Watching birds has become part of my daily meditation affirming my connection to the earth body. Recently this meditation has become tinged with a deep and searing pain.
On Sunday, a friend and I drove to the wetlands of Kalloni, Lesvos to look for wintering birds. En route we saw two sparrowhawk circling the Molivos castle, one apparently offering food to the other in the air. As one of them approached me in flight, I saw the beautiful gray and white striped patterning of it outstretched wings.
"How we admire this strength in each other."1
Arriving in Kalloni, we headed for the new salt pan road.
There we saw ten redshank wading on long legs in shallow water,
calling "tyoo-tyoo-tyoo" when they flew.
Behind them, the plumage of more than five hundred flamingoes with
their heads in the water was illuminated by the morning sun, the
red and black of their wings showing more fully when several of
them rose into the air in flight. Grey heron, great white egret,
and little egret fished languidly on the shore. Little grebe dove
and surfaced. A small speckled brown corn bunting with bright orange
legs sat on a fence post.
"We are stunned by this beauty."
The arrival of a red truck interrupted us.
"Are they looking at birds too?" my friend asked. The truck
passed, stopping at the other end of the road. Two men got out of
the car. In their hands were shotguns. "What could they be shooting
here?" I wondered. "Didn't you say that not long ago the television
reported that someone had shot four flamingoes in northern Greece,
leaving their dead bodies in the marsh?" my friend responded. Without
thinking, I honked the horn, causing all the birds in the marsh
to fly off. The hunters got back into their car and turned toward
us. They had guns.
In Greece, hunting birds for food was once a (necessary?) part of the subsistence economy. For these young men in their red truck it was sport. In Dionos, the magazine of the Hellenic Ornithological Society, Kosta Papakostaninou reported seeing one hundred twenty to one hundred fifty of an estimated four hundred migrating waders fall in the gunfire of some thirty hunters in two hours on Holy Monday (the day after Easter). His article was titled "The 'Tradition' of Slaughter Continues."
The men with the guns got back into their car, passing us on their way out of the marsh. For the moment both the birds and we were safe.
"What she is to me."
Continuing toward the salt pans,
we noted that a new building had gone up in the marshy land across
from the gas station. In the spring a sign had been posted there
saying: "Dump basa (building waste) here." Basa was
now being dumped in an adjoining swampy area.
"What I am to her."
The Kalloni salt pans and the surrounding marshes have been designated
as part of the European Community's Natura 2000 project.
To date the Greek government has not completed the plan for its protection.
Will it be too late?
"All that we have lost."
In the salt pans we counted fifty feeding
avocets, elegant small black and white waders with long upcurving
beaks, endangered species. Close to one hundred starlings crowded
together in the damp field pecking the ground in search of grubs,
the spots on their dark feathers glinting in the light.
"How loved I am."
We stopped near a mud puddle where tiny birds were bathing.
Soon we heard twenty goldfinch chattering
noisily in the dry thistles. First a few, then the whole group descended
to the water, the deep red of their heads and throats contrasting
with the white, black and yellow of their fluttering wings. With
our binoculars we picked out two tiny brownish and yellow birds
in the flock, identifying them as serin, relative of the canary.
Six chaffinch with rosy breasts waited their turn on the fence posts.
"This earth is my sister."
As we drove along the East River,
we saw basa thrown everywhere—broken roof tiles and pieces
of concrete mixed with sand and cement. "Don't they know what they
are doing?" we asked each other. At the point where the river feeds
into the bay of at Skala Kalloni, a whole field was filled with
basa. "Maybe they do know what they are doing." Could this
be the site of a new hotel?
"I do not forget."
The Parakila marshes were devoid of birds, but not of basa.
Everywhere there were signs posted saying:
apagorevetai i ripsi bason, it is prohibited to dump basa.
Soon these marshes will be filled in too, we feared.
"All that we have suffered."
Near the river we were surprised
by a long-legged buzzard flying low over the fields. When it landed
on a telephone pole we could clearly see its pale breast and cream-colored
head. He or she sat there for a long time, not unaware of being watched.
