The Planet’s Begging for Mercy — Why Aren’t We Listening?

Birds, dolphins, and insects are vanishing — and we’re the killers...

Image by G.C. from Pixabay

The song that was inspired by this article is available here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is available here.
My newest book, The Hidden History of the American Dream, is now available.

More properly, the question should be, “Are we killing off the natural world?” Because if it is dying, it’s dying at our hands.

In the debate last night JD Vance lied about several things, as expected, but his most egregious lie was about climate change (which just killed hundreds of Americans), saying the United States has the “cleanest” economy in the world while generally dismissing the topic. The global carbon budget finds that the United States emits .26 kilograms of carbon dioxide per dollar of economic activity and is the third dirtiest economy behind India and China.

And Trump is still claiming that climate change is a “scam,” parroting the fossil fuel billionaires who fund the GOP.

Louise and I live near the Columbia River, the second largest in North America, and usually our neighborhood is filled with ducks, geese, rabbits, and other wild animals. We’ve lived here and on the Willamette River (that cuts through Portland) since 2005 (with a few years off in DC), and this year it seems like most of the wildlife has simply vanished.

We had a duck couple that spent a lot of time in a small pond in our backyard over the past few years, but haven’t seen “Mr. and Mrs. Duck” since last year. There are usually hundreds of geese hanging around the little bay that our house faces, but this year we went most of the summer rarely seeing even a half-dozen. Most years there are dozens of duck and geese babies; this year we saw only one brood of goslings.

Ducks and geese are migratory birds, and on their way to and from our neighborhood they stop at major wildlife areas to fatten up on the plant life growing in bogs and marshes. And that appears to be why we’ve seen so few this year; as the Bird Alliance of Oregon notes global warming is the culprit:

“U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has confirmed that the botulism outbreak at Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge in the Klamath Basin has claimed the lives of an estimated 75,000 to 80,000 birds. This is the worst botulism outbreak in the recorded history of the refuge…  [B]otulism thrives in warm, stagnant water. In the coming weeks it’s likely that thousands, or even tens of thousands more birds will die.”

A study out of Cornell University found that fully 3 billion birds have vanished from North America just since 1970, representing a 53 percent loss just in grassland bird populations. It is, Cornell lab director John Fitzgerald told The New York Times:

“A staggering loss that suggests the very fabric of North America’s ecosystem is unraveling.”

A quick search finds that multiple states are reporting massive die-offs of migratory birds. One headline notes, “Thousands of Migratory Birds Suddenly Died in New Mexico.” In The Denver Post, its: “What’s going on with all the dead birds across Colorado…?” Post reporter Sam Tabachnik noted:

“Normally, birds don’t just die in plain sight. But the winged creatures are being found on bike paths and roads, hiking trails and driveways as if they plopped down from the sky.”

Live Science headlines “Mass bird die-off in eastern US baffles scientists.” In Alaska, the US Geological Survey reports:

“[A]bout 47,000 Common Murres (Uria aalge), an abundant and important subsistence seabird species in Alaska, were discovered dying or dead on beaches and lakes across Alaska. The die-off was centered in the Gulf of Alaska but stretched all the way from southern California to the southeast Bering Sea. Total mortality was estimated to range from 0.5-1.2 million birds, marking the largest die-off of seabirds ever recorded in the Pacific Ocean.”  

But it’s not just the birds.

Before he died of Covid earlier this year, my best friend Jerry Schneiderman had nearly convinced Louise and me to join him in swimming with pink dolphins that live in the Amazon. In the years before his Brazilian wife died, Jerry and Lillian had swum with the beautiful animals on a small cruise down that river and he wanted to revisit the experience.

That’s not happening now, though, and not because Jerry is no longer with us. Instead, the dolphins are dying off because climate change has so warmed their waters that they can no longer survive. As The New York Times reports:

“Their pink bodies began to wash ashore last month, startling locals and scientists in the remote Amazon town of Tefé, Brazil, who had never seen anything like it. A crippling drought had sucked parts of tributaries flowing into the Amazon River nearly dry, causing some water routes to become impassible and turning other shallow areas into a hot bath.”

Reading that gave me a creepy feeling of Déjà vu.

I’ll never forget the day the trucker called into my radio show from southern Illinois. It was about seventeen years ago, and he was a long-haul driver who regularly ran a coast-to-coast route from the southeast to the Pacific Northwest a few dozen times a year.

“Used to be when I was driving through the southern part of the Midwest like I am right now,” he said, “I’d have to stop every few hours to clean the bugs off my windshield. It’s been three days since I’ve had to clean bugs off my windshield on this trip. There’s something spooky going on out here.”

The phone lines lit up. People from Maine to California, from Florida to Washington state shared their stories of the vanishing insects where they lived. Multiple long-haul truckers listening on SiriusXM had similar stories.

Back in May, I reported on how virtually all the insects — from gnats to butterflies to bees — have also vanished here along the Columbia river. I included a photo of a field of wildflowers in full bloom that Louise took with her phone: if you look carefully, you won’t see a single bee.

In my one lifetime, more than 80% of all the wild animals on Earth have vanished; today over a million species are on the verge of extinction. Just since 1970, North America has lost about a third of all our birds. Scientists have declared an insect apocalypse: As that “bottom of our food chain” vanishes, and its pollinators with it, it threatens the entire web of life on this planet.

Humans, and animals raised by humans for food, are now the dominant species on Earth; fully 96% of all mammalian biomass left on this planet is now us and our livestock, and our bloated population’s need for food has driven us to search places that historically weren’t subject to human predation. This set us up for Covid and other “rare” animal (zoonotic) diseases.

The loss of insects, birds, and dolphins constitutes a desperate cry for help from a planet under assault.

We tell ourselves that we’re separate from nature, but the reality is we can’t escape our own destruction without significant cultural and political change, no matter how often our most bizarre billionaires tell us we’ll all just move to Mars and Republicans try to tell us there’s “nothing to see here.”

When Trump was president, he gutted the EPA and elevated climate deniers to senior positions in multiple agencies. We can’t afford to go through that again; our biosphere is in crisis, and we need leadership that acknowledges that and wants to do something about it.

Vote!