The cherry blossoms are budding, the sun is setting after 7 pm, it’s the 20 year anniversary of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and I’m standing at the edge of the Prospect Park lake, scanning the tree line with my binoculars, looking for a bald eagle. One, an adult, has been hanging out in the park for the past couple of months, scaring the hell out of the ducks and delighting local residents. Until quite recently, it would have been exceedingly rare to encounter a bald eagle anywhere in the United States save Alaska, let alone in the middle of New York City. The iconic bird, which holds a complex position in natural and American history belied by the symbolic narrative written of them, in recent years has experienced a population resurgence so incredible that it makes an excellent example of a “conservation success.”
Conservation is a funny word. When used to refer to wildlife and nature, it’s a moral philosophy centered on protecting species from extinction, though exactly how individuals, organizations, and governments enact this idea in practice varies widely. Interestingly, conservation has a definition in physics as well: “The principle by which the total value of a physical quantity or parameter remains constant in a system which is not subject to external influence.” Of course, conservation in the wildlife and nature sense is very much “subject to external influence”: ours, both on creating the conditions that have led to a need for it in the first place, and on every subsequent effort made to reverse them.
In the case of the bald eagle, the extent of its influence is inexorably bound up with ours. Our national symbol, the bird was by and large reviled as an actual animal in the early days of the U.S., considered a nuisance by hunters with whom it competed for small game and by farmers whose livestock would become understandably agitated whenever one was nearby. Thus, over the course of some two hundred or so years, the bald eagle was systematically and indiscriminately (nearly) wiped out, given much the same reception we used to give wolves. John James Audubon, namesake of the famous environmental organization (and known enslaver), wrote about eagles with deep loathing and, according to the author Jack E. Davis, took every opportunity he had to kill one.
Then: Theodore Roosevelt’s parks movement, the Migratory Bird Treaty and Endangered Species Acts, and the federal ban of DDT, which Rachel Carson famously wrote about—a pesticide that caused bald eagles’ eggshells to thin so much that huge numbers of nesting efforts were failing. What underpinned these legislative and legal efforts was an attempt to rehabilitate the bald eagle’s public image, to revamp it in the patriotic sense. An example of this is a letter JFK wrote to the Audubon Society in 1961, when the species was on the brink of extinction: “The Founding Fathers made an appropriate choice when they selected the bald eagle as the emblem of the nation. The fierce beauty and proud independence of this great bird aptly symbolizes the strength and freedom of America…” This fabric of activism, laws, regulations, surveys, studies, appeals to nationalism, and a shifting public consciousness around nature took monumental, concentrated, sustained effort, at least some of which was ideological, ensuring that most Americans felt that anything that imperiled the status of the bald eagle was anti-American.
And those efforts worked. In 1963, two years after JFK’s letter, there were estimated to be 417 nesting pairs of bald eagles in the contiguous U.S. By 1997, this number had increased to 5,000 pairs. In 2020, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated the bald eagle’s population at 316,700 individuals and 71,400 pairs.
There’s some lore that Benjamin Franklin was against the idea of the bald eagle as the symbol of the new U.S.A., recommending instead the respectable, resourceful turkey. Even if that’s true, I’m not interested in painting Franklin as a purer envisioner of national character or perpetuating the idea that American global influence would’ve somehow turned out less extractive and brutal if the turkey had been adopted as our icon instead. But I find it interesting that the animal we did choose is, actually, quite an asshole. Extremely smart, bald eagles use that intelligence in maniacal ways: stealing food from other birds midair, for one, a practice called kleptoparasitism, or, somewhat lazily, bullying smaller or less aggressive birds into dropping their catch. Bald eagles can lock their talons in place around their prey, crushing it to death, but despite looking fierce, their vocalizations are deeply, pathetically weak. If you didn’t already know this, that long, epic, John Wayne Western-esque call most of us associate with the bald eagle is actually a red-tailed hawk. Sometime during the dawn of motion pictures, someone decided it would be better if the public were left in the dark on this one.