"All that we know."
The kingfisher we had seen as a flash of iridescent turquoise
flying low over the river on another day did not show itself.
But we caught glimpses of white wagtail and yellow wagtail,
flicking their tails madly as they hopped across the rocks.
"I love her daily grace."
At dusk, we were given a parting gift:
a single great white egret stretched its very long neck and
long yellow beak into the rose gold sea, catching fish. We followed
it as it moved along the shore. It stopped beside two bobbing small
gulls. Blood red beaks, grey wings with black tips, and a spot behind
the eye identified them as black-headed gulls in winter plumage.
"Her silent daring."
Yesterday Greek television reported
on a conference in the Hague concerned with global warming. Images
of African women carrying water on their heads in drought stricken
lands were interspersed with others of icebergs melting into the
sea. In fifty years, we were told, Greece will be a desert. In one
hundred years, the sea level will have risen one meter and deadly
diseases will be carried on the sea to all the coastal areas. Northern
Europe will suffer increasingly severe floods. The United States,
we were told, was not supporting strong controls on the release
of the pollutants that are causing the hole in the ozone layer and
global warming.
Al Gore knows about all of this. But he fears that he could never be elected if he spoke clearly about the danger we face and the measures that must be taken to prevent it. Americans love their cars too much. Big business funds his campaign. George Bush seems to think that if he ignores the problem it will go away. Saving the environment was central in Ralph Nader's message, but in the United States it is difficult for a third-party candidate to get a hearing.
A Greek friend told me that her son had gotten a job installing air-conditioning. "But it is winter," I said, "who is installing air-conditioning now?" "All of the hotels have it written in their contracts that they must install air-conditioning by next summer," she replied. "And this is Molivos," she added, "where it never used to get too hot." I nodded, recalling that I had moved back to Molivos from Athens because I didn't want to spend all summer with air-conditioning. I couldn't justify the cost to the environment. But last summer, I had been forced to install an air-conditioner in my house in Molivos. It had become too hot to stay inside, yet I suffered sunstroke when I went out at midday.
Greece is very proud to have been awarded the Olympic Games for the year 2004. Yesterday in the mail the World Wide Fund for Nature sent me another update on its (or our, since I had collected signatures too) campaign to save Skoinias, one of the few remaining natural areas in the Attiki area of Greece. This seaside area is home to one hundred seventy-six kinds of birds, many rare and indigenous plants, an indigenous species of fish, and one of the three last Greek forests with pine nuts. This beautiful wild place is scheduled to be turned into a water sports park for the Olympics. Incredibly, the Greek government appears indifferent to the destruction of Greek nature, and even more incredibly, the Olympic Committee requires no ecological impact report regarding the building that occurs in every country that is awarded the Olympic Games. (Think about this when you watch the Olympic water sports in 2004!) (You can learn more about this issue and sign the petition directed to the Head of the Olympic Committee through the WWF Greece Web site www.wwf.gr/ or check out the US site at www.wwf.org/)
"I have been attending meetings in Blacksburg, Virginia," an American friend told me, "concerning what to do with a parcel of land that has been given to the city. This piece of land has water and is home to many birds and mammals. One plan is to leave it as a wild area. The second is to turn it into sports center with basketball courts and baseball fields. The other day a ten year-old girl stood up at the meeting and said: 'I know that in the long run it is too late to save the world for the animals. But just for now, couldn't we save this one place.' I started crying uncontrollably," my friend added. "We know what is happening and we don't seem to be able to stop it."
I rose early on this mid-November day but decided not to go for a walk because last week it was already too hot by nine o'clock in the morning. "Why are we losing our springs and falls in Greece?" was the headline of this morning's news report. Despite the unseasonably "good" (warm) weather we have been having, I have felt a little sad and uneasy this fall. Could it be that my body knows what the earth body is suffering?
I have vowed to do all that I can to save the wetlands of Kalloni, not because I believe that we can succeed in saving them for the birds (and ourselves), but because I know deeply within myself that it is right to try.
1. Boldface quotations in this essay are from Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), p.219.
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