Opinion: Donald Trump Is (Not) For The Birds

In the last few days there has been a seismic change in the way the United States deals with climate change.

It is ignoring it.

Here is the reporting of the New York Times:

President Trump announced [Thursday] afternoon that he was officially erasing the scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten human life by warming the planet. The move largely cuts off the federal government’s legal authority to address climate change through regulation.

Following the lead of a president who refers to climate change as a “hoax,” the administration is directly challenging the overwhelming scientific consensus. Presidents of both parties have warned of the dangers of climate change for decades.

At issue is a 2009 determination called the endangerment finding, which the government has used to justify regulations on greenhouse gases. Lee Zeldin, who leads the [Environmental Protection Agency], called today’s move “the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”

The administration claimed it would save auto manufacturers and other businesses an estimated $1 trillion, although it has declined to explain how it arrived at that figure. The Environmental Defense Fund estimated the rollback could lead to as many as 58,000 premature deaths.

(Alen Hunjet, StockPhotoBoard.com)

What Trump did, according to the BBC, was revoke the Obama-era "endangerment finding" that held that pollution harms public health and the environment. For almost 17 years, the U.S. has used that scientific finding as the legal basis to establish policies to reduce emissions from cars, power plants and other sources of planet-warming gases.

"This radical rule became the legal foundation for the Green New Scam," Trump said, using a term popular with Republicans for describing Democratic environmental and climate policies.

So 58,000 early human deaths caused by an increasingly warmer planet where we've been having hotter summers, more widespread drought and more destructive hurricanes is a "green new scam." 

As an American who loves her country, I hate this radical change by a man who has no regard for anything except his own ego and making a few million bucks for his companies while in office. But as a birder, I am extremely saddened and worried about what will happen to the environment, especially the birds, now that fighting climate change is no longer an American imperative. 

As the oceans warm, the creatures that need to live in cold water have been moving north. So have the birds, whales and fish that feed on them. As icebergs melt, the oceans will continue to rise and threaten coastal communities. That includes my hometown of New York City.

Spring will come earlier. According to Roger F. Pasquier, in his book "Birds in Winter": "While short-distance migrants are leaving their wintering site sooner and returning there later, long-distance migrants, affected by day length, have not shifted their schedule as much. On arrival in spring, however, they find the season more advanced, often to the point where the food they give their young is no longer widely available. Resident birds in the same habitat have begun nesting weeks earlier, remaining in sync with the emergence of the prey they feed their young. The migrants least able to accelerate their schedule are the species most declining."

This was written in 2019.

Birds and animals that once lived in southern regions, such as the red-bellied woodpecker and the northern mockingbird, have been living in the north for years. Armadillos native to Central and South America are now moving beyond the American south, where they could be warm and find lots of insects to eat, to the warming midwest.

Says Pasquier: "The most visible impact of climate change in wintering birds has been the shift in their range. Many species of middle latitudes are migrating less far, if at all, and their range in both winter and summer has moved poleward. Ground foragers can now survive the winter in places where snow cover used to make feeding difficult. Waterbirds are not limited by areas that once froze for months of winter..."

President Trump has done many things to harm many people since he was re-elected in 2024, and he is not much better when it comes to Nature. He wants oil drilling in the arctic. He wants oil drilling off America's coasts. He tried to scuttle wind power projects. He ordered the Defense Department to use more coal-based electricity. He has ordered the Energy Department to pay coal plants to stay online. He has proposed major changes to the Endangered Species Act to eliminate many protections. Once he was re-elected he again pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Accords on climate change. (He did this during his first term, in 2017, but President Biden reinstated the U.S. in 2021.)

His way to "Make America Great Again" seems to be all about making America a sick place where businesses can operate unregulated and with impunity and Nature is a profit center, the rest of the world and all that live in it be damned. 

Even NASA, a part of the U.S. government, recognizes the seriousness of climate change.

There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Human activity is the principal cause.

Earth-orbiting satellites and new technologies have helped scientists see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate all over the world. These data, collected over many years, reveal the signs and patterns of a changing climate.

Europe has been taking climate change seriously, because it is the fastest-warming area on Earth. But the relationship between Europe and the U.S. has been changing under Trump. Besides pulling the U.S. out of the climate accord he has threatened to take the U.S. out of NATO and has been obsessed with controlling Greenland, a protectorate of NATO member Denmark.

