10-05-2025
Bird Banter: Normalizing environmental safeguards was going well
I grew up mostly in Wisconsin, home of legendary conservationist Aldo Leopold and Earth Day co-founder Gaylord Nelson. I headed off to college four years after the first Earth Day. Between those influences and a month-long camping and hiking trip through Montana, Wyoming and Colorado with my uncle and aunt at an impressionable age, it wasn't surprising that I chose to study natural resources at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point.
'Conservation' was an acceptable word in 1974 and popular with outdoorsmen (and it was mostly men back then), but 'Environmental' was not popular with the establishment, especially as part of the title of the new agency restricting air and water pollution and other hazards.
College students like a good fight, so I joined the student-run Environmental Council, which was energized by returning Vietnam vets. I helped put out the council's newsletter, which led to my becoming the environmental editor for the mainstream campus weekly. Other than Judy Collins, my most memorable interview was with a dairy farmer whose neighbor had sprayed his farm with pesticides and apparently killed his calves. No one else was taking his complaint seriously, except the farmer's dairy co-op, which wouldn't take his milk anymore.
In my last 50 years, 36 in Cheyenne, I've been pleased to see that 'Environment' has become a term for not only saving sage grouse but keeping people safe, too.
Environmental organizations have made friends and alliances with people who share concerns, such as hunting and fishing groups, farmers and ranchers as well as health organizations. Even the federal government, for 12 of the last 16 years, was making progress on the biggest current environmental concern, climate change.
In so many ways, people have been making choices supporting the health of the environment.
There's not a single major auto manufacturer today that is not offering electric alternatives. Even here in Wyoming where electric power still is mostly from fossil fuels — the main climate change culprits — EVs make economic as well as environmental sense.
There's not a conventional gardening magazine today that hasn't embraced the pollinator message, and often organic practices. Modern gardening advice encourages planting native plants that require fewer pesticides, less water and less chemical fertilizer (a major water pollutant).
Citizen/community scientists are augmenting all kinds of environmental studies. The one I participate in most often is eBird. Studying birds helps us see what birds need, and where and when, but it's a no-brainer: like us, they need a clean, intact environment.
So as a birder, I try to make environmentally helpful decisions. Mark and I replaced our toilets with low-flow versions, installed higher R-value windows and insulation and keep our cats from killing birds and other wildlife.
I think anyone conservative about their buying habits can be considered an environmentalist — it's manufacturing so much stuff that is part of our problem. I've had some clothes for more than 20 years — they still fit and blend in fine when I'm with a crowd of hikers, gardeners or birders. I'd rather eat at restaurants with real dishes instead of using single-use plastic. We limit our redecorating — we've had the same classic oak dining table since 1982. We relish leftovers and making them into new meals.
More people are looking for outdoor recreational opportunities, a good thing that typically goes hand in hand with regard to the environment. Of course, some outdoor recreation, such as off-roading off the trails, is damaging to the environment.
All of us were doing well at saving electricity with more efficient lights and other electrical uses, but now we have energy-hungry bitcoin 'farms' and data centers. The future could be visually polluted and a menace to birds with wind turbines and solar panels spread across the landscape, though they are an improvement over the clouds of pollution I grew up with in the Milwaukee-Chicago area. But I think we are on track for power production innovations in the future. Or we were.
Since mid-January, we have been inundated with federal administration edicts that want to take us back to the dark ages in many different aspects of life including the environment.
Just when we thought the arguments for clean air and water, for instance, are universally acceptable, we find our federal government taken over by people who don't think clean air and water are important. I asked this 50 years ago: just where are the anti-environmentalists planning to get clean water to drink for themselves (bottled water isn't guaranteed) and clean air to breathe?
We know what needs to be done for a healthier planet. We were studying how to do it better. But it seems this administration is intent on making messes it doesn't think it will have to live in.
