A bird's warning

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: rim of Hell’s Canyon, Wallowa County, Oregon

Today on our hike, a bird began frantically chirping, sounding an alarm as our group passed by. I wanted to reassure it that we posed no threat to its existence. We weren’t there to hunt or log or extract precious metals. We bore it no ill will, no desire to conquer nature via the death of an inferior being. But I had to stop myself, because I realized we pose a much greater threat. Our existence as a species directly threatens everything that bird has ever known. We’ve created a civilization so complex and so blind that we’ve fundamentally altered our planet past the point of repair, and our actions have and will continue to impact the habitat of every single living thing on earth. A few months of years from now, the forest will be a different place—slightly warmer, with thinner trees and more beetles to eat their bark. The bird will do its bets to adapt to its new habitat, one it never evolved to live in. Will it survive? Will its children and grandchildren continue to live here? Or will they be added to the swelling masses of human and nonhuman climate refugees? I might never know the answers. Neither will that bird. But maybe it can sense that something is different. Maybe it can see the changing tide. Maybe, just maybe, it cried out in sorrow, asking one last futile time for us to wake up.