Lately, my friends and I count fewer birds and more black, license-plate-free cars on our expeditions to the woods. While counting hawks, I'm often keeping an eye out for armed men, another eye on the news, and another tracking which of our communities ICE might be hunting in.
Marginalized communities around us have always had to do this. For some, the woods are not safe, and neither are the streets. And for me and other friends whose white skin insulates from much deportation, the last year’s been quite an education.
It was a privilege to escape, even for an hour, the fact the government wants to net my friends, neighbors, and comrades up like dogs. Birding in the quiet, after a long week of news, used to help with that.
My friends, neighbors, and comrades who aren’t white and male can’t even go outside safely, let alone explore the parks and woods without fear of getting accosted by people afraid of difference (recall the scary case in Central Parkwhen Christian Cooper, a Black birdwatcher, was confronted by a white dog-walker from Canada, Amy Cooper, who called the police on him for, well, being Black), or ICE.
Birding should be for everyone, but there are countless ways it’s not.
And I think some of us have been in America so long, we’ve forgotten how many human rights a person deserves.
The daylong job, the lack of village community, the high prices, the sea of silent houses on their blocks of private empty grass, the endless, lifeless gray pavement — it wears you down.
We should all be able to leave the house, gather together, stand in the shade on soft earth, and touch green plants every day of our lives. We should all have safe footpaths winding between our homes and friends’. We should all be able to pick fruit from the bushes beside our door and drink the rainfall safely and travel when the staying gets tough. We should all be given the songs of our grandmothers to sing, the ones older than colonialism, from whatever cultures we are from. We should all have shelter and food and healthcare, of course, but also sunflowers and time to coax chickadees to take their seeds from our hands, and all the other joys that make life bright.
Four or five thousand years ago, I bet we took access to nature for granted. I bet we’d have called it unimaginable cruelty to live in rows of small boxes next to a roaring, stinky road without the chance to head elsewhere whenever the acorns ran short or the deer needed a rest from us.
How much more we all deserve. Birds and plants, who still take nature’s plentiful gifts for granted as their home, who drink without fear because they do not know poison and band together to attack the hawks and owls, help us remember this, too.
If we can imagine a better world, we can plant it in native seeds and fight for it in policy and build it with our neighbors. For everyone.
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