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Nurturing Nature Together
Endangered, Precious, and Heroes - Conservationists of Latin America
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| Beautiful magnificent frigate bird soaring over the keys of Belize. Birds, like her, help our hearts soar. |
This past
week I attended the Mesoamerican Society of Biology and Conservation in Belize
City, Belize. One full day was given to
parrot conservation. We heard many
exciting updates!
- There are Central American scarlet macaws on Coiba Island, Panama, and they may not be experiencing much poaching pressure - thanks to Dr. Mark McReynolds et al for this work!
- There was no poaching of Belize scarlet macaws in 2015 and 2016 - thanks to Dr. Isabelle Paquet-Durand, Boris Arevalo, et al for this work!
- There are about 115 yellow-headed parrots in Honduras in the Cuyamel area, and only 2 of 12 nests were poached - thanks to Roger Flores et al for this work!
- There are many active nests of yellow-headed parrots in Belize that produced 58 chicks - thanks to Charles Britt et al for this work!
- Wild yellow-naped amazons used nest boxes in Nicaragua - thanks to Martin Lezama et al for this work!
There were
other presenters and many informal discussions that motivated us to plan how we can together improve the well being of
parrots in Central America. Perhaps the
best thing about this meeting was the excitement and support we offer one
another, which is an important part of conservation work, especially in Latin
America where the challenges and risks can be great. For instance, in a recent Global Witness report, two-thirds of the 185 environmental activists murdered in the world
were from Latin America. Most often
these activists work with little to no governmental support, and it is not
unusual that the government even
counters or endangers environmentalists.
Writes Billy Kyte, author of this report, " Up to now the government sees these people (environmentalists)
as opposing development. What really needs to happen is that these people need
to be treated as heroes."
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| Heroes of Central America (presenters and attendees of the parrot symposium in Belize) |
These parrot conservationists of Mesoamerica
are my heroes, working under threats and challenges, with very little
resources, and often using their own funds to cover their expenses. Thank you all for what you do, and for being
in solidarity and resistance with me as we build a more beautiful world, fighting the poaching and habitat loss that is rampant in the area. Together we won't le the sun go down on these birds!
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| Sunrise on Caye Caulker right before the symposium |
Conservation: Attaining the Good You Will Not Attain
Grace has its own way of shaping
what our hearts bequeath it. Grace keeps fashioning and shaping our deeds, long
after any hopes we had for them have expired. We’d like to have an energizing
hope, for our burdens are so great. The
headlines will not leave us alone.
How
many were blown up or shot yesterday? What species is slipping further towards
extinction? In this global lotto, odds
are that everyone feels a loser. Many
days it seems as if we have no hope. I
think the risk is to not that we could give up on hope, or even faith. The
real danger is that we falter, don't take the next step, or quit, thus
diminishing the chance for inviting grace and unpredictable positive outcomes even
when all seems lost.
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| Honduras during the constitutional crisis in 2009 |
Many would say that conservation in
Central America is a lost cause. Honduras is just about one of the toughest
places with rampant gangs, one of the highest murder rates in the world, high
government corruption, which diminishes government efficacy, letting the powerful,
moneyed, and drug traffickers rule the day. Some experts say it’s the closest to a failed
state anywhere in Latin America. That’s where I work.
Beginning in 2010 I stuck my nose
in, really just to see what was going on and to at least document and witness
the disappearance of parrots, most notably the macaws, from the country. Scarlet
macaws used to be all over the country, but now are only found in one wild,
isolated place, La Moskitia. There, over
the years I have witnessed firsthand the hopeless of the cause. The indigenous
people keep losing their land to corruption and land invaders and the poaching
of macaws approaches the 100% mark. In 2014 not one macaw from our study area
escaped the illegal wildlife trade. In 2015 drug traffickers had taken even
more land and were buying off indigenous and governmental leaders. I just
couldn’t stand it not trying harder, or at least documenting it all, so I went for
two months this past spring of 2016. It was like every day there was some news
that landed on me like getting kicked in the gut. Even more land was lost and
now it seemed that everyone was coming into this territory to convince the
indigenous to sell their land and extract the timber, oil, and ore. Gold miners
were flanking both sides of the nearby Coco River, contaminating it with
mercury. One of our nests was poached by
one of the local community people we had hired to protect that nest. Then grace stepped in.
