Welcome To Planet Earth

I don’t see birds anymore. During a run of about four miles, I might see a single bedraggled crow hop about on someone’s lawn or shrubbery or a swift or a swallow dart suddenly across my line of sight and disappear just as quickly over the houses and apartment buildings that constitute our neighborhood. That’s it. This is disturbing. It’s early September. The days have been sunny and warm. There was a bit of haze yesterday from several wildfires to the northeast in the Cascade mountains, but it wasn’t that bad, not as bad as it was last August, which was horrific. So what’s going on? It’s as though a spaceship from another civilization in the universe kidnapped all of our birds. Sucked them up. Why an extraterrestrial civilization would be inclined to do that, I don’t know. I’m just wondering what’s happened to our birds.

I wrote to the Audubon Society here in Seattle but they never answered.

If I google “where did our birds go” I get a lot of responses, a lot of people wondering what’s happened to the birds, not just here in the Pacific Northwest but all over the world. The answer is simple: climate change. Species haven’t been able to adapt to warming temperatures, or the radical changes in atmospheric gas that we breathe. Birds have tiny lungs. CO₂ has risen above 400 ppm for the first time in the past half million years. Methane, much of it from ruminants, forest fires, landfills, wetlands, rice paddies, waste water treatment facilities, peat fires in southeast Asia and multitudes of ice age bacteria and planktonic foraminifera bubbling up from the seafloor and melting permafrost in the arctic is now greater than 1800 parts per billion, an increase by a factor of 2.5 and the highest value in at least 800,000 years. That’s a percentage increase of 150 percent since 1750.

Nitrous oxide (a.k.a. laughing gas) has risen dramatically by 20 percent since 1750 due to the largescale use of nitrogen-based fertilizers such as anhydrous ammonium nitrate. Over the past 800,000 years, concentrations of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere rarely exceeded 280 ppb. Levels have risen since the 1920s, however, reaching a new high of 328 ppb in 2015.

So where’s the euphoria? Why aren’t we all dying of laughter?

A few days ago R and I saw a dead crow. It was lying in the grass, its two legs sticking up, not a single feather scattered or torn. There was no sign of attack or struggle. It looked like it just keeled over.

I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I don’t think it died of laughter. The crow remained there, intact, for several days. Why were no other animals scavenging its remains?

On the third day, the crow’s head and legs had been eaten away. Why just the head? Why just the legs?

On the fourth day, the crow had finally been removed by someone. There were no birds at all in the area. No squirrels. Nothing.

I usually bring a small plastic sack filled with unsalted peanuts to toss to any crows I might see along the way when I’m gong for a run. The last few days I’ve just been putting peanuts where a crow or a blue jay might find them. But I’ve seen no actual crows, except for the one crow I saw in the shrubbery by the grocery store at the bottom of the hill on Mercer Street. He looked old and tired.

I check the air quality index for today, Thursday, September 6th. It is considered "moderate," with particulate matter measured at 90 parts per cubic inch.

I notice the headline “Washington has underfunded efforts to control wildfire burning, despite smothering smoke.” No shit Sherlock.

People are disgusting. They’d rather have money than clean air to breathe. They’d rather have a big house full of shit they don’t need rather than songbirds visiting their backyards. The imbecility and selfishness is off the charts. I can’t find adjectives to describe our species anymore. Words like ‘selfishness’ and ‘greed’ just fall flat. They don’t go far enough. They don’t fully reach the insanity.

Meanwhile, there is a project going on up the street, a massive undertaking involving several steam shovels and a colossal drill, ton upon ton upon ton of cement, for what appears to be a gigantic retaining wall and landscaped garden. I see this a lot, someone with a great deal of affluence using their considerable wealth to put forth a pharaonic construction project, putting more stress on the planet, using more of its valuable resources, for a section of ground that was doing fine as it was, needed no repair, for what will essentially be nothing more than a mere vanity project: “look how wealthy I am.” The selfishness is staggering. A species that behaves like this can only go in one direction: death.

Maybe I’m being unfair. This level of ostentation might be representative of a pathology more serious than vanity. Some psychologists are suggesting it is a form of existential anxiety. An article titled “The Urge to Splurge” from a 2004 issue of the Journal of Consumer Behavior explains this behavior as a form of “terror management,” and argues a way to “understand how the human awareness of death affects materialism, conspicuous consumption, and consumer decisions.” “The pursuit of wealth,” it goes on to say, “and culturally desired commodities are hypothesized to reinforce those beliefs that function to protect people from existential anxieties.” Evidence is provided that explains “how intimations of mortality increase materialism as a way to enhance self-esteem and affects consumer decisions that support one's cultural worldview.” Not surprisingly, this pathology of materialistic and consumeristic worldviews has adverse consequences. I would cite one of those consequences as being the “sixth mass extinction.”

Ironic, isn’t it? Existential anxiety leads to aggressive consumerism which leads to dissatisfaction which leads to frustration which leads to aggression which leads to more consumerism which leads to dissatisfaction, and so on. A vicious circle.

And then everything on the planet drops dead and the delicate balances to keep everything stable and working fall apart and volcanos erupt and typhoons and monsoons and tycoons and dragoons and baboons rip the rest to shreds. You can’t eat shreds. Shreds are shreds. Skinheads warheads bloodshed. It’s a mess. Radioactivity everywhere, plastic everywhere, fish and whales and seals washing ashore dead, species everywhere rapidly going extinct, crops failing, the soil dying, dust blowing, hailstones crashing, cars washed downriver in floods, people desperately fleeing war-torn countries smitten by years of drought, crossing the oceans in overcrowded inflatable rafts hoping to find food and a modicum of comfort.

Welcome to Planet Earth.