Despite New York City’s image as the metropolis par excellence, at its heart is Central Park—the crucial hub of bird migration. I first became passionate about birds on New Years Day 1997 when starting off on my jog I saw a red-tailed hawk in the upper limbs of a tree. In all my years living in the Catskill Mountains, I never saw such a creature. Ever since then I have been particularly tuned in to the sights and sounds of Central Park’s birds. I have seen snowy egrets taking off from the Central Park reservoir looking like they had leapt off a Japanese watercolor.

But nothing can compare to the warblers that gravitate to the park on their path northward returning from as far away as South America in early spring. About the size of a mouse and in bright shades of red and yellow, they have the most remarkable singing voice.

One of the things you learn in the disturbing new documentary “The Messenger” that opened today at the Cinema Village is that nearly half of all songbirds have disappeared since the 1960s. Like the honeybees, the bird is essential to the survival of homo sapiens. Although they have great esthetic value, the songbirds have an even more important role in food production. Gorging on insects during the beginning of a migration cycle in order to store the necessary fat that can help them fly thousands of miles obviously benefits farmers.

But if you are shortsighted and do not understand how the ecosphere is constructed, you can make tragic mistakes as the film points out. As part of Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward”, people were mobilized to attack the Four Pests: rats, flies, mosquitos and tree sparrows. Since sparrows were feeding on peasant grain, the answer was to surround the trees in which they nested and bang drums, set off firecracker and generally frighten the birds to such a degree that they remained in the air flying around until they died of exhaustion.

The campaign was a big success since the tree sparrow nearly became extinct. However, the birds also fed on the insects that also attacked grains and much more voraciously than the sparrow. Wikipedia notes:

With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides. Ecological imbalance is credited with exacerbating the Great Chinese Famine, in which at least 20 million people died of starvation.

The unintended consequences of unwise environmental practices were uppermost in the minds of Marx and Engels. In “The Dialectics of Nature”, Engels wrote as if he was anticipating the disaster in China:

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries.

Director Su Rynard was motivated to make the film after realizing that “the birds I used to see and hear were no longer around.” Reading Bridget Stutchbury’s book “Silence of the Songbirds” convinced her that a film had to be made. In Rachel Carson’s “The Silent Spring”, it was DDT that was the cause of the silence. In Su Rynard’s film, we learn of a host of other threats to an essential part of biological recreation (the words “birds and bees” is an implicit acknowledgment of their role.)

Global warming is an obvious problem since birds are accustomed to begin their migration when the seasons change but if November begins to feel more like August, the instinctual wiring is short-circuited. Building lights are another big problem. Birds have evolved over millions of years (remember they started off as dinosaurs) to use starlight as a guide to flights north and south. But artificial light makes that more difficult. Furthermore, birds have a tendency to fly into the windows of skyscrapers that keep their lights on through the night to show off their plutocratic testicles so to speak. The film shows the ghastly remains of birds on the sidewalks beneath some of Manhattan’s most prestigious office buildings.

Our beloved housecats kill of billions of birds each year. As one scientist points out, they are about as alien and destructive to the wild bird population as any invasive species. They might bring a chuckle when they carry a dead bird into the house but it is best to think of them in terms of the snakefish wreaking havoc in American rivers and lakes.

One of the other more repulsive threats is poaching. It seems that migrating songbirds have been a staple of high cuisine in Europe for many years, especially the Ortolan bunting which French master chefs have been preparing for centuries to the bourgeoisie. When the bird is snared during its migratory takeoff, it is laden with fat. The recipe involves drowning the bird in Armagnac, chopping off its head and then serving it to whichever cretin can afford $300 for the experience.

It is this disgusting culinary ritual that came to the attention of Douglas and Roger Kass whose “Emptying the Skies” becomes available as a DVD or VOD on December 8^th.

The documentary includes interviews with Jonathan Franzen who has written about poaching in the New Yorker magazine. Although I am no fan of his novels, his article, which provided the title for the film, is essential reading for understanding the crisis:

In places like Cyprus, Malta, and Italy, violent clashes between poachers and activists have grown increasingly common.

The southeastern corner of the Republic of Cyprus has been heavily developed for foreign tourism in recent years. Large medium-rise hotels, specializing in vacation packages for Germans and Russians, overlook beaches occupied by sunbeds and umbrellas in orderly ranks, and the Mediterranean is nothing if not extremely blue. You can spend a very pleasant week here, driving the modern roads and drinking the good local beer, without suspecting that the area harbors the most intensive songbird-killing operations in the European Union.