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| At the base of poached nest, deciding what to do |
We were gathered at the bottom of the nest tree reflecting and sharing what we felt, when one member of our team said, "Doctora, it is sad, but this is not the time for tears." He was right. We wanted our two parrot chicks
back, and would have to act, now. But recovering chicks had never happened before. Once they were gone, they were long gone: to
the cities, to other countries, all the way to the Middle East and Japan. It was hopeless. But that didn’t matter. People went out on bikes and motorcycles to
try to track down the poachers and to get any hints of where they had
gone. I borrowed a phone, climbed a
hill, got a cell phone signal from Nicaragua, and started calling people. Several days later I had not heard any news
when I had to go to the nearest town, Pt. Lempira, a 4-hour drive away. I was there to put my spouse Meredith on a
plane the next day. I called the
forestry service to ask them if they had any news, and they said they had 4
confiscated parrots. When
they brought them to me to take care of they casually mentioned that two of
them had bands. A thrill went through me. They were our chicks! We got them back
against all odds. They went directly to our Rescue and Liberation Center in the village of Mabita, and are now flying free! Not only that, not one chick from 2016 entered the illegal
wildlife trade. I never saw that coming.
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| Rescued chick being fed |
I should be happy, shouldn’t I? But I keep repeating the incantations, it is
not about happiness. attaining the good of keeping those birds and people safe.
It could go at anytime, and it’s not looking good for the long haul. Yet, I’ve
never been in a place so powerful to stave that off. Holding that failure and
possible success has made a watcher out of me, trying to stay present to it
all. Sometimes I wonder if trying to hold it all leaves me, personally, with
less. So I remember Zbigniew Herbert's poem where he who tells me to beware of
dryness of heart. See the beauty and love the bird with an unknown name and an
unknown future.
Lest we should rest on our laurels
for a spectacular conservation year of 2016, I heed Herbert's warning, "Beware
of unnecessary pride. Keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror. Repeat,
I was called, weren’t there better ones than I?" So I juggle fumbling and
bumbling all the time, a clown through and through. I juggle many other balls
though: beauty, resistance, witness, and
solidarity. We must give testimony, testimony to the startling beauty and
wonder of life. I seek to be motivated by these, even when I think we are
losing, because we are always losing.
At one time I thought I had lost too
much. I went to divinity school to find
a way to save the world that might help save me. I was not looking for a life partner and I
was not looking for a career, especially as a parish minister, and later a
community minister. And then grace stepped in.
My mother always told me that the place to meet a man was in church. During Divinity school I attended the First Unitarian
Universalist Church of Nashville, not to meet anyone, but to investigate who I
was in the world. There I met Meredith, my current spouse.
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| The Reverends Beth Johnson, Meredith Garmon, and LoraKim Joyner heading off to the New York Climate March, 2014 |
Early in our relationship I helped
him move, tempting our new and fragile relationship with disaster. But then
grace stepped in. We were getting ready to lift his long, five-drawer, metal
file cabinet into a truck when we paused for him to show me all the mementos he
had taped to it over the years. That’s the first time I saw Zbigniew Herbert’s
poem, "The Envoy of Mr. Cogito".
As he read it I stared over his shoulder, and cried. He did too. We groked each other. So soon there was an engagement, and happily I
called my mother to say that her advice was correct: church IS a great place to
meet people. My mother, a lifelong Methodist replied, “But I didn’t mean that
church.” Now when I counsel people who wish to get married I don’t come right out and say that marriage
is about attaining the good we will not
attain. But it is. And it’s worked
pretty well for us.
Conservation
is like that too. Attaining the good I do
not attain, but that you, and you, and we together attain.
