Whippoorwills

Last night I heard a whippoorwill's melancholic song issuing from the woods to the immediate east of our house. It is a rare occurrence anymore, to hear whippoorwills, at least compared to my memories growing up on Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau and the north Florida piney woods. Memory is an imperfect and highly selective instrument, but as best I recall, hearing whippoorwills was a common part of the aural ecology of my childhood. Having lived in a number of rural and semi-rural localities since then, mostly in the upper south, it occasionally dawned on me that I wasn't hearing whippoorwills as often as I should be. Ornithologists tell us there is good reason for that. Whippoorwill populations have declined 57% in the last 40 years. The annual rate of decline for Tennessee has been as high as 5.8%. I take this last statistic from a book by local nature writer Stephen Lyn Bales, Natural Histories: Stories From the Tennessee Valley. In it Bales goes on to discuss general decline in songbird populations of the eastern woodlands. Definitive attribution for the decline is difficult to discern, but is relate to habitat destruction along all points of the birds migratory routes. Deforestation of Latin American winter habitat, says Bales, is a big part of the problem, and goes on to cite some statistics for Guatemala, the amorphous Amazon, and Venezuela. "Why such deforestation?" asks Bales. His answer, without any further support or elaboration: "human population growth is the probable cause . . ."

The Malthusian bogey-man rears its ugly head again. It is puzzling to me that writers such as Bales can so casually yet confidently issue such uninformed and purely conjectural statements. What Bales fails to recognize is that while deforestation and population growth are certainly problems, there is no 1:1 correlation between the two. Deforestation for the purposes of supporting a growing mass of presumably ecologically illiterate swidden horticulturists pales in comparison to rates of deforestation for the purposes of feeding the consumption patterns of populations in the Global North. This is not the forest clearance of peasant farmers, but of multinational corporations feeding the bloated global economy. Global demands for "exotic" timber products, coffee, bananas, and crops for biofuels (palm oil) are hardly driven by growing rural populations in exporting countries. Indeed, in those countries the bulk of the rural population is displaced in the wake of corporate-led and financed deforestation, forced into the swelling urban slums of Guatemala City or Caracas as "free labor" to toil for meager wages in abysmal working conditions in yet other industries feeding yet other consumer demands in the Global North (cheap T-shirts for example).

By way of another body of statistics, in 2004 the 2.3 billion people of the Global South accounted for 3% of total global consumption while the 1 billion residents of the Global North accounted for 80%. The U.S., containing 4.6% of the global population, accounted for 33% of global consumption. Placing the blame for the decline in songbird habitat, tragic though that certainly is, on the presumed reproductive fecundity of brown people is an extension of same old colonial project that began some five hundred years ago. Such notions have yielded involuntary sterilization and "family planning" programs targeting marginal and "backward" populations--almost always the rural poor of color, or else the "otherized whiteness" of peripheral regions like Appalachia. The modernist body politic. Need someone to blame--blame "them," but not "us." It perplexes me that so many otherwise well informed and highly educated people could so utterly misrepresent reality in such ways. It is in part, I suspect, the result of the hyper-compartmentalization of knowledge that characterizes our contemporary world. Certainly population growth is a problem, but an idea that unfortunately nearly always carries with it certain colonial habits of mind.

It is well established that Thomas Malthus was a racist ("the father of scientific racism"), a fact that renders the implications of his ideas something altogether different than the pure detached scientific observations they are often thought to be. Indeed, it is one of the largely uncritically accepted legacies of dualistic Enlightenment thinking that it should be possible at all to separate the knower from the known. Context is everything, and Malthusian "science" should be understood in the context of its day, one in which Europeans were grasping in various ways to justify their subjugation of colonized peoples. Friedrich Engels, a firm believer in the managerial and liberatory potential of science, called Malthus's ideas "the crudest, most barbarous theory that every existed, a system of despair which struck down all those beautiful phrases about love thy neighbor and world citizenship."

Anyhow, back to the immediate matter at hand (though these other matters are hardly tangential), the whippoorwill at my window. It was glorious! A messenger from a dying world, bringing news that there is still reason for hope, a reminder that deep mystery and beauty still reside in our diminished world, but whose elusiveness also serves as a warning to the observant that we are fast approaching the precipice.