America releases major bird report, warns of 'silent forests'In a statement Thursday announcing the release of the first-ever comprehensive report of America's bird populations, United States Interior Secretary Ken Salazar recalled Rachel Louise Carson (1907-1964), a pioneer of the international environmental movement:
"Just as they were when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring nearly 50 years ago, birds today are a bellwether of the health of land, water and ecosystems. From shorebirds in New England to warblers in Michigan to songbirds in Hawaii, we are seeing disturbing downward population trends that should set off environmental alarm bells. We must work together now to ensure we never hear the deafening silence in our forests, fields and backyards that Rachel Carson warned us about."
Starting out as a biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, Ms. Carson documented the negative effects of pesticides, particularly on birds, in her 1962 book Silent Spring, which helped launch the environmental movement. The book's title was inspired by a line from John Keats' 1884 poem "La Belle Dame sans Merci" (French for "The Beautiful Lady Without Pity"), which reads, "The sedge is wither'd from the lake, And no birds sing." She was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Jimmy Carter in 1980.
"The U.S. State of the Birds" synthesizes data from three long-term censuses taken by professional biologists and thousands of citizen scientists. Its sobering conclusion: A third of the over 800 species of birds in America are either endangered, threatened or in decline. A main threat: habitat loss.
President Obama's decision to appoint Mr. Salazar as Interior Secretary received mixed reviews from environmentalists, many of whom are concerned about his ties to the coal and mining industries. Earlier this month, On March 6, 2009, he approved the delisting of the gray wolf from the Endangered Species list in Montana and Idaho. Conservation groups are outraged. But certainly Mr. Salazar's recent call to "set off environmental alarm bells" regarding the plight of the nation's birds is something on which both sides can agree.
As President Obama and the country's legislators ponder the report's various findings, they would do well to take Mr. Salazar's cue and remember the "silent spring" imagined by Rachel Carson, who once said, "Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world."
Perhaps they might also take a deeper look at "La Belle Dame sans Merci." The poem opens with a haggard knight wandering a bleak landscape "alone and palely loitering."
image: "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," illustration by W. J. Neatby, from "A Day with Keats"
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