On the last day of April, I went to the prospering tourist town of Protaras to meet four members of a German bird-protection organization, the Committee Against Bird Slaughter (CABS), that runs seasonal volunteer “camps” in Mediterranean countries. Because the peak season for songbird trapping in Cyprus is autumn, when southbound migrants are loaded up with fat from a northern summer’s feasting, I was worried that we might not see any action, but the first orchard we walked into, by the side of a busy road, was full of lime sticks: straight switches, about thirty inches long, that are coated with the gluey gum of the Syrian plum and deployed artfully, to provide inviting perches, in the branches of low trees. The CABS team, which was led by a skinny, full-bearded young Italian named Andrea Rutigliano, fanned into the orchard, taking down the sticks, rubbing them in dirt to neutralize the glue, and breaking them in half. All the sticks had feathers on them. In a lemon tree, we found a male collared flycatcher hanging upside down like a piece of animal fruit, its tail and its legs and its black-and-white wings stuck in glue. While it twitched and futilely turned its head, Rutigliano videoed it from multiple angles, and an older Italian volunteer, Dino Mensi, took still photographs. “The photos are important,” said Alex Heyd, a sober-faced German who is the organization’s general secretary, “because you win the war in the newspapers, not in the field.”

Suffice it to say that the Kass Brothers have made a film that not only shows what the CABS activists were doing but in highly dramatic terms. The first documentary is one that is analysis driven and the second is character driven. They work together to give you a full picture of what might be one of the greatest environmental challenges humanity has had to face. If the extinction of dinosaurs amounts to one of the world’s greatest geological events, the extinction of their feathered descendants might coincide with our own, amounting to the extinction of higher life on earth.

 Christian Parenti

As I stated in my article on Edward Abbey in last weekend’s CounterPunch, there are tensions between Marxism and ecological thought over the role of capitalist development. In the nineteenth century, there was a tendency to regard the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class. The Communist Manifesto, includes “the subjection of nature’s forces to man” as part of capitalism’s forced march toward civilization. So when both FDR and Stalin viewed massive hydroelectric dams as necessary for social progress, it was logical for Communists to celebrate their creation even though they came at huge costs to the environment.

Uncle Sam took up the challenge in the year of ‘thirty-three,
For the farmer and the factory and all of you and me,
He said, “Roll along, Columbia, you can ramble to the sea,
But river, while you’re rambling, you can do some work for me.”
Now in Washington and Oregon you can hear the factories hum,
Making chrome and making manganese and light aluminum,
And there roars the flying fortress now to fight for Uncle Sam,
Spawned upon the King Columbia by the big Grand Coulee Dam.

Woody Guthrie, “Grand Coulee Dam”

Not long after I wrote the article, the issues resurfaced in a Christian Parenti interview in Truthout on “The State, Humanity as Part of Nature and the Malleability of Capitalism” in which he offered his thoughts on a number of scholars who are trying to integrate political economy with ecology such as John Bellamy Foster, Jason W. Moore, and William Cronon. I am very familiar with Foster and Moore’s work—less so with Cronon’s. However, what I have read of Cronon makes me question Parenti’s praise of his work.

The key part of the interview is a reply to the question “What are the limitations to using Marx’s work when thinking about ecology?” Parenti claims that Moore’s approach is superior to John Bellamy Foster’s because it avoids a Cartesian duality between nature and society by placing humanity within nature. Although these distinctions might sound abstract, the political consequences are dramatic according to Parenti.

It’s very, very dangerous to see human beings as outside of something called nature. If that’s the basis from which one begins, then the conclusion is almost automatically Malthusian. If nature is this pristine Other being victimized by Man, then the solution is for humans to leave. Sadly, that notion is at the heart of most American environmentalism. Just look at the misanthropic politics of deep ecology.

As someone who confessed to “Abbeyism” in my last article, I felt a bit defensive reading this. Reading it carefully, however, I cannot help but wonder what Parenti meant by stating that “most” environmentalists want “humans to leave”. Maybe I haven’t been reading articles by John Bellamy Foster critically enough but I have never found anything resembling those space colonization schemes put forward by Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and company. (Granted, MRZine sometimes reads like it has been written by Martians.)

