Last Song for Migrating Birds
The writer investigates the killing of migrating songbirds in the Mediterranean and why there is little being done to prevent hunters from shooting the birds for sport:
“‘It’s become fashionable, and my friends talked me into it,’ the hunter explained to me, somewhat sheepishly. ‘I’m not a real hunter—you can’t become a hunter at 40. But being a new one, and feeling good about owning a licensed weapon, a very good powerful gun, and never having killed any birds before, it was fun at first. It was like when summer comes and you feel like jumping in the ocean. I would go out on my own and drive up into the hills for an hour. We don’t have well-identified protected areas, and I’d shoot whatever I could. It was spontaneous. But it gets less joyful when you think about the animals you’re killing.’
“‘Yes, what about that?’ I said.
“The hunter frowned. ‘I feel very uncomfortable with the situation. My friends are saying it now too: ‘There are no birds; we walk for hours without seeing any.’ It’s really scary. At this point I’d be happy if the government put a stop to all hunting for two years—no, five years—to let the birds recover.'”
Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.
To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self. Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.
A COUPLE of weeks ago, I replaced my three-year-old BlackBerry Pearl with a much more powerful BlackBerry Bold. Needless to say, I was impressed with…
Good Neighbors
In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else’s children’s sandbox, and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it. (Fiction)