Climate change limerick

With reference to http://environmentalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/10/intentional-climate-change-again-again.html:

Were climate Caldeira's own toy,
Away he would play for his joy.
    Spray sulfates up there!
    It's easy, I swear –
So easy, the earth to destroy.

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Walking and Flying with Pelicans

It is a late autumn afternoon at the Baylands.

American Avocet (winter plumage) plying the mudflats

This is an avian paradise whose denizens have no apparent complaint about the place's recent history as a complex of man-made levees, landfill, salt-evaporation ponds. Only my non-avian eyes smart when touched by the plain evidence of this. The full moon, not yet risen in the eastern sky, has tugged away tidal waters to expose a vast expanse of mudflats. For many birds, the veil has been removed from a table bearing a great banquet. I walk out from the trailhead expecting that a riot of birds will have come to the feast.

Instead, I find a normal-sized congregation of some of the usual suspects. Blackbirds in the reeds on the bay's periphery. Gadwalls, shovelers, mallards, and coots voluntarily corralled together, looking for dinner in isolated islands of water. Avocets, whimbrels, willets, dowitchers, and western sandpipers, trawling through the mud for tasty treasures. California and ring-billed gulls flying overhead. A single cormorant on the wing. But other of the usual suspects are conspicuous by their absence. Where are the stilts that keep the avocets company, the terns that dive and plunge for their repast, the herons that discretely wade, watch, wait, then spear theirs? These are no-shows, as are the often seen swallows, teals, ruddy ducks, pintails, canada geese, herons, pelicans. On a day like this, the hope for a rare appearance of a rail or white-faced ibis quickly fades.

Watching creatures that are here today plying their trade and thinking about those that aren't, it is not hard to feel that "there is somebody there behind the ... feathers", as Holmes Rolston III puts it (Rolston, H., "Value in Nature and the Nature of Value", from Philosophy and Natural Environment, ed. Attfield, R, and Belsey, A, Cambridge University Press, 1994). That "somebody" is an animal that, like me, needs to work for a living. I can appreciate that effort and relate it to mine. I can even imagine myself living their life, finding food the way they do. Philosophers wrap themselves in knots trying to unravel the meaning of counterfactual statements. The rest of us find straightforward meaning in "if I were a pelican..." Those feathered "somebodies" are, in some significant sense, one of "us".

White pelicans. In warmer weather months, they can be seen together in a great flock, swimming together and flying in formations so impossibly low over the water that their huge, powerfully flapping wings must inevitably drown; but never do. Sometime every fall, the pelicans suddenly vanish to I-know-not-where. Apparently, I have arrived after their departure.

Why aren't more birds here? Didn't the word get out? "GOOD EATS". I imagine that the message was somehow sent, but was then swallowed up by the hum of traffic on nearby Route 101; or knocked down to the ground by the single engine planes that drone overhead from and to a nearby municipal airport; or scrambled into gibberish by the electromagnetic fields around the power transmission lines strung along erector-set towers that line the bay.

My habit is to walk out a few miles on a dirt road atop a levee; then retrace my steps. Almost at my turnaround point, I spot a solitary white pelican – incapable of disappearing amidst a dense congregation of of gadwalls and shovelers. What is he doing here alone? Did he miss a cue while deep in pelican thought? Does he suffer from not having his companions for flying in tight pelican formation? Could he be a pelican iconoclast and just not care about such things? I reach the slatted bench which marks my turnaround. Affixed to an upper slat is a small metal plaque. I hope that I accurately recall the inscription: "Libby Dutton (1948-1998) Her spirit now flies with the pelicans that she loved."

I arrive back at the trailhead at sundown and look back at the sky across the bay to the east. Until this time, it has born the brownish tint of nitrous oxide. But the setting sun now has repainted the eastern sky in rose colors, and the nitrous oxide is evident only in a sepia deepening and intensification of the roseate hues. The birds, just moments ago chattering, twittering, calling, are now hushed.

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