Ironically, climate change is causing Greenland's ice sheet to melt at an accelerated rate, leading to rising sea levels and having an impact on local ecosystems and communities. The warming temperatures also threaten traditional livelihoods, particularly for the Inuit population, as fish stocks decline.

Trump does not care about any of that. He does not care about ecosystems and communities. He does not care about Inuits or fish. He claims he needs Greenland to protect the U.S. from potential threats from China and Russia. What he really wants, I believe, are the rare earth metals needed for technology, which Greenland has in abundance and the U.S. is no longer getting from China.

In a word, sad.

Dear President Biden:

Hello. Congratulations on your win. I hope you can achieve the unity you mentioned in your inaugural address. As you said, you have many crises on your plate, starting with the coronavirus and its devastating effect on the U.S. economy.

Normally I don't write letters to politicians. I am a bird watcher. But in the waning days of the Trump Administration, the outgoing president did more than pardon his cronies and others. He issued executive orders rolling back some of our long-held environmental regulations.

Mature bald eagle, threatened symbol of our land. (RE Berg-Andersson)

So now that you have issued your own executive order to get us back into the Paris climate accords, here are other Trump orders you should rescind as soon as possible.

An EPA rule that will allow major sources of hazardous air pollutants to reclassify themselves as less regulated "area sources" under the Clean Air Act, abandoning the "once-in, always-in" policy that had been in place for 25 years.

An EPA rule on greenhouse gas emission standards for airplanes that fails to adequately mitigate public health and environmental harms from such emissions, including the environmental justice impacts on residents living near airports, which disproportionately include disadvantaged minority and low-income communities.

An EPA rule maintaining the national ambient air quality standard (NAAQS) for ozone at a level that fails to protect public health and welfare based on the existing scientific evidence.

An EPA rule that will skew how the agency weighs the costs and benefits of rules under the Clean Air Act by excluding important public health benefits from the analysis while inflating the costs. In particular, the rule will cause future EPA rules to undercount the harmful effects of carbon emissions that lead to climate change and distort the value of "co-benefits," the often-substantial benefits of rules that addresses more than one pollutant.

An EPA rule weakening the Clean Air Act's new source review program for major modifications to existing major stationary sources of emissions. The rule will subject New Jersey residents to lower air quality and will make it more difficult for downwind States like New Jersey to attain or maintain federal air quality standards.

An EPA rule that unlawfully and arbitrarily limits the scientific evidence that the agency can consider when adopting rules and standards to protect human health and the environment.

A U.S. Department of Energy rule that will weaken federal energy efficiency standards for consumer appliances and industrial equipment by making it easier for manufacturers to obtain waivers from product testing requirements.

Rules from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service that will make it harder to protect endangered and threatened species by narrowly defining critical "habitat" and establishing a skewed process for excluding areas from critical habitat designations.

A rule from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that rolls back protections for migratory birds. 

These last two are the ones that most alarm me. The narrow definition of "habitat" has allowed Trump to open forests in the northwest U.S. to logging, threatening the northern spotted owl. Trump's order removing protections for migratory birds threatens, among others, the bald eagle, the symbol of this land. For this reason, 12 states filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York alleging this Trump orders violates the Endangered Species Act.

Martha, the last of the passenger pigeons (Smithsonian)

There are some people who believe what it says in the Bible, that man was given dominion over the animals, and use that as license to do what they want, including hunting some birds to extinction. Think of the birds no longer around - the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet - except in the paintings of John Jay Audubon. According to the environmental organization that took his name, over 300 birds are on the brink of extinction, as of 2019, before Trump's executive orders. This is all because of climate change, one of your many concerns. But without action, that number will surely rise.

When the coronavirus is a distant memory and people can walk outdoors unafraid and unmasked, I don't want to live in a world when I can no longer see warblers, herons, hawks or owls. Do you?

Please act now.

Thank you. 

'Interesting' Times

"May you live in interesting times."
  -- purported Chinese curse

As I write late in December 2017, the rain is falling and the temperature is expected to rise to 50 degrees. Not the type of White Christmas people in the New York area seem determined to have no matter how much trouble snow causes for travelers.

I sit on my porch, bundled against the damp coolness, trying to breathe it all in before re-entering my warmer, dryer house. Birds come to the feeder poles to find no seed outside today in the downpour, and their contact calls and the occasional cars driving by are the only sounds I hear. No leaf blowers. No lawn mowers. No shouting kids or barking dogs.

