When Saving the Earth means Rescuing Society

I have been working as a wildlife rehabilitator for 26 years. I will tell you briefly why. 

One day in the late 90s I looked up from the book I was reading – I had been studying the westward expansion of the US, and reading women’s diaries of the overland crossing, the details surrounding the “ill-fated” Donner Party, and of course the genocide of Native Americans that was part and parcel of so-called Manifest Destiny.



I looked up from the book, which was filled with nightmarish suffering, and looked outside – it was 4 am. In the eastern sky the last quarter moon was rising over the Cascades, Venus was just below and behind the mountains the sky was beginning to glow with the coming dawn. Suddenly the dome of sky was a vast expanse, and here I was, in it. In the mix with the Earth, the moon, Venus and the Sun. The mountains jagged in a mountainous perfection and all of the known world before me. 



At breakfast later, I was reading the Seattle Weekly – an ad for the PAWS Wildlife Center asked “Want to Help Return and Animal to the Wild?” and I knew in my heart, in my gut as they say, that this ad was for me. I needed the real world, unmediated by books, just as I had seen at 4 am… real, concrete, actionable. And action, not study, is what I needed.



Even then, 1999, the world was in grave danger. The greenhouse effect had supplanted nuclear winter as the thing that was going to get us all in the end in the late 80s. By 1999 we were already calling that phenomenon ‘climate change’.



I had moved to Seattle from New Jersey in 1993. It was the aftermath of the forest wars. As a reader, of course I had caught up with the science and political skirmishes surrounding ancient forests and old-growth logging. Timothy Egan’s book The Good Rain was an excellent introduction to the Pacific Northwest and offered a concise history of the region including the battles to save the forests, and the most famous indicator species of forest health, the Spotted Owl. My reading had walked me right up to that moment at 4 am, and there I stood at the window, dissolved by the real and reassembled in an instant … In an instant the mountains were no longer mountains and the stars no longer stars and then they were, mountains mountains and stars stars again.



While I still had and still have so much to learn, it was then that I graduated into my real work. I needed to help with the ordinary grueling work of rescue. Rescuing what our world was treating as so much “overburden” – the forest and wild community that sits inconveniently above all that valuable mineral wealth, whether is is coal, or gold, or a good location for a billionaire’s golf course.



Like most of us currently topside, I was born into a world that had a doomsday clock ticking. It has been a feature of daily recognition that bad times were coming, if we didn’t change our ways and for over twenty we’ve largely known that it was too late. It was probably the nineties when it last seemed possible that we could have a future watching our great great grandchildren grow on a green Earth from our little corner of the afterlife.



From the vivid protests against the World Trade Organization, November of ’99 to the launch of the destruction of Iraq in March of 2003 the prevailing idea, in America at least, was that the future was going to be a lot worse than it had to be. Avarice had outflanked prudence and care. The world was less profitable saved than burned. Money had spoken.



In the twenty some years since, we’ve lived through hope and dread in a cycle almost as dependable as the tides. But even our hopes, our accomplishments, such as marriage equality, the occasional killer cop who is charged with homicide, and so on, even these in each election since 2008 have been grounded in the inescapable realities of climate disruption and environmental catastrophe that we’d have to deal with – no matter how much reform and transformation we bring to the still pressing injustices of our daily world, the collapse of our world was coming and we could either do it in cooperation, or we could destroy ourselves along with the world.



When Joe Biden won in 2020, it was a relief but not a surprise. By 2020, the only people who still supported that wreck of a human soul, Trump, were the fools and the wicked. Most people are neither. Biden’s administration was a surprise to me. At the start of the primary season, I had said that I’d take any democrat over Biden – Kamala Harris then Elizabeth Warren then anybody but Biden but certainly Biden over Trump.- those were my preferences. In my online world and in my daily life, I met many of my kind. Trump’s handling of COVID and the rise of the Proud Boys and neo-Nazis under Trump, as well as every other single thing about the man, whether politician, celebrity, or real estate conman. I’ve been despising Donald Trump since his first casino was built in Atlantic City in the Anti-Christ fashion, a skyscraper with his name at the top in in thirty foot tall red-letters, as if he were Damien Thorne. As my great-grandmother, my grandmother and mother said to me many times, if you walk like a duck and talk like a duck and … well you just might be the devil on earth.

