For the Birds Radio Program: Andrew Slade
When environmentalists cannot speak out in their capacity as private citizens without losing their jobs, something is desperately wrong with our democracy.
Transcript
Most people like birds. They bring to our human world something of their beauty and song, their warmth and vivacity. They never ask anything of us in return, and so we often get the.idea that we can take all they give us for free, with no obligations in return. But if birds don’t place demands on us, we should perhaps place some demands on ourselves–to at least take birds and their needs into consideration as we make decisions that affect them. Our human interests take precedence since we are human, but when a conflict between us and birds can be resolved with little cost to us relative to the possible damage to them, it seems like an ethical obligation for us to minimize the damage we cause.
Since I took it upon myself to be a spokesperson for the birds, I have always felt duty-bound to speak out about the things that hurt them, from communications towers to cats, and lawn chemicals to deforestation. Public radio has given me a forum to speak out without worrying about the kinds of corporate pressures that too-often silence newspapers magazines, and other commercial sources of news. Too much corporate power over our lives is as scary a prospect as too much government–perhaps more so because at least government representatives have been elected democratically.
A column that ran a few weeks ago in the Duluth News-Tribune about the proposed power line from Duluth to Wausau, Wisconsin, isn’t the kind of controversy I usually get involved with. The power line issue is about energy conservation and policies that affect all of us, but don’t as directly affect birds. Actually, the power line will affect habitat, fragmenting some forested areas. This is bad for songbirds that end up raising cowbirds or succumbing to predators which have their greatest impact along edges. But overall, there are bazillions of projects that chop up forest habitat–it would be inappropriate and silly for me to take on every one of them. So this is the kind of topic I shy away from, preferring to focus on things more obviously related to birds.
But when I read Andrew Slade’s Duluth News-Tribune column about the power line, I was impressed by his fairness and restraint, and proud of him as a fellow naturalist and environmental writer for speaking out on this important issue. Andrew pointed out that we are all responsible for conserving energy, and that the power line is a sad but natural consequence of our energy intensive lifestyles during the past decades.
It was with shock and anger that I learned last week that Andrew had been forced to resign from his job as the director of education at the Great Lakes Aquarium for writing that very column. He writes for the newspaper as an informed individual, not a spokesperson for the aquarium, and wasn’t even identified as an employee of the aquarium in the column, yet one of their corporate sponsors flexed its muscles and he was forced to resign after eight years of service to the aquarium and four years of writing his well received newspaper column.
I am grateful to KUMD for allowing me the freedom to speak out when issues are important to me. I’m proud to do a program which allows me to be honest and sincere, to speak the truth as far as I can see it, and to take corrections from listeners based on truth, without having to watch my every word for fear of some environmental or corporate or other kind of extremist silencing me.
America is the land of free speech, where we citizens are supposedly free to publicly discuss our knowledge and beliefs. Corporate pressures like those placed on publicly supported non-profit institutions frighten me–without avenues like KUMD, I fear that soon the only ones who will be genuinely free to proclaim their beliefs honestly and directly could be the birds. And no one understands their language.