Birds and Breathing

            I’m combining my reactions to two separate pieces of literature for this blog.

            We read “The Fog” by Berton Roueche for class on Tuesday. I was struck by how intense the reading was. The story is about Donora, PA a town stuck in a toxic valley. Twenty people total die within an alarmingly short period of time due to the “fog” in the air. The fog itself is a combination of the temperature of the Earth near the surface mixed with the gases emitted from the trains, mills, and boats in the area. When I personally think of fog, I think of the romantic, Irish landscape fog: light and hazy but comforting rather than frightening. So to read this story where the idea of fog is so perverted had a very heavy impact on me. I could feel myself empathizing with the townspeople. I could feel their lack of ability to inhale, and instead choke and cough. I could sense their entrapment in this town with no breathable air. If I smell something bad, I light a candle or spray some room deodorizer. If I find myself walking behind a wall of smoking students as I often do, I simply walk around them or find a favorable direction of the wind. But these people didn’t have that option. The rapid-fire phone calls and deaths would have certainly had me in a panic. It’s reading like this that draws me towards environmental law, to prevent these sorts of things or punish those who caused it.

            We also read Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” It was an eye-opening read for me. I literally made wide eyed gasps at the sheer enormity of the number of deaths of these birds. It was strange timing, as my brother and I were discussing DDT this past weekend. His roommate wrote a ten page paper on the positive aspects of DDT. My father was aghast at such a topic, but my brother explained exactly what the reading said: that that particular pesticide is fine in small quantities. It’s once we mass produce it to use it as a panacea for our bug problems that we destroy the integrity and intent of the chemical. Personally, I find comfort in birds. They remind me of spring and summer times, of being outside in the sunshine. I’m upset by the lack of birds here on campus. It is rare for me to hear one chirping a tune. I just presumed the squirrels, in their heavy abundance, have chased them away. But while I was reading, I took notice of the changing idea between bird deaths and human deaths. Sure, people notice when some birds go missing, when their fowl aren’t producing as much as before. But it seems that people really sit up and take notice when our own species is being harmed. We don’t notice the bees gone until there’s no more pollination of our flowers and fruits. We don’t notice the absence of fish in the streams until we go hungry. How is it our culture has roped us up in “me me me”? There is no more “us,” no more thought given to the species around us. We look at statistics like 65,000 red-winged blackbirds and starlings died and revel in our success. Rather than take the hit and lose a few seeds or plants, we destroy entire species. And I appreciated the author’s style to end the piece. She approaches the story with a naturalist theory, facts and statistics. But she ends it with a scathing declaration that we are not the end all and be all of this world; we cannot simply do as we wish without consultation. Overall, both were great environmental pieces.