When Biden won in 2020, the simple relief of Trump not being president was astonishingly restful. COVID was still a problem, but because of our work, Humboldt Wildlife Care Center staff were able to receive the vaccine just a week after his inauguration, We managed in other words, we did the things, wore the masks, tried to stay current on latest developments as scientists, representatives, healthcare providers, teachers, administrators, neighbors all of us all over the world wrangled with the pandemic.

We made it through. Here we are. 



I used to say during the worst of the pandemic in America, with lockdown protests and sane people turning into lunatics believing things like the pandemic was a planned attack, that the vaccine was a trap, that masks don’t work, – i said that the pandemic was breaking America, and it did. But I didn’t think it was breaking the whole world. I thought the world was learning that cooperation and shared experience saved lives and made the world a better place. For every relationship strained by a zoom meeting maybe there’s one born that would’ve been otherwise impossible. I came out of the pandemic believing that maybe there was still a chance to navigate the coming turmoil with more grace and less despair, while avoiding the unnecessary turmoil of a descent into fascism. 



That we strengthen bonds during turbulent times is as natural as battening a hatch. We secure hitches. We tighten straps. We call our neighbors or our parent across the sea – we grasp onto what endures – door jambs, granite, deeply rooted things, our friendships, our dreams.



When tiktokers outsmarted the cacodemon and made him believe he had a big crowd for a campaign rally by reserving all the tickets in a plot hatched in broad daylight, I was uplifted. His dismay walking back from the nearly empty stadium was a joyful occasion and in that light he looked already defeated, and he was. Had he not been, I would’ve been thrown into dismay – but a crushing one, because it would have meant that I was wrong and that my hope that he was but a dumbass immoral debauched and depraved villain yes, but one who could be defeated was wrong too. But he lost. He lost and in losing, lost even more, debasing himself even further with his ridiculous inability to concede losses. 



I did not believe that he was going to win in 2016 and I was wrong. Simply put I didn’t think that poorly of my neighbors.



I did not believe there was a snowball’s chance in hell that he would win in 2024. I had some fairly negative opinions about the MAGA crowd, but I thought their numbers too small – and nobody with a brain or a conscience would vote for him – stopping him seemed like it was everybody’s agreed upon assignment. The tent was huge – it included Bernie Sanders and Dick Cheney and Beyoncé. We all know that.



Now here we are, the same unavoidable environmental crisis, which is an existential threat to humanity and whole lot of other lives too, and instead of working together, instead of tightening bonds, instead of investing in our world and opening our hearts to what is real, loving it and saving what we can and looking to find a new way forward that doesn’t kill the road we walk, instead we’re going to be fighting idiotic morons who know neither the value or price of anything who on whim can put a luxury car in orbit around Mars – impractical, vainglorious, puerile and avaricious – arrogant sadists who claim to want a better world and the only way to attain it is by destroying this one, the only world we have.

Now here we are, seven weeks since Donald Trump returned to the White House and the wreckage that surrounds is nearly impossible to catalogue. Tens of thousands of federal employees, from weather scientists, to wildlife biologists, to disease experts and more, just erased, and all of their work too. Purges of departments to rid them of references to accomplishments of people of color and women. We’ve endured cruel and vicious attacks on trans people, gays, lesbians, and more. – Abandonment and betrayal of allies in apparent service to our adversaries. The elimination of critical aid around the world that will result in untold death and suffering. Government programs have been scrubbed of references to to climate science while the head of the EPA recommends reversing the finding from 2009 that fossil fuels are an endangerment. Yesterday it was reported that criminal investigations into organizations because they applied for and were awarded federal grants from the EPA to do climate work were underway. Habitat for Humanity, for example, is one of the organizations named.



It’s a lot to take in.



The chaos and destruction have already caused harm to our work, just by destabilizing day to day life. Bird Ally X does not receive federal funding, thankfully, but many of our colleagues and partners do. The work of everyone who is on the frontlines of conservation and restoration and rehabilitation is being thrown into question.



