Standing with Mother Earth

The results of the 2016 Presidential election surprised a lot of us. As conservationists, as lovers of the Wild, as passionate defenders of Mother Earth, many already felt that our government was not being authentically responsive to the gravity of our situation – the rising seas, the dying seas, the disappearing species, the endless stream of loss. And now we are facing an administration that has thrown what slender legal protections our natural world currently has in question; for example, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Power Act. Even if many of these protections were not enough, stripping them is certainly no improvement.

Even more disturbing is the apparent rise in cruel and hateful acts since the election. Each of us likely knows someone who has been accosted or assaulted, or who has seen strange and ersatz displays of triumphant power – from ignorantly scrawled racist graffiti to images associated with genocide and other crimes against humanity – nazi swastikas and confederate flags – on proud display. Even US flags, overlarge and billowing from the backs of pickup trucks, seem to announce a new reign of bullies in ascendancy.

In the days and weeks before the election, it became undeniably apparent that for many Americans, sexual assault, bragging of sexual assault, and blatant misogyny – the hatred of women – were not disqualifications to hold the highest office. For centuries now the connection between destruction of the land and the violation of women has been conclusively established. For those actively engaged in the protection of Mother Earth, dismantling misogyny has been integral to our work and imperative for our success.

Coupled, the stripping of legal protection for the wild and the unrestrained rise of the bully will have a negative impact on wildlife and wildlife care.

And yet even the cure may have serious repercussions for wildlife and wildlife care. While the work of large organizations to protect and strengthen federal laws that protect the wild is important; there is a real possibility that the efforts to protect what we love at the national level will absorb limited resources, sucking the oxygen out of the room, stranding small organizations who operate on the slimmest of budgets – the truly grassroots – which is where the wild lives and has her babies.

In our work, trauma, recovery, death and healing live side by side. Everyday, a gull might fly from her caregivers, free again, while another is admitted with a wing severed, hanging at the shoulder, wet, red bone under an exam light, fear in the gull’s eyes, a return to his ancestors the only hope.

People who work for the environment, for Mother Earth, have struggled a long time with the knowledge of how our society is destroying the world, destroying what all that we love depends on… Many of us were heartbroken long before this election – by the senseless destruction, the avarice, the cold calculations that value the fool’s gold beneath the forest more than the forest.

We’ve watched in horror while the losses have mounted – Mother Nature has been on the run since long before the 1970s. It’s seemed that nothing we’ve done has changed the world – a victory here, a victory there, while the machine only gets bigger, more costly, more destructive. And politics can seem a useless tool against this machine. Each president in his turn has sacrificed our collective future to some open grinder, a mountain range torn apart here, an ice sheet collapsing there…

We all know it and feel it – in our bones that are made of earth, by Mother Earth.

We must ensure that wildlife rehabilitators around the country are not stymied by the flow of support to large national organizations, even as we support their work. We will still need, especially in a world where callousness, where brutality, where thuggery, and hatred for mother earth are elevated, we will still need compassion for the injured, for the orphaned, and for the marginalized… and no one is more marginalized than wild animals… just drive down any road in your town and see the raccoon dead on the shoulder lying there bloating with not a resource turned her way.

Many people in our line of work shared emphatically their sense that this was our last shot at correcting the horrifying course that we’ve been on for decades, even as we likely all knew that we couldn’t stop this machine by replacing its operator.

Now, even inside the nausea and the fear that many of us feel, there is a way forward. There is a revolution underway – a revolution led by grandmothers, as it should be. This revolution is not for supremacy or for power. This revolution is for Mother Earth, for the wild, for the water, for the air, for the forests, for the deserts, even for us, humans of every color, of every gender, of every language.

There’s never really been a way for the USA to lead this revolution – the USA is largely responsiblefor the revolution’s necessity, through its policies that place corporate greed over the needs of the environment (i.e., wolf-eradication, fracking, mountain top removal coal mining). That USA is one of the revolution’s targets. The people of the USA have an obligation to take the necessary steps to protect the lives their government threatens.

As Dr Martin Luther King Jr said nearly 50 years ago – this country is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” This election was the voice of that America’s violence. It’s not our voice. Now we’ve got to stand with those who protect the water, protect the air, protect the wild, protect the people.

We can honor life. We can tune the life within us to the life outside us. We can join the grandmothers, the water protectors – we can #StandwithStandingRock

We can support those who provide the care that the victims of the onslaught of violence need. Wildlife rehabilitators everywhere are a first line defense against barbaric cruelty, against totalitarian indifference to life, against the crude callous disregard for the rich and central inner life of each of us.

Mother Earth does not forget the individual. Mother Earth works at the individual level. It is individuals  who are born, who live, who dream, who study the rain-cleaned air, who gaze from the high rock over the plain, who hunger and thirst, who dance and who mate, who build and create, who suffer and die. It is only individuals who can actually stand. And we stand with Mother Earth.

She really is our only hope.
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Please, in these perilous times, wherever you live, remember your local wildlife care providers. We all need you.

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We Stand With Standing Rock Against the Dakota Access Pipeline

Since August, news of the people of Standing Rock, North Dakota, a Lakota community (read Standing Rock statement here), who are working to protect their water supply, their livelihoods, their ancestral lands, their scared sites and the integrity of Mother Earth against a pipeline that is being built through their territory without their approval has spread around the world.  Thousands of people have come, some from thousands of miles away, including Ecuador and Northern Europe, to stand with Standing Rock and join the water protectors. (read Standing Rock statement here)

In the course of peacefully defending Mother Earth, protectors have been arrested, pepper-sprayed and tear-gassed, and attacked by trained dogs. Even journalists at the scene have been arrested and charged.

Bird Ally X stands with the courageous and committed protectors of Standing Rock. As wildlife rehabilitators, we are on the frontline of the incessant war that industrial civilization wages against the Wild. We see, each and every day of our lives, the suffering, injury and death that is recklessly and thoughtlessly caused by the machinery of the Anthropocene – Falcons hit by cars, Gulls tangled in derelict fishing gear, Raccoon shot and trapped and their babies orphaned. We see it all: from the Swainson’s Thrush torn apart by a carelessly kept house cat to a Brown Pelican breeding colony washed over in an spilled oil, killing most of the young chicks.

BAX staff have responded acorss the continent to catastrophic oil spills, whether caused by shipping accidents, train derailments or pipeline breaches. We have waded knee-deep through Tar Sands, finding the oil soaked remains of entire families of Common MergansersClark’s Grebes and Common Loons. We’ve pulled 50 year old turtles from oil-wrecked rivers. We’ve been in the dark core of the industrial project and seen the wreckage, the loss, and the pain that Mother Earth and her offspring suffer at the unthinking hand of a machine run amok.

We’ve watched as patient after patient dies. Yet we’ve also stood silently in joy when those we’ve been able to help are restored to their wild and free lives. We’ve seen how our own lives can be used to restore justice each day. We know that direct action, that committed action, saves lives.

Our name is our mission: Bird Ally X. We are in alliance with wild birds. We are in alliance with the wild. We use the word ‘ally’ the way our grandparents would – we are an equally staked partner in the fight. We are not here to help industrial civilization feel better about itself. We are here to fight for the rights of Mother Earth. We treat her offspring when they are injured, orphaned or sickened by the human built world. We help our colleagues who are engaged in the same tasks. We lend our voice to the wild and act on behalf of the preservation of our beautiful, life-giving world. As Henry Thoreau observed, “in wildness is the preservation of the world.”

We are encouraged by the bravery of the Standing Rock community. We stand with Standing Rock and all protectors of Mother Earth. We stand with the Wild.

Learn more here.

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