Maybe.
The Lives of Parrots and People - Part III
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| Traditional house in Valle, Honduras |
Today we continue our journey through the Valle Department of Southern Honduras. Last week we visited Tio's (Uncle's house) and this week we visit three other homes with parrots.The first house as two little parakeets sharing a cage (orange-fronted and orange-chinned parakeets). The owners seem proud of their birds, whom they report do not have clipped wings and eat everything that the humans do. They also never get out of their cage. I asked the husband how the birds came to be in his home, and he said he shot them down with a slingshot and gave them as presents to his wife.
Cage of mixed parakeets
The next house has two siblings that came to the home as young chicks. Their diet is more restricted: mango, rice, and corn mush. Like the previous house they do not have clipped wings and never leave their cage.
Our last house has two parrots - an endangered yellow-naped amazon and an orange-fronted parakeet. The amazon has severe feather damage brought on most likely from stress, boredom, and malnutrition, although we cannot rule out disease just by looking at the bird. This household also engages in poultry production, and I suggest to the owner that she can improve the diet of her parrots by feeding them high quality chicken concentrate feed.
Self inflicted feather damage for this yellow-naped amazon parrot
At these homes we make suggestions on improving the welfare of their parrot companions, and also deliver a conservation message.All these birds need more diversion, better food, exercise, company, better sanitation, and access to clean water. The humans who share their lives with these parrots seem open to ideas, and mostly treat their birds badly because they do not know differently.
As we drive away I think how little money and resources it would take to vastly improve the lives of the parrots here, as well as to protect them in the wild from the rampant poaching. I vow, along with my companions, to return, and do just that.
Many Needs, One Earth
There are many needs on our one earth.
We meet these needs by empowering people
who are
saving the planet.
who are
saving the planet.
Our empowering programs build knowledge,
motivation, resilience, and capacity in
people, organizations, and communities in
the US and internationally so that they can
better cherish and nurture themselves,
nature, and other beings.
motivation, resilience, and capacity in
people, organizations, and communities in
the US and internationally so that they can
better cherish and nurture themselves,
nature, and other beings.
Parrots and People of Latin America
Counting parrots in Valle, Honduras - looking towards the mangrove swamps
Today we journey to the Valle Department of Southern Honduras. We wind through sandy beaches and mangrove canals to get to where the last yellow-naped amazons are on the Pacific coast of Honduras. We have just finished two parrot counts over the last 24 hours, and on our way out we visit families with homed parrots.
Orange-fronted parakeet on floor next to stove
One of first stops is Tio's (Uncle's House). We interrupt his television soccer game, which he doesn't seem to mind as he walks us to a sparsely furnished kitchen where there are 3 parrots; 1 orange-fronted parakeet in a cage on the floor, and two yellow-naped amazons perched atop a cage. Tio tells me that they eat everything that the humans do. He can handle the larger parrots, even though they also both have unclipped wings, which seems to be true for the other parrots we visit in this region; instead parrots are kept in cages. Both of these birds, which he has had for 13 years, can fly around the house, and everyone once in a while get out. One of the amazons has a damaged foot from when he got out before and got caught in a hammock. One of the toes is frozen and necrotic. "I tried to cut the damaged toe off one day but it bled too much," Tio told me.
Tio with pair of yellow-naped amazons in kitchen
"Because his foot doesn't work too well he can't mount the female and have chicks." I look around at the environment and suspect that there are other reasons why the birds might not be reproducing, such as the pair actually being two males or two females. Most homes I visit assure me that they know the sexes of the birds; They tell me that males are supposedly larger, brighter, and more vocal.
Damaged foot with missing toe, short toe, and necrotic toe
I asked Tio why he had parrots and he says it is because of tradition, "Todos los tienen" (Everyone has them). I then asked what he liked about having birds. He paused for several seconds and then said, "My wife likes them." I ask Tio if I can give advice on caring for the birds and he agrees: we speak about diet, the dangers of keeping parrots in a kitchen, and how they need toys, cleanliness, and potable water.
