Olivia Gentile

"A little over a decade ago, the major players in the environmental movement tried to take on . The industry's fertilizers were polluting the , and the environmentalists asked Florida voters to approve a penny-per-pound tax on sugar companies that would yield $35 million a year for cleanup work. But "Big Sugar" responded with a multimillion-dollar campaign to portray the environmentalists as white elitists attempting to weaken an industry that employed blacks and Latinos. Jesse Jackson joined forces with the industry, telling Floridians, "We should never have a showdown between alligators and people." With the help of minority group blocs, voters soundly rejected the tax. The defeat was a wake-up call for the , and other large environmental groups, which at the time were staffed and supported mostly by white people. In recent years, these organizations have begun to devote a great deal of money and effort to engage minority groups—not just to foster a sense of inclusiveness, but to survive in a demographically changing society. Nonwhite people make up 33 percent of the U.S. population, and the expects that figure to increase to 50 percent by 2042. Meanwhile, a survey of 60 environmental groups conducted in 2002 found that minorities made up less than 13 percent of their staffs."

"Last month, the , in conjunction with several conservation organizations, released a State of the Birds report, an assessment of the health of the country’s 800 bird species. The findings were mixed. On the one hand, nearly one-third of our birds face the possibility of extinction, have suffered a serious population decline or are in danger of such a decline. On the other hand, many of the species that were in trouble several decades ago, such as the and dozens of wetland birds, are now thriving precisely because our conservation efforts have paid off."

"The banning of DDT and other toxic pesticides also has led to the recovery of the and the in recent decades, according to the report. Over the same period, s, which give hunters and bird watchers a year’s access to National Wildlife Refuges for $15, have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, nearly all of which has gone to expanding wetland refuges. As a result, wetland bird populations have increased by nearly 60% since 1968, the report found. Species that have made particularly impressive recoveries include the , and ."

"... Phoebe married a few days after she graduated, became a housewife in the Minneapolis suburbs, and had four children in quick succession ... She tried being a teacher and a leader, but didn't take to either. Then, one sunny spring morning when she was thirty-four, when only one of her kids had started school and the youngest two were still in diapers, an neighbor took her out birdwatching. As she beheld the blazing orange throat of a that was perched in the top of a tree, she had an epiphany akin to a religious awakening."

"... Phoebe crisscrossed the globe with ever-deepening abandon, staking out rare and spectacular birds in the wildest places on earth. She still took tours, but she took increasingly fringe ones, and as time went on she took more trips on her own, hiring local guides to show her around. She slept in s, at truck stops, and by the side of the road; she traveled in tiny planes, in canoes, and on horseback. Once, she was chased by tribesmen with ten-foot-long spears; another time, she was boat wrecked in the middle of the ocean. On the island of , she was carjacked, kidnapped, and brutally assaulted by five thugs. Ten years after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, Phoebe had become obsessed with the notion of seeing eight thousand species, more than any other birder in history. She had also lost the capacity to take into account her family, her health, and her safety."

"... once you've identified a bird, you can appreciate it on a deeper level. If you know you're looking at a Blackburnian Warbler, for instance, you also know that it spends most of the year somewhere between Peru and Panama, usually at about two thousand meters above sea level; that it subsists, for the most part, on s and beetles; that every April, it flies north across the and settles for the summer somewhere between Georgia and Saskatchewan, where it looks for a mate and builds a nest, often in a high branch in a ; and that the female lays three to five white eggs with little reddish blotches that hatch around early June."

", in some ways, is like a religion. Some people get hooked on birds gradually, but many other have an experience like Phoebe's, an awakening triggered by a "spark bird." Many religious people seek to transcend the everyday by praying or meditating; birders seek transcendence by spending time in nature. Bird clubs give them a sort of church, a community of like-minded people who offer companionship and support."

"… It used to be that if you liked birds, you shot them. In any case, that's what gentlemen in England did after the country start to industrialize, in the early nineteenth century. Cities were getting big and polluted, and people were longing to reconnect with nature. The rich, who had lots of free time, began going to the woods to collect plants, bugs, and rocks. If you were a man, you might also collect birds—bloodily, with your shotgun. Once you'd shot a bird, you’d figure out what it was, then skin, stuff, mount, and display it. The idea was to amass as big and varied a collection of bird skins as possible. A few decades later, when the United States started industrializing, took hold among the upper class here."