As a national symbol, the parallels are apt. As just a bird, though, the bald eagle is still undeniably awesome—its’s massive and powerful, it’s so unique looking it can be identified immediately, it engages in aerial dogfights with other raptors, and, most incredibly, it’s the main character of a winning story: yanked from the brink of extinction and, through great communal effort, provided with everything it needed to not only survive but thrive, and then doing it.
Last week, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific body that advises the UN on rising temperatures, issued the final installment of the sixth assessment report, stating that we have approximately a decade left to avoid breaching the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold that, to most scientists studying it, signifies “catastrophic global warming”: continued, worsening storms, floods, droughts, and fires across the globe; food supply precarity; the extinction of hundreds of species of animals; and a sea level rise of several feet, among other currently unknowable social, political, and environmental outcomes. The report makes it starkly clear that human activity is responsible for current levels of global warming, and it names the continued burning of fossil fuels the main culprit. More than that: as Britt Wray points out in the latest Gen Dread, “the report […] states straight-up that carbon emissions from existing fossil fuel infrastructure would cause us to blow past 1.5°C. So, it’s not just that we can’t build more fossil fuel projects going forward – we actually can’t continue to coexist with the ones we have now.” The report also outlines how those in power—corporations and governments, namely those of the United States, which is responsible for the highest percentage of carbon emissions of any country from the last 180 years—have without significant interruption taken actions that directly undermine any effort to reverse these trends, continuing to subsidize fossil fuel use and investing in far more dirty energy ventures than clean ones.
This, quite literally, just happened. The week before the IPCC published the report, President Biden put the green stamp on The Willow Project (initially approved by his predecessor), a massive drilling operation on federal land in Alaska, which by Biden’s own administration’s estimates will add 260 million metric tons of carbon to the air and make between $8 and $17 billion in revenue for the state and federal governments. These numbers are, of course, only meaningful temporarily—as a finite resource, the oil will run out and the revenue will follow—but those set to benefit financially from it will be alive long enough to make it a permanent fixture in history. (Though, as ever, the mechanics of this process are kept secret; when you search “willow project profit” in Google, you don’t see much about how the project would contribute to Conocophillips CEO R. M. Lance’s yearly salary of $21 million.)
“A system which is not subject to external influence.” It implies precisely the opposite of what’s actually occurring in the world of wildlife and nature conservation, where there is a problem with a clear source, a problem given the highest level of urgency a human governing body is capable of, and a problem that is solvable, as evidenced by the report itself, which also outlined how things aren’t as bad as the direst predictions had previously warned precisely because we’ve made many positive changes in the last few decades. Despite this, climate change is a problem that has, largely, been systematically and deliberately ignored, and thus made much worse, for the sake of jobs and money: things that can be created, can be derived, can be made possible, from an almost infinite number of sources, that do not need to come from oil or coal, but do, and persist in doing, clinging to their history and the very American feeling that once one discovers a source of wealth, one must capitalize on it, to grow and keep growing it.
Solving this problem might seem impossible, but it’s a problem, and a solution, with a shape. We aren’t talking about some innate, intractable human instinct, as evidenced by thousands of human communities throughout history that were held together by a mix of trade, barter, credit, debt, trust, even violence and death, without the concept of capital—money possessing the ability to create more money, in and of itself—at all. We’re not talking about a natural orientation, but economic and industrial behavior that started within the last five hundred years, during the ages of exploration and colonization, as both the origin story of and justification for the kind of gambles the era is known for. In the case of Hernán Cortés, for example, as told by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who accompanied him to Mexico in 1518, we’re talking about living outside of one’s means, getting yourself into trouble because of it, deciding to risk it all on an expedition the Spanish governor of Cuba had already cancelled, acquiring untold amounts of gold through brutal violence against the Aztecs, spending that gold in a rush of fame and power, and ending up again financially beholden to the Spanish government and dying at age 62 in considerable debt. The age of exploration, as it were, has slowly come to an end, and while the age of colonization has stubbornly persisted in multiple forms of state-sanctioned force, neither age is in the same shape as it used to be, and age of capitalism won’t hold out forever, either.
