After a seven-year hiatus—birds aren’t the only things that fly!—I’m back on my Birdathon team. We’re heading out mid-May to count as many birds as we can in one day. That’s species. Not just birds. Bushtits come in a twenty-four pack but you only get to count them once.

Birdathon is the main annual fundraiser for the Portland Bird Alliance, formerly Portland Audubon Society. I was concerned when I heard we were evicting the proper gentleman Mr. Audubon from our society but he was posthumously revealed to be morally bereft, and we don’t want him stanking up our bird group anymore. I like the sound of that “Alliance” though. It sounds fierce. We need fierce. We’ve got lots to defend.

Shoot. This gorgeous land we’re gutting? I don’t have exact numbers, but I believe we’re down to the last twenty or thirty ancient trees now, after our forebears systematically mowed down 96% of all the forest we had. Some of that was re-seeded like a monoculture wheat crop but the result might as well be tall, dull wheat. Big stands of same-age tree facsimiles with all the vigor, fungal life, rich soil, and complex arboreal communication stripped away, more and more with each harvest, until we are left with barren imitation forests all over—better than nothing, but we are so much poorer for it.

That’s if we value valuable things, instead of money. That’s if we appreciate the insane genius of the natural world and also understand that we have made a very bad deal every time we traded it for somebody else’s profit.

And just about when there was at least some hope that people were waking up to the need to institute sustainable practices or, at the least, not totally fuck over everything until we know what we’re doing, along comes the wrecking crew.

Gosh! Apparently we haven’t scraped enough trees off the land! Apparently we haven’t built enough data centers on wetlands! Coal, for heaven’s sake! We are now prying open coal’s casket. We are plunging a syringe of adrenaline in Coal’s dead heart. Somebody important still wants her ass.

You can tell what we’ve lost, or stand to gain, by the birds. We’re losing them too. Heck, we’re losing microbial life, life in general, everything that actually enriches all of us, but we might as well simply attend to the birds: they’re fun to watch. And if it’s bad for birds, it’s bad for everything.

Which means anything we do that’s good for birds is good for everything. This cannot be said about billionaires. They have no intrinsic value, except to their ex-wives.

So I’m back on a Birdathon team to raise money for the Portland Bird Alliance, which advocates for birds and other wildlife through conservation, rehabilitation, habitat protection, and education. They are dedicated to introducing people, all kinds of people, to the wonder of life. To that end, if it matters to you, they explicitly trumpet their devotion to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—words that should never have become forbidden.

There are so many ways we can all help. Pick one, volunteer, chip in, matter.

If you would like to contribute to my Birdathon team, for instance, here’s a handy link.