If Parenti is not quite in favor of ”man’s subjection of nature”, there are hints of coming too close for comfort. He states that when Native Americans burned the landscape, they increased biological diversity. This is the lesson he drew from William Cronon’s “Changes in the Landscape”, a book that reviewed native peoples in early New England history.

Pre-contact New England was not some sort of pristine, natural place. Native Americans didn’t necessarily tread lightly in the region. No, in fact, indigenous people throughout North America had a robust and quite aggressive role in shaping the ecosystem. Some communities would burn the landscape twice a year. This created edge habitat meadows amidst forests, the ideal environment for deer.

Now if this were all that there was to Cronon’s theories, it would be hard to mount any great objection even though it has a bit of a straw man character. As someone who has studied Blackfoot and Comanche history in some depth, I have never heard them described as living in “some sort of pristine, natural space”. They hunted bison and even created quasi-statal institutions that marked out their control of such resources. What distinguishes such precapitalist societies from “civilization”, however, is that they lived in balance with nature rather than seeking to dominate it. This was not a function of their spiritual beliefs but one dictated by the need for survival. If you hunt bison to extinction, you will die just like the beasts. It is only under capitalist “civilization” that we face such threats.

Indeed, as Cronon turns his attention to that very capitalist civilization that his theories begin to spin off the tracks. His 1992 “Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West” explored “ecological changes” in the Midwest that helped to create America’s most dynamic city as the Amazon blurb puts it. Undoubtedly the work was a major contribution to understanding the transformation of the American west but my reading made me wonder what it had to do with ecology. Was the creation of stockyards and the rail system that delivered steers “ecological”? If there is a place for a book that documents how capitalism transformed nature in a major American city, one can understand the acclaim for “Nature’s Metropolis”. However, nobody could ever mistake what Cronon was writing with Mike Davis’s on Los Angeles that were filled with a moral imperative to resist man’s subjection of nature.

It is only when Cronon decided to write “The Trouble with Wilderness” that the issues became more sharply posed. Like Moore, Cronon is a critic of Cartesian dualism: “This, then, is the central paradox: wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall.”

Once he gets past such abstractions, Cronon strays uncomfortably into a kind of contrarianism that suggests a detachment from the more practical matters of wildlife preservation:

The terms of the Endangered Species Act in the United States have often meant that those hoping to defend pristine wilderness have had to rely on a single endangered species like the spotted owl to gain legal standing for their case—thereby making the full power of the sacred land inhere in a single numinous organism whose habitat then becomes the object of intense debate about appropriate management and use. The ease with which antienvironmental forces like the wise-use movement have attacked such single species preservation efforts suggests the vulnerability of strategies like these.

This seems dubious at best. Arguments that I am familiar with over the spotted owl or the snail darter are presented in terms of the creature’s integration with the ecosphere. That which threatens the spotted owl or the snail darter threatens others in the food chain, including homo sapiens ultimately.

Cronon directs most of his polemical heavy artillery against Dave Foreman, the founder of Earth First!, a group that was inspired by Edward Abbey’s writings as I explained in my last article, especially Foreman’s view that our troubles began with farming:

In this view the farm becomes the first and most important battlefield in the long war against wild nature, and all else follows in its wake. From such a starting place, it is hard not to reach the conclusion that the only way human beings can hope to live naturally on earth is to follow the hunter-gatherers back into a wilderness Eden and abandon virtually everything that civilization has given us.

Given Cronon’s breathless take on the explosive growth of Chicago as a nature-transforming supplier of grain and beef to the rest of the country, there is something to be said about the problems of “civilization” and its handmaiden agriculture. While no doubt responsible for the emergence of urban life and modernity, agriculture has obvious costs as the midwife of class society. Without an agricultural surplus, there is no ruling class. Cronon belittles Foreman’s belief in the democratic norms of hunting-and-gathering societies but there is every reason to believe that Marx and Engels would find more to agree with in Earth First! than Cronon, if you are familiar with their writings on the American Indian, especially Engels’s take on the Iroquois constitution:

And a wonderful constitution it is, this gentile constitution, in all its childlike simplicity! No soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits – and everything takes its orderly course. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole of the community affected, by the gens or the tribe, or by the gentes among themselves; only as an extreme and exceptional measure is blood revenge threatened-and our capital punishment is nothing but blood revenge in a civilized form, with all the advantages and drawbacks of civilization.