It’s more than it feels like we can bear, even though we must. We must bear it and also keep our strength to fight back and to prevail. Despair must be managed. And we are all learning to do so, but the biggest problem, – my biggest problem, is that I was barely able to imagine us collectively arresting the environmental collapse that has been speeding toward us for decades. The hope that we might prevail, that we might turn this rig around, that has surfaced and been subsumed to surface again seems likely to be lost forever. 


The effort to stop what has to be seen as a hostile takeover of our society must win, but will it eat the only time that we had remaining on the clock?

 For my part, I will say this. I’m an interventionist. Every rehabilitator is. Every caregiver is. I will continue to intervene until I am dead. Frankly, I hope, after death, to be an intervening phantom. 

Our patients will need us no matter the state of the world.

For so many people who deeply love the Wild, human civilization has almost completely played the villain’s role in the fight to preserve and conserve Nature. But here we are. Conservationists, caregivers, people who simply want an ocean to play in that won’t make them sick, piscavores and vegans, farmers, fishers, and clerks, we’re all served by a society and a rule of law that provides a means to improvement, that is accountable to us – that is us. A government is not a business, and our world is not a balance sheet. Yes, it’s ironic that in order to save the Wild we now must rescue society, but unsurprising. Since as a species we made the first poisons that would outlast us we’ve known. We are on the hook. We have have to prevail. Civilization is too dangerous of a thing to leave in the hands of billionaires and dictators or left to decay into a river without interference.

I tell our new staff, I tell anyone who wants to listen, that what we are is who we are. If we are refugees trying to reach some of the last inhabitable land on Earth, some of us will still bend over to give aid to the struggling Raccoon, or the broken-winged Robin. If our vessel is approaching the falls and all seems lost, wildlife rehabilitators won’t stop rowing until we simply no longer can.

Your support keeps our facility open no matter what. Please donate if you can. Thank you so much!!!

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New Wild Review vol 6 ep 1 Loren Eiseley’s The Star Thrower

In the first podcast of 2025, we look at the essay by Loren Eiseley, “The Star Thrower”, first published in his book The Unexpected Universe (1969). This essay has been paraphrased in numerous ways over the years, telling a simple story of a man encountering another person throwing Sea Stars into the ocean after they’d been heaved onto a beach by a storm. The man usually says something to the effect of “but there are so many, your efforts won’t matter.” No matter how the essay is paraphrased, it ends with the thrower telling the man that “it mattered to this one!”

While many find the little story thus paraphrased useful, the essay is so much more than that – in fact the phrase “it mattered to this one” isn’t even in the orirginal text. Rather the essay is about the natural and proper work of beating back against the odds and loving the world. Eiseley writes of coming to realize that compassion, which in his time was considered anti-science, is as much a part of human nature as the fierce competitive aspect of living in the actual world which has been the presumption since Darwin. It’s a magnificent and deeply reasoned piece of writing. You can listen to it here, in the latest edition of New Wild Review.

As always, thank you for your support! Your donations are what make our work possible. Thank you!

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Seeds for Change! Round up at the North Coast Co-op!

We are very happy to say that Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bird ally x is one of the non-profits chosen by voting members of the North Coast Co-op for Seeds for Change, the monthly round-up program. Our appreciation for this honor is huge! Thanks to the co-op members for choosing our work. We will be featured this month.

How does it work? Simple! For the entire month of January you can round up the cost of your purchase at either location and that loose change, from a penny to 99¢ will go to HWCC/bax. If you want to give more, you can!

I love this program. Having been chosen in the past, I can say that the support it provides is very significant. It’s allowed us to meet many iof the regular difficult challenges we face, but has also helped during unexpected emrgencies (Like our big move that began in 2023 and is still underway.) As a regular customer of the co-op, I can say that I’m a perma-yes when asked if want to round-up. It;s such an easy way to make a very big difference.

Thank you co-op for being such an important part of our community and thank you co-op members for making sure we have the support we need!

And if you want to donate now, here while hope-scrolling click on the big …

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2024: One heck of a year!

A lot happened in 2024. We treated 1,577 patients! We answered thousands of phone calls! We gave hundreds of second chances to our wild neighbors.

And it was with your help, your support, your generosity, that we could do any of it.