At the moment, given its power, wealth, and the responsibility it bears towards climate change, the U.S. government is exceptionally positioned to make real, lasting reversals to the upward trajectory the global temperature is taking. But if the bald eagle’s story is any model, it evidently needs to be in the best interest of the U.S. government to do so. Back in 1963, a magnificent bird deemed by the founding fathers themselves to embody the very characteristics of our tough, righteous, fledgling nation was about to die off: not great PR for, essentially, the entire concept of the United States. But getting the U.S. government off fossil fuels requires a framework of opposition, a counterargument to the personality of America itself. It requires a decision by those who own the means to leave something that has measurable economic value in the ground—to do nothing with it, in other words, although great profit can be derived from it, because to do would be to harm in every other sense. It would be a decision to admit, through action, that we are not entitled to every natural resource that has use, that we are not exceptional, that our fate and the fate of everything around us are intertwined, and that, despite what we may feel or be capable of, we simply do not have the right to fuck that up for everyone else.
Individual choices aren’t enough, and they don’t stand in as solutions in and of themselves. An emphasis on them, particularly in media, risks diverting attention away from the ultimate big hits: holding fossil fuel corporations and the governments acting as their emissaries legally responsible for facilitating carbon reliance, and forcing them to change tack. But individual choices do matter, and in a landscape of climate activism that emphasizes what’s possible when we each contribute instead of focusing on despair over what feels like it will never change, individual choices will form the basis for communal efforts. In these terms, the IPCC report suggests that plant-based diets and more walkable and bikeable cities with climate-friendly public transportation would make a big dent in emissions. Moreover, these are decent beginnings for a collective realization that we as individuals also do not have the right to fuck things up for everyone else. Perhaps most importantly, they are opportunities for solidarity. Giving up steak and buying a bike can be touch points, in a communal sense—a way to hang one’s personal journey in with the journeys of others, people who are also concerned, who also feel the urgency, who are also confused and helpless and who are trying to invent new futures regardless of the confusion and helplessness they feel. The great ache of climate anxiety is the isolation of it, and only recently has it fully occurred to me that that isolation may be a capitalist construct, too.
How do we make it in the best interest of the U.S. government to divest from fossil fuels? Endorsing, as individuals or organizations, something like the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty would be a start. But I keep coming back to the U.S. economy, a thought experiment and political structure which relies on our labor to perpetuate itself as both a practical system of credit and debit and a set of ideologies that are so deeply ingrained in our collective psyche that the fact that the top 1% of Americans own 40% of the wealth barely causes a blip. It’s our labor that allows the economy as it is to continue to exist, to figuratively and literally warp the natural existence of trees, animals, oil, coal, and human intellectual and kinetic energy into extractable, exploitable resources. A general strike, a political action wherein a majority of citizens don’t go to work, has as far as I know never happened on a national scale in the U.S., but there are models of its efficacy in world history—in 1968, for example, 11 million workers went on strike for two weeks in France and nearly caused the collapse of Charles de Gaulle’s government. I’m inclined to believe that even the threat of a general strike might force a government as large as the U.S. to capitulate to strikers’ demands. The trick is that in order for a strike to work, participants must feel assured that they won’t be alone in doing it. The isolation, then, is itself a tactic, a way of maintaining the illusion that solidarity isn’t likely or even possible.
While the Prospect Park bald eagle seems to have departed, there’s now an eagle-sized shape in the bare trees along the lake where they spent most afternoons the last couple of months. In 1970, there was only one bald eagle nest in the entire state of New York. Now, we have two just within the five boroughs: one pair on Staten Island, and a new pair that, this year, started an attempt at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. The narrative of despair has no room for these outcomes, but here they are regardless, an elephant-in-the-room only if everyone in that room is desperately avoiding a conversation about culpability, action, and solidarity. The awkward silence in the American room, on that note, is more than palpable. As Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and a member of the core writing team for the IPCC report, says, “It’s not that we are depending on something that still needs to be invented. We actually have all the knowledge we need. All the tools we need. We just need to implement it.”