(Listen to the radio version of the first part here, and the second part here.)
Part 1: Secrets are natural, and not all of them are bad.
My house on Peabody Street was originally a one-story bungalow, but during the Depression, a large family living here put in dormers and built three small bedrooms in the attic. We dated the construction by the old newspapers used for much of the insulation up there.
There was a fourth, incredibly tiny room at the stair landing, its plywood door only 18 or 20 inches wide and barely 5 feet high. We originally used it as a storage space for our Christmas decorations, but before us, some kids apparently used it as a clubhouse. While rooting around in there in the early 1980s, we found a crevice between the baseboard and beaverboard wall with a piece of folded up, yellowed notebook paper reading:
Pledge
I hereby promise
not to tell anybody
about our secret club.
If any body should
tell they will get
the supreme penalty.
Three children signed with their initials. Russ and I got a big kick out of this and kept the note on our family bulletin board for years. Keeping secrets must be a fundamental human impulse—my very first memory involves a big secret that I felt honor-bound to keep.
My grandmother died of breast cancer in 1953 when I was not yet two years old, but I’ve had a lifelong vivid memory of the big secret between us. I remember climbing up the steep concrete front porch steps by myself even though I was rather small for my age. When my Grandpa opened the door, he and my parents would talk in hushed voices as I ran through the entryway and living room, around a corner, and into the bedroom where my Grandma was lying very still in bed. I’d stand at the bedside trying not to disturb her, but the moment she opened her eyes and saw me, her face would break out into a huge, soul-nurturing smile.
I was forbidden to climb into the bed—everyone was afraid I’d hurt her—but she told me she needed me to climb up and lift her arms to help her hug me. Her radical bilateral mastectomy left her arms limp and heavy, but I remember her hands were gentle, warm, and loving. She told me we had to keep this a secret or they wouldn’t let me into her room anymore thinking I might hurt her, so I never breathed a word about this to anyone. Even after she died, it never occurred to me to divulge the secret until long after I was an adult.
After she died, my dad and aunts put every photo of her away—they said the reminders would make my Grandpa too sad—so I can’t remember seeing any pictures of her when I was growing up. But one day when I was in my early 40s, a letter arrived from Connecticut from a name I didn’t recognize. When I opened it, something fell to the floor—a photograph—and the moment I saw it, I started crying uncontrollably.
I instantly recognized my Grandma’s face and her warm, loving smile. The letter was from one of my dad’s cousins who’d kept in touch with my aunts, so she knew that her beloved Aunt Laura had a granddaughter named Laura who’d written a book about birds. When she came across For the Birds in a bookshop, she saw a resemblance in the back cover photo of me, tracked down my address, and sent me that photo—still one of my most beloved possessions.
When I next saw my aunts, I told them about the letter, my recognizing Grandma’s face and smile, and about our secret. They said this was all impossible—I was just a baby when she died. They were floored when I told them exactly what room in the house she’d been in and how the bed was situated.
That secret between me and my grandma feels sacred to me, which is probably why I never used to feel concerned about secrets in other contexts. Many birds keep secrets or at least are secretive in many of their habits—their lives and the survival of their nests and young depend on it. Most of us keep birthday and holiday present secrets, adults keep some secrets from their children, and families keep secrets from outsiders. Some of these secrets are a simple matter of privacy, but some are much more insidious.
Part 2: Democracy dies in darkness
Data centers are well known to cause horrible problems for the people who live very close to them because of the noise and heat they produce, but the ripples of genuine harm go well beyond that. Their enormous water and energy consumption cause pollution, water shortages, and higher water and energy costs for people in the cities, counties, and states where they are located. Plus their outsized carbon footprints are a major contributor to climate change.
Yet in my own neck of the woods, in Hermantown, Minnesota, right outside Duluth, where Google plans to build an enormous data center, the city councilors and other people involved in rezoning the land for the project all signed NDAs so for a long time as the process proceeded, no one outside their inner circle had a clue that Google was even involved—even as the city held public hearings! Apparently these elected officials cherish their feeling of belonging to a small circle of power brokers more than their belonging to the community that elected them, despite the fact that this community will be facing all the damages that data centers always cause, with Google reaping all the benefits.
A few years ago, Duluth closed a vast, 27-hole public golf course on my side of town—property that is zoned as public parkland. Most people (except many dog walkers) don’t yet realize that without the golf course there, we now have free access to a beautiful area that had mostly been limited to golfers before this. This public park has stunning views, many beautiful graveled paths, valuable habitat, and a huge bird migration. And those migrant birds don’t just pass overhead--a great many of them use this valuable open space to feed and rest. And beyond migration, this land provides plenty of nesting habitat as well. And that Lester Park open land is a wonderful place to find wintering owls such as Great Grays and Long-ears. But now a developer wants to use the land for upscale housing and a pricey private golf course.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in Chicago which, well over a century ago, set aside a huge swath of city land as forest preserves and protected almost its entire lakeshore as public land that I see squandering public land here in Duluth as a mortal sin. Not only would we be losing some of the most scenic property in the city—we’d be increasing pesticide runoff into the Lester River and Lake Superior, sacrificing valuable bird habitat, putting in yet more huge bird-killing windows right along our migration pathway, and for what?