Yellow-naped amazon in kitchen
After leaving Tio's home my biologist companions suggest that perhaps it is the women who drive the illegal wildlife trade here. "They want company in the kitchen. The men like to give the parrots as presents to their wives, parents, and children." There must be a lot of gifts given here because parrots are in many homes. No wonder we counted so few this morning.
Prayer for Poachers and Parrots
Prayer for Poachers and Parrots
Rev. Dr. LoraKim Joyner
(Inspired by and adapted from Bryan Stevenson,
“Just Mercy”)
When I left the base of the tree I had a wet face and a broken heart.
A man had died poaching a nest of scarlet macaw chicks. He had fallen,
killing one of the chicks he landed on, and her sibling was doomed to a life
time with clipped wings and spirit-breaking conditions.
The lack of compassion I witnessed every day had come once again like a
kick in the gut…
As I got up from the grave marker underneath the tree, I thought myself a
fool for having tried to fix situations that were so fatally broken....
I was breaking open, taking in now how my life was just full of
brokenness, as is everyone’s
I worked in a broken system of justice, where those with power merited
more fairness, freedom, and flourishing than those without.
The people I worked with were broken by malnutrition, poverty, violence,
corruption, racism, and classicism, and fatally flawed by the story that says
more for me means less for you.
They were torn apart by disease, drugs and alcohol, pride, fear, anger,
greed, and spiritual disillusionment.
The parrots I worked with were also broken; sometimes their very bones
when they were ripped from their wild nests by the poachers who will sell them,
exchanging a fist full of feathers for another of dollars.
I think of Rosa, a scarlet macaw with two broken wings and legs, suffering
when taken from her nest, nearly dead before she was one.
I think of Lole, a yellow-naped amazon parrot, a broken leg, cat
attacked, full of tapeworms, so weak, stunted, and unable to breathe I thought
she would die in my hands. She made it to one year of age, but I don’t see how
she will make it to two.
I think of Exodor, a black-hooded parakeet whose parents were killed with
their heads cut off over a toilet bowl for being carriers of Pacheco’s virus.
Exodor inherited the disease, with papillomas making his defecation difficult,
and his pain exacerbated by his constant masturbation on his food dishes, the
only parrot in his life.
I think of the poachers, broken by war, poverty, colonialism, and the
drug trade, and their children, stunted by malnutrition and stress, educated to
6th grade if lucky, raised by grandparents who did not go in search
of work in other lands, as did the parents
Entering the U.S. they are they are judged and condemned by people whose
commitment to fairness had been broken by cynicism, hopelessness, and
prejudice….
It has taken years to sort it out, but I realized something about me and
the others gathered around the cross at the bottom of the towering macaw nest
tree.
After working for more nearly 30 years in Latin American conservation, I
understood that I don’t do what I do because it’s required or necessary,
important, or will work.
I don’t do it because I have no choice.
I do what I do because I’m broken, too, because we all are, and the
system to at its very core.
Animating my body was a deeper knowing that came from my years of
struggling against animal abuse, oppression, poverty, economic inequality,
habitat loss, and a spiritual malaise in humans born of the false story that we
are separate or better than the others of different skin color, class, or
species.
Being close to suffering, death, guerilla war, executions, extinction,
and rape of earth and earth’s beings, didn’t just illuminate the brokenness of
others;
In a moment of anguish and heartbreak, it also exposed my own brokenness.
You can’t effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness,
oppression, loss of biodiversity, extinction, or injustice and not be broken by
it.
We are all broken by something.
We have all hurt someone and have been hurt.
We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not
equivalent.
I desperately wanted fairness and a chance for flourishing for poachers
and the parrots they brutalize, and the pet owners who are the end of the line
of a long chain of pain and tragedy.
I could no longer keep pretending that their struggle is disconnected
from my own, and from yours, and from all of ours.
