Shame on NPR

Okay, I try to keep my posts upbeat, but sometimes I just can't hold in my sorrow.

Right now I'm sitting in front of my computer (duh-oh!) with the window open. Somewhere nearby a bird is singing its heart out. I don't know what kind of bird it is -- maybe a warbler of some kind -- but it sounds like paradise to me. And my heart is breaking. 

The bird is no longer singing. It may have flown away. I just feel extremely lucky that the air isn't totally silent here. But we all hear stories about massive bird deaths caused by electronic towers. For example, this one from NPR:

Baudette Minnesota sits on the US-Canadian border, about as far north in the continental U.S. as you can get, and is famous for snowy winters and a giant concrete walleye that sits downtown. It's also home to a massive Coast Guard tower, built to guide people across and around the Great Lakes. The tower has long been decommissioned, but it remains an imposing presence — especially for the birds who pass through the area on the way to their northern breeding grounds. 

The story isn't complete as written on the link. The real story is about how nearly a thousand birds of many different species fell dead as they struck the tower there in a fog. That's bad enough, but the whole story seemed to exist only to promote a group of women who sing. I think this promotional story at the expense of losing so much wildlife is a disgrace.

Not only am I sitting here whining about the death of nearly a thousand migratory birds, but I own a cell phone and ride in cars and do a million other human things. Every year I see fewer and fewer pollinating insects. Every year I hear fewer birds. I never hear frogs or crickets any more. I wonder how much longer it will be until the first absolutely Silent Spring.

I heard someone say on the radio that humanity has just now begun to wake up. I wonder.

From Death Comes Life

Life is incredibly complex and mysterious and its potential to heal is infinite. Click on this Radiolab link to listen to an amazing story that illustrates this.

Soren Wheeler takes us to Butte Montana--where an open pit copper mine’s demise leads to a toxic lake filled with corrosive runoff. Reporter Barret Golding goes to visit the pit lake, and writer Edwin Dobb tells Soren the story of a pile of dead snow geese who made an ill-fated landing on the water. Soren also talks to husband-and-wife chemists Andrea Stierle and Don Stierle, whose startling discovery reveals the secret life inside a death trap.

(I blogged about this story earlier, too).

Gratitude

Found this in my inbox today:

...The Whale... If you read a recent front page story of the San Francisco Chronicle, you would have read about a female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spiderweb of crab traps and lines. She was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her body, her tail, her torso and a line tugging in her mouth.

A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farallon Islands (outside the Golden Gate) and radioed an environmental group for help. Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so bad off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her. They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her.

When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous circles. She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them, pushed them gently around as she was thanking them.

Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives. The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth said her eyes were following him the whole time, and he will never be the same.

May you, and all those you love, be so blessed and fortunate to be surrounded by people who will help you get untangled from the things that are binding you. And, may you always know the joy of giving and receiving gratitude.

I pass this on to you, my friends, in the same spirit.

Life is good.