Image by Carl Buell.
The next person I see arguing that we shouldn’t worry about giant windmills because domestic cats kill far more birds, I’m going to take out to the middle of the Mojave so I can run them over with my Jeep.
This will be a perfectly acceptable act by that person’s own reasoning, seeing as the vast majority of auto accidents happen within ten miles of home.
Are we really having this conversation? Yes, outdoor cats kill an astonishing number of birds. I’ve written about this issue for some years, and have gotten threats of assault as a result. But I have a little trouble believing that cats regularly kill golden eagles, or turkey vultures, or red-tailed hawks.
This argument illustrates rather neatly the deepening divide within that group of people generally referred to as environmentalists. On one side, you have those people who pay attention to the non-human world, who see people as one part of an incredibly complex and ailing system whose other aspects deserve attention and respect. On the other side, you have those who see the non-human world as a stage setting for humans. To those people, the non-human world becomes important when it affects humans — when sea level rises high enough to take out our beachfront property, or when pollinators threaten to die off before they can ensure the existence of our food supply, or when a large endearing-looking Arctic predator promises to be helpful in raising funds for your environmental organization. You see this worldview promoted in the main category headings of green publications: “Energy,” “Food,” “Lifestyle,” “Technology” — none of them concerned with the world as a thing worthy of consideration on its own, all of them aspects of our species-wide version of “It’s All About Me.”
It’s only the people on that second side of the divide who can hold the category “birds” in their head without wondering about the complexities the category contains. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for the apathetic conflation of hawks and hummingbirds, chickadees and condors. Would the Sierra Club downplay the importance of white rhino poaching because domestic cats kill hundreds of millions of rodents every year, lumping both groups of animals into the category “mammals” the way they’ve conflated large birds killed by windmills and smaller ones killed by cats and other dangers? Probably not: mammals are closer to being Us In All Our Importance, and the light reflecting off our glory illuminates the difference between them a bit better.
(A tidbit from that last link, by the way: a caption for a wind-power siting map in the Oklahoma panhandle defends windmill siting because “Endangered prairie chickens aren’t at risk of flying into turbines because they shy away from tall objects that might serve as raptor perches.” Let that one sink in for a moment.)
There’s far more diversity among birds than there is among mammals, so you could say it’s actually more defensible to confuse a rhino and a rat than it would be to conflate ducks and hummingbirds and peregrine falcons all into one big group “birds,” and then write articles that imply all members of that group are identical in rarity, breeding patterns, and/or ecological importance.
Which is just what the “cats kill more birds than windmills” crowd is doing: playing on the public’s regrettable biological apathy, and in fact fostering that apathy, in order to get yet another industrial initiative off the ground.
Cats kill millions of birds a year in the US. Some of them are rare and endangered. Some of them are protected by law. A lot of them are invasive exotics — starlings, English sparrows — or not particularly rare natives. Very few of them — I will go so far as to speculate that the number is around zero — are eagles and hawks. Windmills kill a lot of raptors. It’s an apples and oranges comparison, which I suppose would be characterized by the windmill lobby as being “just fruit.”
But even if all birds were pretty much the same, what kind of person excuses an evil by pointing to a greater one? Aside from Republicans and third-graders?
“Endangered prairie chickens aren’t at risk of flying into turbines because they shy away from tall objects that might serve as raptor perches.”
Ugh. What about habitat degradation? Scaring them off their breeding grounds?
Nice piece, Chris. Thank you. Al Manville, a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service expert on birds and wind emergy, says that birds of conservation concern are increasingly being killed by wind turbines. It’s not surprising as wind projects seem to be going into areas of higher risk for birds than in the past.
wind emergy = wind energy. Although it “emergy” does sound like like it could be some of high tech thing.
Excellent post, Chris. It’s nice to see that the question of the non-human world, aside from its human use-value, is important to you - something I could’ve inferred or read in your archives, perhaps, but it’s good to see an explicit statement of its importance. Also, great to see you take to task the way in which animals are homogenized. Saying “The Animal” or “The Non-human” does not do an ounce of justice to the unbelievable complexity and heterogeneity of those categories. This is a chief obstacle for a lot of environmental and animal-related thought and one I hope to see overcome.
What we don’t hear about is the increased human disturbance in nesting areas and (what John said) about placing wind towers in nesting areas - driving large predators out of their traditional territories. In the East
County area of San Diego, we have increasing reports of Condors and Bald eagles possibly from
Baja, La Rumarosa. Wind turbines are now operating there. The Golden eagle nesting sites in East County
are up for grabs here. The companies involved here plan on saving the eagles “elsewhere”. Sad.
Hi Chris,
Just driving by, saw the light on, thought I’d drop in.
Good to see you posting on the topic of nuances. They make such a difference to arguments.
Hope the magnum opus is still on track.
I’m sure it will be a great contribution to the sum of knowledge.
And btw, certainly people show their lumping tendency when using *birds*, but it’s *fish* that I can never work out the attitude to, when many things with gills and fins are even more different *by each of morphology and clade and grade* from each other than creatures within the birds group differ from each other.
It’s as if Old Testament Patriarchal vision of fish and fowl and cloven hooves, and all that a restricted set of domesticated fauna (and flora) implies, just never wants to go away.
That kind of response (cats kill more birds than…) is precisely the kind of short-sighted, parochial, me-first nonsense that sets me most on edge, and it’s so often spouted by people who seem to be repeating drivel they’ve heard from someone else - someone plausibly bearing an agenda.
Wasn’t it some Reagan era clown who, asked about ozone layer depletion and the resultant risk of increased UV exposure, said that we could all wear hats, sunglasses, and sunscreen?
How many animals wear sunglasses, again…?
WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO THE NOTION OF ENERGY CONSERVATION!!!!!! SHOULDN’T THAT BE OUR FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE WHEN IT COMES TO ALTERNATIVE ENERGY!!