Finally, I was rather amused to read Cronon’s dismissive remarks on Theodore Roosevelt’s creation of a national park system, something he regards as elitist and reactionary:

The mythic frontier individualist was almost always masculine in gender: here, in the wilderness, a man could be a real man, the rugged individual he was meant to be before civilization sapped his energy and threatened his masculinity. [Owen] Wister’s contemptuous remarks about Wall Street and Newport suggest what he and many others of his generation believed—that the comforts and seductions of civilized life were especially insidious for men, who all too easily became emasculated by the feminizing tendencies of civilization. More often than not, men who felt this way came, like Wister and [Theodore] Roosevelt, from elite class backgrounds.

Thus the decades following the Civil War saw more and more of the nation’s wealthiest citizens seeking out wilderness for themselves. The elite passion for wild land took many forms: enormous estates in the Adirondacks and elsewhere (disingenuously called “camps” despite their many servants and amenities), cattle ranches for would-be rough riders on the Great Plains, guided big-game hunting trips in the Rockies, and luxurious resort hotels wherever railroads pushed their way into sublime landscapes. Wilderness suddenly emerged as the landscape of choice for elite tourists, who brought with them strikingly urban ideas of the countryside through which they traveled.

As it turns out, Theodore Roosevelt’s wilderness preservation program found eager backers in a place that was arguably much more important for the legacy of Marxism than anything that William Cronon ever wrote—I speak of the Soviet Union in its early years before Stalin’s forced industrialization took shape as an exercise of the “subjection of nature” gone mad.

The Communist Party issued a decree “On Land” in 1918. It declared all forests, waters, and minerals to be the property of the state, a prerequisite to rational use. When the journal “Forests of the Republic” complained that trees were being chopped down wantonly, the Soviet government issued a stern decree “On Forests” at a meeting chaired by Lenin in May of 1918. From then on, forests would be divided into an exploitable sector and a protected one. The purpose of the protected zones would specifically be to control erosion, protect water basins and the “preservation of monuments of nature.” This last stipulation is very interesting when you compare it to the damage that took place in China as a result of the Yangtze dam. The beautiful landscapes which inspired Chinese artists and poets for millennia disappeared, all in the name of heightened “productiveness.”

What’s surprising is that the Soviet government was just as protective of game animals as the forests, this despite the revenue-earning possibilities of fur. The decree “On Hunting Seasons and the Right to Possess Hunting Weapons” was approved by Lenin in May 1919. It banned the hunting of moose and wild goats and brought the open seasons in spring and summer to an end. These were some of the main demands of the conservationists prior to the revolution and the Communists satisfied them completely. The rules over hunting were considered so important to Lenin that he took time out from deliberations over how to stop the White Armies in order to meet with the agronomist Podiapolski.

Podialpolski urged the creation of zapovedniki, roughly translatable as “nature preserves.” Russian conservationists had pressed this long before the revolution. In such places, there would be no shooting, clearing, harvesting, mowing, sowing or even the gathering of fruit. The argument was that nature must be left alone. These were not even intended to be tourist meccas. They were intended as ecological havens where all species, flora and fauna would maintain the natural equilibrium that is a crucial factor in the life of nature.

Podiapolski recalls the outcome of the meeting with Lenin:

Having asked me some questions about the military and political situation in the Astrakhan’ region, Vladimir Ilich expressed his approval for all of our initiatives and in particular the one concerning the project for the zapovednik. He stated that the cause of conservation was important not only for the Astrakhan krai, but for the whole republic as well.

And where did the inspirations for such measures come from? Chris Williams supplies the answer in “Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis”:

In 1924, the All-Russian Society for Conservation (VOOP) was created through the Conservation Department of the Commissariat of Education to help build a mass social base for conservation and to incorporate conservation and the study of nature into school curricula. VOOP published its own journal, Okhrana prirody (Conservation), which carried vigorous debates inside its pages on critical academic issues in ecology, the history of ecological research in Russia, news from national parks in other countries, including translations of Theodore Roosevelt’s thoughts on Yellowstone, articles for and about children, special profiles on various endangered species, and articles for biological pest control and against monocultures. The journal even discussed the positive role shamans had historically played in ensuring sustainable yields of game in Siberian culture. Ecology as a separate field of academic study began to appear in Russian university curricula by 1924.

If it is William Cronon versus the shamans, Abbeyism and V.I. Lenin, I’ll go with the latter group—thank you very much.