by BIBLIOboy, 6 November 2006

Flight is a popular human metaphor for escape and freedom. Somehow, the ability to fly, to transcend distance and soar high above the world, seems to us earthbound humans, to signify much that is inspiring and positive. Even the word to “uplift” implies flying.

While we humans have now sought to master all the elements, and flying to and fro in airplanes is commonplace, this fascination with flight has also led to a deep fascination with the creatures that have truly conquered the air: the birds.

Birds, however, lead a precarious existence, and none more so than the wonderful cranes - among the largest of the flying birds. In nature, they are considered by ecologists to be an “umbrella species” - one which depends on the ecosystem at large and which parallels its well-being and also warns of its decline, like the proverbial canary in a mine.

Peter Matthiessen, who has been called by the New Yorker magazine “the poet laureate of nature writers”, has presented a despairingly beautiful, desperate, cry for the cause of these marvellous birds in “The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes”.

A recently-awakened long-dormant interest in birds and birdwatching led me to this haunting combination of travel writing, avian popular science, and socio-ecological commentary.

In poetic and elegiac prose which pierces the heart, Matthiessen describes not just the beauty of these totemic and iconic birds, which have become symbols in every human culture where they occur (including being the national birds of numerous countries around the globe, which, however, has unfortunately not stopped their rapid decline), but also the ongoing wanton rapine destruction of the natural habitats, of the wetlands and forests and rivers, of the birds themselves, which threaten the existence of these endangered birds.

Sensitive to the many cultural, political and economic contexts within which cranes are merely the pawns of human interests, he nonetheless remains full of fighting spirit and passion for the possiblities of change.

We humans, as a species, are destroying our own precious world that we all live in. All for the sake of short-term greed, grinding poverty, materialism and endless, heedless consumption. In addition to being a marvellously well-written book (one review has admired the writing as “prose as good as it gets”), “The Birds of Heaven” is a truly evocative portrait of a world where there are no more wild species left on earth - a world where every species now lives on sufferance and through negotiation with humans.

It may not make you any more “green” or environmentally concerned than before, but as the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” (which EVERY teenager ought to watch - after all, this generation is the one which will pay the environmental price of the folly of previous generations) also powerfully demonstrates, . . .

. . . caring about our planet is no longer something we can ignore.

If not for the sake of the cranes, at least for our own sakes, and the sakes of future generations.

Signing off,
Biblioboy, November-2006