Our secretive mayor and the secretive developer with a sketchy record aren’t quite saying, and the inner circle of power brokers, from our City Council to the Chamber of Commerce, have a horrible track record of protecting and promoting developers who don’t live up to their promises. The City has been very secretive about this project and are blatantly ignoring the results of a poll their own consultants made that showed that public sentiment was strongly opposed to developing this land.
It used to be that I’d pick one important issue and monomaniacally throw my heart and soul into it. I spent two years while my children were little fighting construction of a 300-foot guyed, lighted tower proposed on Moose Mountain precisely along our migration flyway. We won—the corporation finally put in a 99-foot structure cemented in the ground, just below the height at which the FAA requires the lights that lure nocturnal migrants to their deaths.
I worked for much longer to get the City to adopt a cat leash ordinance—they finally passed it in 1999 not because of anything I said about the huge numbers of birds killed by domestic cats but because the county health department testified to the danger toxoplasmosis poses, especially for small children and the elderly. Those cats that eat or toy with birds are the ones most likely to release the disease organisms in their droppings, and outdoor cats selectively choose soft garden beds and children’s sandboxes for depositing their feces.
Although my side won both battles, the wider wars regarding both those issues are going badly. Now when opposition to a tower construction project includes concerns about bird mortality, communications-tower developers hire a particular ornithologist they know will testify that bird deaths at towers are “insignificant.” Even though it’s well established that communications towers kill 7 million birds every year, the tower project on Moose Mountain remains the only one in the country that was modified specifically because of the danger lighted, guyed towers pose to migrating birds.
And huge, well-funded projects to neuter feral cats and release them continue even as we’ve seen that they do not reduce the number of feral cats out there killing birds. These feral cats expose humans, pets, and wildlife to both toxoplasmosis and rabies.
It takes so much time and energy to fight these local battles while meanwhile, even more scary state and federal issues loom. We individual citizens, each one of us supposedly an equal participant in our democracy, can’t help but feel hopeless and helpless facing the lies, secrets, and power of those making the decisions that hurt all of us. And whether looking at little local matters or the vast issues affecting everyone in the country and the world, this mess we face today is so big and so deep and so tall, it seems there really is no way to fix it, no way at all—especially without a Seussian Cat in the Hat to magically put things right. But “We the People” managed to win independence from the powerful British Empire and to win a Civil War waged to end the horrifying outrage of slavery. Margaret Mead wrote, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
I started producing “For the Birds” forty years ago because something deep inside me needed to make sure people understood how wonderful and valuable the birds in our world are. Because I do the program entirely as an unpaid volunteer, money and political arm-pulling don’t influence what I say even as billionaires, corporations, and the government are now insidiously influencing most of the news organizations we trust and censoring popular television programs. As the Washington Post once seemed to believe, democracy really does die in darkness. Sunlight is the best disinfectant against these forces of darkness.
FOR DULUTHIANS: I’m going to post more specifically about the public land issue in Duluth’s Lester Park, but meanwhile, a group of Duluth residents formed Our Park, Our Vote, a citizen-led campaign that has spent the last several months gathering signatures on two petitions which, together, would put to voters the question of whether to give parkland protection to the entire 267.5-acre former Lester Park Golf Course. Under the city charter, valid signatures from 3,664 registered Duluth voters would force the question onto the ballot. The deadline is June 1. They’re at about 3,000, which seems pretty close to the number of signatures needed, but petitions like this are of course always carefully vetted; some people have a new address not on their voter registration yet or sign a name that doesn’t precisely match the way they wrote it on their voter registration. So they’re shooting for 7,200 signatures with little more than two weeks to go.
My good friend and birding buddy Michael Bernstein is leading this effort. One volunteer in Lakeside recently had 23 people open their doors in a single evening. All 23 signed. Obviously, if a person is one of the 9% who were in favor of this development, they can vote for it—the vote simply gives us citizens a say about land that belongs to us.
If you’re registered to vote in Duluth (any precinct as long as it’s in Duluth, Minnesota), please sign. You can sign at Stitch Craft, Amity Coffee (they don’t have a website, so that’s their Facebook link), Duluth Gear Exchange, Tortoise & Hare, and Zenith Bookstore — or find the current list at ourparkourvote.org. If you go to Duluth Gear Exchange, you can also pick up a yard sign that says “Let Duluthians Decide Lester.” I of course have one in my yard.
How terrible that they are stealing your parkland! Sign the petition!
So glad you have worked so hard to save birds and quality of all of our lives. Thank you.