Did Mankind Inherit the Earth?

I have found that there are many people who will argue about an issue without a whole lot of knowledge to back up their beliefs. My personal crusade to stop a cell tower in my neighborhood has brought out the worst in some people, both online and in person.

I began my fight because I thought that this tower would be placed in an area that is significant to bird migration. My daughter and I wait at the end of our driveway for the school bus. Each fall we watch flocks of birds fly right over our heads. These are extraordinary in that they are huge flocks, and virtually constant. These birds travel in a narrow strip, from the lakeshore to just beyond our yard, uphill from the lake. There are several tiers of flocks. On some days you see Eagles, Hawks and Songbirds flying less than one hundred feet high and some that are tiny specks, several hundred or even thousands of feet high. But there is one constant, lots and lots of birds. Because Hawks and Eagles migrate in the daytime, there are probably 10 times more Songbirds migrating at night!

One evening this fall; as I worked in my garden, I watched the annual migration of Nighthawks. They flew about 30 feet above, I could see their white patches on the undersides of their wings and that their mouths were wide open. Nighthawks cannot swallow, so they fly openmouthed and the bugs they catch slide right down their throats. It was so thick with Nighthawks that a woman jogging down the road stopped and walked in circles, exclaiming, “This is amazing!” Each fall and spring we are fortunate to witness this amazing one day migration. Once, many years ago, I stepped out into my yard and witnessed a Bald Eagle drop a salmon, smack dab into the middle of the yard. That was the moment I started watching the sky, paying attention to the birds migrating through this extraordinary place.

We are fortunate to live directly under the most significant flyway in the western Great Lakes. It is the concentrated path that the birds follow when they come down from Canada. Birds instinctively know that if they were to attempt to fly across Lake Superior they might not eat or find a place to land for a very long time. Therefore they follow the shoreline along Lake Superior. By the time they reach Duluth the numbers are huge. They follow the shore and catch the thermals up to the hill we call Hawk Ridge. Some of these flocks are so large that they are detected on NEXRAD radar! My instincts told me that a place with so much bird movement would not be a good place to erect a man made obstacle like a cell tower. I received confirmation of my belief when Bob Russell with the US Fish and Wildlife Division of Migratory Bird Management called me and encouraged me to fight this tower. He confirmed that this is an “egregious” place for a tower. He regrets that FWS does not have the authority to stop a tower under 200 feet, but acknowledges that this tower should absolutely not go in this major migration path. He was able to help by sending a letter of warning to the City. The letter explains that if this tower is built, FWS will enforce the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, and the Endangered Species Act if and when there are documented bird deaths at this tower.

People have shocked me with their ignorance and arrogance. Some people do not believe as I do, that the birds are more important than having improved cell phone coverage for AT&T. They argue that more birds die from window strikes and cat predation. I agree. But this tower is not yet built. It is something that we can avoid. Can we go back and ask everyone to board up windows on buildings already built? Can we enforce a law that says you must keep your cat inside? Those are issues that are ongoing, people are trying to find solutions. That doesn’t mean that we throw up our hands and say…”geez there’s more dead bodies from this, these dead bodies don’t matter.” And then there is the argument that our needs are greater than the lives of animals. This is the argument I’ve seen on the blogs. “If the birds are too stupid to avoid the tower, they deserve to die.” And “It's called survival of the fittest for a reason. If a bird isn't smart enough to fly around the tower, maybe it just wasn't meant to pass along it's genetics to the next generation.”

So we intentionally place an object in the flight path these birds have instinctively followed for thousands of years, and call them stupid if they hit it. We disregard animal life to such an extent that we make fun of a very serious issue. Are people so disconnected from nature that they do not realize that if we continue to trash the Earth and creatures, WE will no longer live? I guess this is the same lack of ethics that allows people to dump their garbage on the side of the road. Or pour motor oil down the sewer drain. Somehow corporations find a way to justify pollution in the name of profits. How about the jerk that shot the last successful breeding Whooping Crane from the eastern migratory population? I’m sure he/she thought it was great fun to kill something. It escalates to the point where we don’t care about each other. We find a way to justify our lack of regard because it’s for the good of humankind. I don’t get it. I really don’t. I find it hard to understand how mankind has gone from being a steward of nature to a dominator.

We claim extraordinary intelligence, but lack the ability to think deeper about our role on the Earth. We are part of a system, a system with a tenuous balance. When we are so arrogant that we cannot even fathom that life might be more valuable than “improved cell coverage and wireless communication” we are in great trouble.

Perhaps you think I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. “Oh, it’s just one tower!” But it is one tower today, placed in one of the most significant avian flyways in the Western Great Lakes. Let this one go and there will be more. Eagles, Hawks, and Songbirds all stand to lose if we have one bad weather day. In fog or rain they will not be able to see this tower, and at 180 feet it is far above the treetops. This has nothing to do with the bird’s intelligence, how smart are we when we place an obstacle in a path that has been used for migration for thousands of years?