Thank you for making our second busiest year of all time a successful year. And please, if you can, support us going in to the future. Who knows what the new year will bring, but with your support, we’ll be ready!

Happy New Year!!!


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Latest Podcast! New Wild Review vol 5 ep 3 with Laura Corsiglia, imagination and the Wild!

On the day I met Laura Corsiglia, I knew. Who else would I ever be able to talk with about wildlife and reality and necessity the way we could. Here’s a bit of what I mean

Want to help us meet the incredible challenges of our mission. Donate today!

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In your mailbox soon!

Our annual holiday card! Just mailed out today! You’re support is so important to us – you make everything possible! Thank for another beuatiful year caring for our region’s orphaned and injured wild animals. It’s been a good one. It’s been a tough one. Please help if you can.

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Young Raccoon Narrowly Evades Oily Death

Late on a Friday afternoon, a woman walking past a shuttered restaurant heard something that made her stop. Looking around she found the source – a large bin filled with old cooking oil – and also containing two juvenile raccoons. She called Humboldt Wildlife Care Center. Staff immediately was dispatched .

On scene we found two raccoons trapped in a large bin that contained several gallons of used cooking oil. We were saddened to find one of the raccoons had drowned.

The living raccoon was completely soaked in cooking oil. A small, juvenile male, he was in a lousy mood. With the oil soaking his fur he was cold and hungry. Tomorrow we could determine a course of treatment and determine the strategy for bathing him, but for the night we set him up with heat support and a decent meal. Perhaps many wouldn’t agree, but the raccoon found the whole fish, the egg, the live mealworms and the frozen rat we’d thawed for him to be appetizing. In the morning the food was gone.

We kept him indoors with heat support and food for a couple of days to make sure he was strong and ready to be washed. His size was working out in his favor. He was small enough that experienced staff members had no difficulty restraining him while he was lathered up with dish detergent (seventh generation free and clear) and rinsed of the foul smelling old oil which had darkened the suds and fouled the tub.

And then the bomb cyclone hit. This gave us plenty of opportunity to ensure that his fur would again protect him from the elements – the several days pre- and post-wash were good for his weight too. He’s a good looking raccoon and he looked it, even in the rain. A week after he’d been found in a situation that surely would have killed him without intervention, we released back to his wild freedom, a second chance in his grasp.

Disappearing into the real right before our eyes…

Your support, of course is why there was a place for the person who discovered this guy trapped in oil to call. Your support is what gave this raccoon a second shot. Your support is why a facility to properly provide his care exists. Thank you for helping us meet our mission, serving our region’s injured, orphaned (and sometimes half-drowned in cooking oil) wild animals in need of helping hand.

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New Wild Review vol 5 ep 2 Disaster Response and Everyday Living

Our latest episode of New Wild Review with guest Lucinda Adamson, Humboldt Wildlife Care Center’s Assistant Rehabilitation Manager.

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Raptor Aviary FUNDING ACHIEVED!

Thanks to many donors, building our much needed raptor aviary is now underway!

Many supporters contributed with donation since our call went out in August for help. Thank you so much. And very recently, Cal Poly Humboldt professor of marketing Dr. Sarita Ray Chaudhury, who put us over the finish line with a $5000 dollar donation!

Many other donors have provided substantial help rebuilding our facility, a project that still has some distance to go before we are finished! Our colleagues at Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue have generously supported our rebuild as have Julie Buchanan and more!

Our busy Summer is winding to a close and now begins our season of building projects!

Still to come:
A Pelican, Gull and Cormorant Aviary (the PGC!) (estimated cost, $7000)
Small Mammal Housing! (estimated cost $4000)
Specialty Aviary for Swifts and Swallows! (estimated cost $4000)
Laundry facility (estimated cost $6000)

We have big plans and major goals for the future of Humboldt Wildlife Care Center. An on-staff veterinarian with a well equipped surgical suite is a must! Our goal is to have this capability, thereby reducing the number of patients who we must transport to other parts of the state for critical surgical needs, by early 2026 – that’s only 18 months away!

In other words, while great progress is being made, we still have some distance to go. Your support is still needed, and in fact will always be needed! Thank you for helping us meet our mission of rehabilitating injured and orphaned wild animals. And thank you for your love of the wild!

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