Last week a team of bird experts led by LSU ornithologist Van Remsen began a month-long search in the Pearl River bottomlands between St. Tammany Parish and Hancock County, Mississippi. Their mission: to determine if the famed ivory-billed woodpecker, listed by the World Conservation Union as extinct, survives in an isolated nook of the woods. Then-LSU student David Kulivan saw what he believed to be a pair of ivory bills while turkey hunting in 1999, and his detailed report to Dr. Remsen was convincing enough to warrant the expedition.
Proof that the ivory bill survives would create a sensation in the world of bird-watchers and ornithologists. The last confirmed sighting was more than a half century ago. One hopes against hope that current expedition will be successful, but the chances that ivory bills are still nesting somewhere in the dwindling wilderness are not good. The bottomland forests that once stretched from Virginia to Texas, the rich habitats that hosted the ivory-billed woodpecker and countless other species, are no more, decimated by encroaching human populations. The strikingly beautiful ivory bill, painted by John James Audubon and described by his friend Alexander Wilson as a “royal hunter” that “seeks the most towering trees of the forest,” exists now, it seems likely, only in pictures, one famous audio recording of its call, and a few pitiful stuffed specimens in museums.
We Americans have not been good stewards of the land. In our shortsightedness, we have focused on immediate gain, the economic equivalent of instant gratification, and have left tomorrow to worry for itself. We have devastated all too many landscapes, heaving innumerable species down the slippery slope to extinction, from where, outside of Hollywood, there is no return, for second acts do not exist in the natural world. And unless a miracle occurs and the ivory bill turns up in the depths of the Pearl River bottomlands, future generations will never marvel, as our ancestors did, at the uncanny call and impressive size—almost three feet from wingtip to wingtip—of this wonderful bird.
It is more than a little ironic that the current administration, which proudly describes itself as “conservative,” shows so little interest in conserving and protecting the nation’s precious natural heritage. From the top down, the Bush administration suffers from the overrepresentation of men with close connections to the industries that wreck our natural world—and it shows. Vice President Cheney ridicules those who would try to rein in our profligate waste of energy, even though one of every seven barrels of oil produced worldwide gets burned up on American roads, even though the American five percent of the world population consumes twenty-five percent of the planet’s limited energy resources. President Bush, instead of taking advantage of his immense popularity to get on the bully pulpit and encourage Americans to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles, makes drilling for oil in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge the centerpiece of his energy program.
It is high time that Americans do more to protect what we still have. Nothing can bring back what is already lost. But a government more inclined to true conservatism, the preservation of what remains, could go a long way toward insuring that future generations aren’t restricted to understanding the America that was by visiting museums and watching Animal Planet.