I want the chicks of all species to grow into free flying flourishing
adults, though who knows how this is possible when others are hungry - the hawk
and the poacher takes the parrot chick to feed her own, or the pet purchaser
gets the parakeet to feed the family’s starved spirit.
The ways in which I have been hurt – and have hurt others – are different
from the ways Central Americans and middle Americans suffer and cause suffering,
and the ways predators hunt and consume prey.
But our shared pain, hunger, and brokenness connects us….
Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make.
Sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen.
And all of life is broken by rules we did not write that flow deep in our
evolutionary telos.
But our brokenness is also the source of our common connection to all of
life, to our animality, and to our humanity, the basis for our shared search
for comfort, meaning, and healing.
Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our
capacity for compassion….
Responding to the beauty that thrums through us all.
I heard of a minister that said before leading the congregation in song,
‘Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which thou has broken
may rejoice.’
Thinking of him, I see what our shared connection to all life is saying.
We all are broken, and beautiful….
Those who are part of the system that gives credence to the shameful
ideology that human worth and needs are greater than avian, and that makes it
possible to profit from birds in one way or another either as poachers, market
distributors, pet store owners, pet food makers, pet owners, aviculturists, veterinarians,
agriculturists and business people who promote sterilizing monoculture
practices, destroying the land for people and parrots.
I am them, I have broken and I have been broken.
We all are broken and beautiful….
As are the protectors, the stewards, the conservationists, animal welfare
advocates, parrot rescuers and liberators.
They too suffer the same bludgeoning blow that fractures the ties that
bind us to all life in beauty and brokenness.
Our tears beneath that tree are a cry to put down our hammers, our guns,
our credit cards, and our judgment, freeing our hands, minds, and hearts to
liberate the imprisoned, the caged, and the broken spirited.
In between the ground where bones broke and the sky from which beauty
fell, may you my dear parrots, always fly free, and you, my human companions,
let us walk together on the broken trail seeing beauty above us, below us,
behind us, before us, in us, and all around us, every step moving us ever
closer to cherishing our common animality.
Rejoice!
Healing and Nurturing Ourselves to Nurture All Life
Rev. Dr. LoraKim Joyner, Co-director of One Earth Conservation, wrote this essay in response to the First Principle Project of the Unitarian Universalist Association which asks members to vote to change their First Principle from the "inherent worth and dignity of every person" to the "inherent worth and dignity of every being." Though aimed at Unitarian Universalists, the essay's foundational ideas carry across organizational and tribal ties.
Healing and Nurturing
Ourselves to Nurture All Life
Rev. Dr. LoraKim Joyner
For
your sake, for humanity, for earth, and for individual lives and life, vote yes
to endorse the bylaw change that asks Unitarian Universalists to covenant and
to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every being. Be part of your
congregation and our Unitarian Universalist Association leading the way towards
more beauty and more flourishing by nurturing humans to nurture all of nature.
I’ve
been an avian veterinarian for 30 years and a Unitarian Universalist minister
for almost 15 years. I am driven by incredible and hopeful possibilities for
honoring and connecting to nature, including human nature, and thereby making a
more beautiful world.
To
heal our beleaguered earth and the wounds of human separation from the rest of
life requires a praxis of compassion and ethics. We must more clearly see
humans’ true relationship to life and others and more fully grasp that there is
no disjunction between human and nonhuman nature. We must embody our
interconnection through concrete relationships with discrete individuals, for
otherwise the Unitarian Universalist principle of respect for the interconnected
web of existence is merely abstract. I find affirming the inherent worth and
dignity of all beings to be an expression of this hopeful and healing praxis.
We
are called to connect to others. While we cognitively know that human health is
intertwined with the earth and all earth’s beings, our diminishingly biodiverse
and increasingly urban and technological world accentuates our impression of
separation and distance from nature. This alienation from nature is an
increasing cause of withdrawal and despair. Yet I am hopeful that a re-enchantment
with the life that surrounds us -- an opening to the beauty, worth, and dignity
in individuals – can motivate us to effect change, nourish our sense of
belonging, and deepen our connection to life. As our own agency is enhanced, we
will come to more fully apprehend the agency of individual life around us.
