Protecting a Bird's Song

Today's edition of The Arizona Republic includes an editorial titled "Protecting a Bird's Song." It refers to a recent study -- "Human impacts on the rates of recent, present, and future bird extinctions" -- from the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

The study's abstract says, "Extinction threatens 12% of bird species; another 12% have small geographical ranges and live where human actions rapidly destroy their habitats."

The newspaper's editorial says,

"...researchers also found that even though 20 species have gone extinct since 1975, conservation efforts have kept an additional 25 species on the planet.

That's the good news of environmental protection.

It's the fertile middle ground between the sanctimonious folks who wag fingers and condemn every human endeavor and the champions of the status quo who insist there's no problem so big it can't be safely ignored.

I'd like to think that most birders fit into the "fertile middle ground" rather than contributing to the number of that irritating species Sanctimonious Finger-waggers. The world has too many of those already.

Let's focus on the simple and complex solutions cited in the editorial: fostering native plants for native birds and educating elected decision-makers so that they focus on "measures that represent sharing, not hogging, the planet."