One gift of the coronavirus...

Clean Air

“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what is good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.”

Wendell Berry

          One of the upsides of the isolation demanded by the coronavirus pandemic is that for the first time in as long as I can remember, the air is clean. We still have coal-fired power plants in Alabama, but without all the cars on the roads spewing out their emissions, the air is much cleaner than it’s ever been.

          Birmingham is full of hills—sandstone mountains, the foothills of the Appalachian chain. When I first came to live here in 1980, you could crest one of those ridges and see a blanket of gray smog covering the city. It looked thick, like a storm cloud filled with debris. Shortly after that, the steel industry shut down, and the air became cleaner, but still, on days when the air pressure pushed the ozone down against the earth, you could SEE the air. The ozone shimmered in the summer sunlight. Right now, after six weeks of low traffic, all I see are clouds and blue sky.

          Anther thing that tells me that we are pushing our environment to the brink is how many fewer birds there are—both the diversity of species and the sheer numbers. Remember when we watched murmurations of starlings during their spring and fall migration? Huge numbers would form patterns in the sky, so many birds that they covered the entire visual field. This year, there may have been 150 birds on the flyway. I leave my back yard natural, and I have several species of birds nesting there, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen blue jays or gold finches. All this is to say, we are losing birds by the thousands. In fact, we have lost three billion birds in North America since 1970—and nineteen species are now on the brink of extinction. I can’t tell you how sad this makes me.

          I don’t know about you, but I am ready to make whatever changes are necessary to help the earth, and her creatures to recover. We will live longer, healthier and happier lives if we can adopt a new value that all species have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and not just humans. We are seeing right now how quickly the earth can clean itself up if we will cooperate. We must find a way to do that, because what is good for the world will be good for us, too—for our bodies, minds and souls.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane