Subject: Re: reply to Baccus, the ammo excise tax
Date: Oct 9 11:57:51 1997
From: Michael Price - mprice at mindlink.bc.ca


Hi Tweets,

Wallis writes:

>Grrrr to Baccus. I can't not reply to his off the cuff, (censored) remark.
>Let's start with my annual, continuing, and substantial contributions: The
>Nature Conservancy, The Sierra Club, Earth First! Washington Wilderness
>Society, green candidates, and any poor louse on a dark, rainy night who
>knocks on my door begging for money to stop a road building effort, preserve
>a forest, et cetera et cetera et cetera. Let's move to my annual memberships:
>National Audubon Society, Washington Park Arboretum. Let's then move on to my
>purchases of cereals, coffees, long distance services where portions of these
>companies monies are devoted to conservation efforts. And then I'll finish
>with the newly instituted $3.00 trail fee, which I grit my teeth and pay
>because I recognize the necessity even as my bile mounts into my throat when
>I think about our congressional inability to appropriate adequate money for
>the Park Service coupled with our congressional zeal for LOGGING ROAD
>appropriations. Yeah, go ahead and tax bird seed. I'll pay it.
>
>Wallis
>Grrr!

Sorry, but the reason I quoted the whole thing is it's worth reading again
for the extent of W's contribution. Given its extent, his resentment is
understandable, even predictable.

And yet it's beside the point. Don's point, and this is one I've been
concerned about myself for some years now since I first noticed it, is that
birders not only don't organise politically *as birders* but that in my
local experience, many actively resist the idea; they just want to "enjoy"
the birds. Any contribution they make is, usually passively, one into
systems that other people and groups established and maintained and do the
gruntwork on. As a special-interest group, birder representation is simply
not there, though having the most numerous membership of all the groups.

A case in point illustrates my thesis. At a recent first public meeting on
the issue of allowing dog-owners official and structured access to the city
park system as a special-interest group to run their gazillions of dogs
offleash regardless of wildlife values, there were about three hundred
people: about 296 for dogs running offleash, 3 (yeah, that's *three*) for
wildlife interests. Interestingly, the dog-owners didn'y have an
association, just formed one, pro tem, and got out the vote in about three
weeks, thereby showing birders how to do it, that it's not the work of
titans to pack a meeting--just work.

The local nature organisation's leadership treated it as an administrative
issue and delegated a couple of people to come to speak to the meeting,
which one of them did for about two minutes in a terrifically half-hearted
manner--the other designated 'official' speaker from the nature group didn't
speak at all--and one person, a clearly terrified-of-public-speaking
individual (wan't me, btw) unaffiliated with any organisation made a
passionate and knowledgeable case for dog-control in wildlife-sensitive
parks rather than offleash freedom to an accompaniment of much heckling from
the crowd and a series of hurry-ups from the Park Board Chair (who
recommends people run them on wild shores and in forests away from the
picnic areas BTW: but, hey, that's how we do things here in Vancouver BC).
Here was an issue which had direct impact on birding, yet where were the
local birders to speak and support the cause of wildlife?. The answer's not
flattering to them.

In meeting after meeting on local conservation or hunters' access or
development of a wild area, where birders were the biggest user-group (until
the mid-late 1980's when it began to be fashionable in our alienating
society to have a--usually big--dog as a friend and love object instead of
another person (I like dogs and cats a lot, btw, nothing against them, some
of my best friends etc--but I like perspective *more*; I like to keep my
heart in the right place: not on top of my shoulders), the canine population
exploded and the sight of wild birds flying off in terror became a common,
every-hour sight, and the wholesale transformation of cows and horses into
immense amounts of dogshit fouling the parks and beaches began) the question
used to be 'Where are the birders?' Now nobody bothers to ask; since they
refuse to organise politically, people know they're not gonna be there
except as a mild-mannered administrative delegate or two. The idea of
packing a meeting with raucously-assertive birders simply wouldn't occur to
them without a reaction of horror at the vulgarity, the confrontativeness,
the terror of the unpleasantness at having to actually compete with other
special-interest groups.

Don's not the only grouch on this issue. This post touches on some sensitive
issues, I acknowledge, but that's also because, collectively, birders are
not very self-critical and, *like many other such groups*, there's a lot of
unexamined mythology and self-image we have collectively that may be
considerably at variance from a more objective overview.

So if you want to flame, please do so on the issues and please do so publicly.

Michael Price We aren't flying...we're falling with style!
Vancouver BC Canada -Buzz Lightyear, Toy Story
mprice at mindlink.net