Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

My husband, who thanks to hard work and scholarships became a scientist, supports me and my work so I don’t need a paying job, which is exceptional in this day and age. My not depending on an employer or underwriter gives me the freedom to write and speak without fear of censorship. That has always been important to me, but now more than ever. Many of my friends’ jobs are in jeopardy right now, and unlike me, they and their families depend on their earnings. When they tell me they have to “lay low,” I completely understand, even as that makes me feel even more obligated to speak up and to resist while I still can.

During the almost four decades I’ve been producing “For the Birds,” I’ve never run out of ideas. It usually takes several hours to a day or two to research, write and produce each one, but a few times it’s taken several days. Now suddenly, I have way too much to write about—so much that I seem to have hit a wall. It took more than two weeks to write my last program, about why I can’t in good conscience return to Florida while people are being held in a horrific concentration camp by the federal and Florida state governments. It’s so obviously outrageous that people are being treated so horribly—denied fundamental rights guaranteed by our Constitution—that it feels strange to even think about other issues that are also critically important.

Last week, for example, the air quality index in Duluth stayed mostly in the red “Unhealthy” category due to smoke from the enormous wildfires in the Canadian wilderness. Fires in Arizona and Utah are also burning out of control. The direct cause of any specific fire cannot be attributed to climate change, but the number and magnitude of fires in recent decades most certainly can. Yet the politicians and billionaires running things continue to publicly deny the existence of climate change, erasing the very words from governmental websites and rolling back regulations that would reduce carbon emissions. I can’t imagine what these massive fires are doing to wildlife, including the warblers that pass through here every spring and fall. On such a huge scale, many bird populations must be badly affected.

When I went birding with a friend of mine last week, the hazy conditions compromised my photos and made my eyes water; I also got winded doing very little walking. If this is so bad for me, imagine how tough it must be for birds who have no indoor refuge.

One of my friends found a dead hummingbird in her yard a few days ago with no obvious cause of death. Was it the awful air? Or could it have been pesticides? It’s virtually impossible to find anyone with the means, equipment, and expertise to conduct a necropsy on such a tiny bird, so we’ll never know. But on August 1, The Guardian reported on a recent peer-reviewed study finding that last year’s mass monarch die-off in California was caused by pesticide exposure. The butterflies were found twitching or dead in piles, common signs of neurotoxic pesticide poisoning, and testing of 10 of the insects revealed an average of seven pesticides in each one.

Other news last week was equally sad. Kirtland’s Warbler had been delisted as an endangered species by the previous Trump administration in 2020—a decision that was premature at best. This year’s census showed the species in rapid decline, with just 1,477 breeding pairs compared to 2,245 in 2021—a 34 percent decline in just four years!

News on the Greater Sage-Grouse front is even more urgent and depressing. In this year’s census, North Dakota researchers could not find a single Sage-Grouse anywhere in the state. That species is in steep decline everywhere, yet for over half a century, scurvy billionaires and politicians have succeeded in keeping this charismatic, culturally important bird off the endangered species list.

Meanwhile, the Breeding Bird Survey and Bird Banding Lab, two inexpensive and extremely cost-effective programs that I’ve been personally involved in, programs that provide a wealth of information that ultimately protects human lives as well as wildlife populations, are on the Project 2025 chopping block.

I simply cannot wrap my head around the sea change our nation has undergone in a mere six months. This is NOT the country I learned about in seventh grade civics and high school and college American history—the country that led the world, during my adult lifetime, in setting seminal environmental policies to protect the air, land, and water that every one of us, human and non-human, needs for our very survival. Elon Musk famously thinks he can escape to Mars even as he became the world’s richest man by damaging so much of our own planet. Peter Thiel, another billionaire behind Project 2025, thinks his own conscious being will be kept alive in the underpinnings of artificial intelligence long after the planet becomes uninhabitable for most living beings, accelerated by the vast energy consumption and heat generation involved in that AI.

The more we all understand science, history, the various species and human cultures with which we share this country and this world, and basic math, the more clearly we can understand what our government is doing, which is exactly why this administration is dismantling public broadcasting and the Department of Education and doing everything possible to prevent colleges and universities from educating the underprivileged. For the first time in my life, the powers running the government are deriding as “woke” the fundamental values drummed into my head and heart by my Catholic school education—fairness, equality, empathy, and basic human kindness.

In the 73 years I’ve been alive, I’ve never felt so much hopelessness about so many things. Some of my contemporaries have told me they’re glad they won’t be alive to see how all this turns out, but my personal timeline extends beyond the days, weeks, months, or years my own body draws breath. I need my three children and my grandchild to live out their own days in a world with clean air and water, with chickadees and sage grouse and Kirtland’s Warblers.

I’ll be returning my focus on For the Birds to the lovely, interesting, humorous, elements of the birds we still enjoy, and there are a lot of them. But underneath my positive messages there will be an unstated truth: every one of the beautiful things I value is at risk right now, at the hands of billionaires and politicians who are actively or passively destroying the last vestiges of freedom and democracy in this once great nation.