A
denomination that covenants to affirm and promote the inherent worth and
dignity of every being is a denomination that invites its members to creatively
re-vision the web of interconnection. That web is not a network connecting some
beings with worth and dignity (humans) with other beings that lack worth or
dignity. Rather, it is a web in which all beings are interconnected by
sharing worth and dignity; it is a web whose interconnections recognize
and reinforce each being’s worth and dignity. This re-visioning is our path
of healing. The web of beauty, worth, and health can lift us out of our
spiritual and ecological crisis, but it cannot do so if some beings in that web
are deemed without worth or dignity.
The
path of healing through re-visioning will take unexpected curves and encounter
unanticipated obstructions. As Unitarian Universalists embark together on this
path of healing ourselves so that we can heal the world, we will discover
surprising things about ourselves, our world, and place of our congregations.
Our free and responsible search for truth and meaning is ever unfolding, a way
forward together that invites us to fall in love with life over and over again.
Surprised
by love, we go through our days with wonder readily available to nourish us,
for re-enchantment and re-visioning brings an invigorating sense of wonder. It
invites us into Henry David Thoreau's "discipline of looking always at
what is to be seen." Through that discipline we encounter what Stephen Jay
Gould called the "excruciating complexity and intractability of nonhuman
bodies." Suddenly, we see the miracle of expression everywhere. What seemed
unappealing, dull, or even fearful, is revealed as magnificently present before
us. We live in a world of wondrous subjects, each being a life with an interior
experience of life. This transformation of perception of beings represents a transformation
of our selves.
Worth
seen everywhere grows compassion everywhere. With vitality and beauty seen
everywhere, wherever we go, we go not alone. Wonder replaces loneliness. Studies
indicate that wonder nourishes our lives, improving our health, spirits,
relationships, and compassion. When wallaby, walrus, whale, and worm provoke
wonder, we are nourished and better able to nourish. But when any being’s worth
is seen as merely instrumental, human lives, too, may be judged merely
instrumental. To distinguish just one
species as having worth and dignity, to set ourselves apart as unique bearers
of worth, only separates and isolates us and perpetuates the wound of
disconnection.
Accompanying
us on this visionary path we endeavor the development of a humble curiosity. Approaching
all findings as provisional, declining to obscure the wonder of the moment with
prior concepts, creative possibilities of relationship emerge. We become playful fools, in love with life
that constantly amazes and amuses. Life invites us to fun and frolic as we let
go of our idols of knowledge and control.
Our lives are not bound to others in our mind's definition of life and
worth. Rather, we are bound because all beings who have subjectivity, who
desire to endure and flourish, are bound together. All life has the capacity to
experience that which is harmful or beneficial. All life strives for further
coherence of their embodied selves. Recognizing this, we begin to live wider,
wilder, and deeper lives than human designs alone can realize.
Though
the vision of interconnecting beauty, worth, dignity, and health between
individuals does challenge us with the burden of knowing the harm humans cause
to so many, we move forward nonetheless, perhaps ever more lightly, for we walk
in beauty. As the Navajo Way Prayer suggests, beauty is all around us. This ever present beauty, that is also within
us, connects us to all others. We care for and protect them because we love
them, and we love them because we are part of them, and they are part of us. Healing comes from seeing how we are embedded
in relationships of common experience and existence with other individuals. We, the walking wounded, are healed and
healers.
We,
a people who covenant to affirm and
promote the worth and dignity of every being are a people encouraged to
cultivate patient, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman presence – a people emboldened
to live a new story of wholeness in place of the old story of conquest and
consumption. Appreciating the limits of our control and of our understanding,
we can live freely in present and persistent beauty, wonder, and awe. Every denial
of a being’s intrinsic worth and dignity cuts off life from ourselves, and cuts
off life's creative striving expressed in that being. If
we hold that some beings have worth and dignity and some beings don’t, then we
deny ourselves the journey along this spiritual path of healing and hope.
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