Jonathan Franzen: climate campaigns killing the birds?

The author’s suggestion in a New Yorker essay this week that bird populations would thrive if we gave up the fight on climate change is ‘nonsense’ say conservationists

In Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel Freedom, lauded for its biting critique of the US environmental movement, a conservationist enters a Faustian pact with a coal miner. He cuts a deal in which a community of 200 families are to be relocated and a mountain denuded in return for the creation of a sanctuary for warblers.

In this week’s New Yorker, Franzen flirts with his own protagonist’s folly by proposing to protect birds by giving up on the fight to slow down climate change. A suggestion that has angered and confused bird conservationists across the world.

“The Earth as we now know it resembles a patient whose terminal cancer we can choose to treat either with disfiguring aggression or with palliation and sympathy. We can dam every river and blight every landscape with biofuel agriculture, solar farms, and wind turbines, to buy some extra years of moderated warming. Or we can settle for a shorter life of higher quality, protecting the areas where wild animals and plants are hanging on, at the cost of slightly hastening the human catastrophe,” he says.

Continue reading...