A small example of how our economy went terribly wrong
A small piece of conversational journalism from 1980 has left me with a jolt of recognition of just how far off the rails we gone in the past quarter-century or so.
Harry Whewell was musing then on the availability of wild bird seed. Why would you think about that, you might ask today? Isn’t it nice that people are trying to help the birds?
Well, yes, it is good people are thinking about the environment (if also seeking some entertainment for themselves by attracting the birds).
But what struck me about the article was how in 1980 this was an odd and new idea – or at least could still be presented as such.
Harry asks, very logically, why it was that people weren’t simply feeding the birds scraps from their own table, or else allowing plants in their garden to grow and seed? (Indeed he also notes that dogs and cats used to almost invariably be fed human scraps, rather than specialist food.)
He asks: “was there anybody who could not find crumbs in their cake tin, stale slices in their bread bin, and bits of bacon rind in the sink tidy, enough to keep half a dozen sparrows, two blackbirds, and a robin happy?”
He worries that the seed might be grown in Africa and being taken human supplies, or taken from wild places: “A charm of Cheshire goldfinches might find one autumn that its normal supplies of thistle seeds had totally disappeared, the plants having been stripped by foraging schoolboys and the seeds sold to pet shops in Manchester.”
And when you think about it, he’s absolutely right. (And to add in today’s concerns: all of that seed was shipped, using fossil fuel, to the mixing plant, packaged in plastic bags made from petroleum products, shipped likewise to a supermarket, and very likely carried home in a private car.)
Meanwhile, the same people who are carefully pouring this into the bird feeder, are most likely throwing large quantities of perfectly good food – certainly good for the birds — into the waste bin, from where it is carried in lorries to a landfill site, where it will eventually produce globally warming methane. And the supermarket that is selling it is carefully locking into its rubbish bins huge quantities of the same.
And they are very likely carefully mowing their lawn into a perfect sward, excluding with poison any “weed” (for which read seeding plant that the birds might like).
So many things that we do today, when you start to deconstruct them, are wrong from start to finish – even buying bird seed.
Stumble it!
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I can see your point about wastefulness but a couple of things
Commercial bird seed is usually a by-product from grain grown to feed humans or livestock – rarely is it grown solely for bird seed as it just doesn’t pay enough.
Here in Australia, scraps from the human table can be very harmful to the health of native birds & animals even positively toxic. In a balanced environment the majority of wild birds and animals thrive with their wild forage. Unfortunately finding these wild places with no contamination or destruction of the habitat is getting harder & harder. Creating a total dependency of wild animals on human handouts can be just as damaging but the occupational treat is at least some recompense for the what we are doing to their habitats.
Comment by mort — July 19, 2009 @ 12:50 pm
[...] A small example of how our economy went terribly wrong – Philobiblon Now I thought feeding the birds was a good thing. Natalie Bennett on why you might want to rethink that. [...]
Pingback by Vidi: Various things seen « Archaeoastronomy — July 20, 2009 @ 8:05 am
I’m happy to say, Natalie, that my lawn is a weedy mess. I am lazy and the birds are cock-a-hoop. But what to do in the winter when it freezes? I put out pieces of lard and stale bread. Human handouts might be wrong but, as Mort says, it’s partial recompense.
Comment by judith weingarten — July 20, 2009 @ 9:13 am
Lard and stale bread – basically using up leftovers, is exactly what I’m advocating, rather than specialist food grown and transported around the world for the purpose.
Comment by Natalie Bennett — July 20, 2009 @ 9:29 am
Ouch! Mort’s points may be well taken but the bird-seed example suggests what’s unbalanced with the supply-chains of much of what we eat, wear and both work and play with. Thirty-odd years ago, I wondered why in London I was being served New Zealand butter. I knew that there had to be creameries _somewhere_ in the UK that could supply pats of butter, but no, either New Zealand or, almost as inexplicably, Danish butter, was what I was served. Was it good butter? I think it was. Did it cost more than the semi-local product? it must have, at least in a real sense, but somehow it made sense to someone to ship a commodity halfway ’round the globe, just so I wouldn’t have to fall back on mixed-fruit jam for my breakfast rolls.
It’s not just “specialist” food that we’ve gotten into the habit of shipping. Cheap transportation has made possible the sourcing of any commodity from the place that can make it or grow it or pack it cheappest–and this behavior has some dire long-term costs. If you seek its monument, look around: imbalances of trade, sapped manufacturing sectors, toleration of environmentally-insensitive production…as long as it’s a continent or two away from us. Grr!
I’ve always liked the idea of a slab of suet , tacked up to a tree limb in winter. Birds have liked it, too. As for bread, alas, the dogs get jealous!
Comment by david ware — July 29, 2009 @ 5:12 am