated that not less than 100,000 hunters from all portions of the Union have visited the roost during this season.”
The Adams roost of 1871 was the largest ever recorded. It measured approximately 850 square miles, covered most of the county, and hosted an estimated 136 million pigeons. It was also one of the last. The combined slaughter made possible by fast communications and the railroad was simply unsustainable. There were a few more large roots in the 1870s, again heavily hunted, but by 1900, passenger pigeons were extinct in the wild. In the autumn of 1914–just as France and Germany were getting their next war underway–the last passenger pigeon, Martha, a solitary female at the Cincinnati Zoo, died.
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The annihilation of the passenger pigeon happened because people assumed it couldn’t happen. There were just so many birds, it didn’t seem possible that they should cease to be. In 1857 when a bill was proposed in Ohio offering protections for the birds, a select committee of the state senate wrote this in response: “The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here to-day and elsewhere to-morrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced.” Yet within a lifetime they were gone–the work of ages destroyed in a single day.
And the calamity of the passenger pigeon is but one facet of a larger calamity that is still ongoing. It is largely not a malicious, premeditated calamity. It is an unthinking calamity, the natural, inevitable result of new technologies and expanding populations carrying on business as usual without considering–or caring about–the destructive potential that modern developments represent.
There are many current examples of wildlife being pushed to (or over) the edge by our modern way of living, but I will start with tuna because the problem of tuna is the best corollary to the passenger pigeon.
Like the passenger pigeon, tuna are a staple food source. Also like the passenger pigeon, tuna exist in numbers beyond counting–a seemingly limitless resource for consumption. And like the passenger pigeon, tuna are brought to our tables from far remote places by the workings of an industrialized process we do not understand and about which we care little. For us, it is enough to know that the tuna in those little cans is a great source of protein, eats nicely, and is cheap.
But knowing what happened to the passenger pigeon, and how quickly it happened when all seemed well, the similarities between the bird and the fish should give us pause, indeed should worry us.
There is no doubt that the systematic exploitation of the passenger pigeon which led to its extinction was in part a profit-motivated, industrialized activity. Professional pigeon hunters made their living off the birds, and refined techniques for mass harvesting (such as tunnel nets which could take thousands of birds at a time) maximized income potential. And the market was never farther than the nearest railroad station. Our 1871 observer reports, “Four of the party were Chicago men who had come out to purchase or otherwise procure several thousand birds for that market. We quickly negotiated our interest to them at the rate of one cent per pigeon, and six hours later, we understand, the birds having been thoroughly plucked and packed in ice, were headed on a through freight to Chicago.”
Birds packed in ice for the housewives of Chicago were the harmless-looking face of a mass extinction.
It is that thought which should come to mind every time we see those familiar little cans that greet us on our grocery store shelves. Behind the StarKist, the BumbleBee, and the Chicken of the Sea is a mechanized juggernaut that is trawling our oceans, not for fish, but for dollars, and in many cases that juggernaut is every bit as opportunistic and wasteful as the hunting parties that leveled forests to speed up harvest times and left hundreds of thousands of dead pigeons rotting in the fields. As with the passenger pigeon, if we don’t stop ourselves, there’s little to stop us before the damage is irreversible. And as global population grows and new markets expand, demand will only rise, and exploitation will only get worse.
A stark reminder of this fact is the supermarket shelves here in Riyadh which are just as plump with tuna cans as any grocery in America. Less than a century ago, there was only desert here surrounding a small walled community. Now there’s a thriving market for tuna with millions of consumers and high-end sushi bars to boot. Massive freighters and cargo jets now supplement the railroad, but as in 1871, new technology continues to open up new markets, increasing our ability to destroy by simply carrying on as usual.
Even a modicum of research reveals that many tuna fishing practices (indeed, fishing practices generally) are known to be unsustainable–they will result in extinction if continued unchecked. Either they catch too many fish, or they exploit fisheries that have already been overpressured, or they indiscriminately catch unrelated species that have less ability to rebound. All of this is known, and while some tuna providers are making genuine efforts to develop and practice sustainable harvesting methods, those methods are less efficient and cost more per fish, which means consumers must pay more per can. As a result, the market is dominated by unsustainable (i.e. “extinction-causing”) tuna harvesters who offer their product more cheaply. Greenpeace USA has compiled a Tuna Shopping Guide that ranks fourteen brands of tuna based on how sustainable their practices are. Without exception, the companies with the largest market share are at the bottom of the list. (Incidentally, one of those producers, StarKist, recently settled a class-action lawsuit for underfilling its five ounce cans, and then was sued along with BumbleBee and Chicken of the Sea for price fixing. That should tell you all you need to know about how scrupulous these companies will be in their managing of an irreplaceable natural resource.)
And tuna is only one example, there are many, many more that need to be discussed.
The salient point is this: While each of us gets lost day by day in the humdrum of life, in the earning of paychecks, the pursuit of hobbies, the raising of children, and the noise of politics and the news cycle, collectively, we are killing off Earth’s wildlife.
Our business as usual (whether it be property development, or industrialized fishing, or monocropping agriculture, or urban and agricultural water utilization) is death to wildlife, and if we do not change how we do business, in not so many years from now, our children and grandchildren will be writing articles about how the world used to be and how we destroyed it–ecosystems that matured over countless years destroyed in the thoughtless act of a single day.
Think about that the next time you see a can of tuna in the grocery store.