I think about this year. It started with a health crisis for me. On my birthday my main source of income dropped me and most of the rest of my co-workers. We lost two loved ones, a friend of 40 years' standing and MH's father, within three months of each other. 

Some would like to see a White Christmas. I do not. This is from several
years ago. (Margo D. Beller)

But there was also good. We got to New Hampshire to visit family more times this year, even though two of those visits were after, or because of, funerals. We celebrated our grandnephew's first birthday and learned that he will soon have a sibling. Our nieces, nephew and their spouses or boyfriend are gainfully employed, an increasing rarity for their generation.

We saw many friends including others from college days and some who have been friends since we worked together at other jobs, sometimes many other jobs. MH and I celebrated another anniversary and we explored much of the far end of Long Island.

And we saw the underpinnings of democracy be weakened by a president determined to blow up the good, rational parts of what makes our country work and replace it with lunacy - hollowing out whole departments by forcing out the knowledgeable, longtime people and not replacing them, or bringing in the type of political or religious hack (often a mega-donating billionaire) with no experience except a stated preference for closing the department he or she now runs.

We do not live in the age of statesmen, particularly in our highly partisan Congress, where working with people from the other political party is worse than a serious affront, it can lose you any power you've worked to gain through consistent re-election. Thus a tax bill that will hurt people in my home state, which already pays out more in taxes than it receives in government aid, while benefiting GOP-leaning states (and income brackets) that pay out far less and get far more in return. A tax bill that may result in my health insurance becoming too expensive for me to afford at a time when I am too young for Medicare and too old to be hired in the workplace, age discrimination laws notwithstanding.

This is more like what we expect for Christmas 2017.
It adds a bit of prettiness. (Margo D. Beller)

What do you do in such times? You hope. You hope the midterm elections bring about more people to undo the damage. (For how we got to this point, read Kurt Andersen's "Fantasyland." It explains a lot and is an easy but disturbing read.) You hope your grandnephew and the rest of his generation grow up to make the world a better place. You hope you live long enough to see it.

This doesn't have much to do with birds, does it. Well, here's something: My new year's wish is to see more birds for the first time and thus add to my life as well as my Life List.

Happy holidays.

Dust in the Wind

Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. -- Ecclesiastes 1

Nothing is permanent in this world. This is a law of nature that transcends all things, including blowhards about to become President of these United States.

In my little New Jersey town I only have to walk a few miles to what used to be the property of the state-run Greystone psychiatric hospital. I have not written much about Greystone lately because once the old Kirkbride building came down, all the protests and shouting ended. The hospital moved to state land at the western-most part of the property and the much of the rest was sold for $1 to become Central Park of Morris County.

Kirkbride, as it was. (Margo D. Beller)

MH and I took our walks, thinking it odd that there was just a lot of space at the end of the road behind a storm fence instead of the hulking, stone building, a building it took close to a year to take down because it was put up to last.

There had been plans to build housing here, doing lip service to the preservationists by promising to use part of the old building to house a mental health museum. However, the whole plan died, thankfully. It would've created too much traffic and cost to provide services in one of the few, large, open spaces in a crowded part of northern Jersey. 

The other day I drove us to the end of the road and discovered the fences were gone and big boulders or huge tree logs lined the edge to keep out ATVs. However, there were no signs saying people could not walk in there. And that is what we did.

Looking south -- The ground had been frozen but recent rain made it muddy and spongy in parts. (Margo D. Beller)

Looking north -- It is hard to believe I am standing where one of the largest, continuous foundations in the world once stood. (Margo D. Beller)

Looking west -- You can't see it well here but there is a road between the hill and the field. On the other side of the road and to the right is what is now Greystone hospital. (Margo D. Beller)

Looking east -- You can see the rocks and logs put in to keep ATVs out. Beyond is Central Ave. heading back to my town. (Margo D. Beller)

I stood on this field for a long time, even as MH went back to the car. It took a very long time to take the building down, remove the mountains of stones, fill in the former foundation, put in grass and then leave it all alone until it was deemed time to remove the fences, that the danger to people like me was past.

I stood here, thinking of the human condition. Here was this huge building, built to last as I said, and then it's gone, as if it never even happened.

Dust in the wind.

We can build our monuments to ourselves, our legacies, but when circumstances intervene - a change in presidential administration, global warming, a nuclear holocaust or just everyday dying - it all means absolutely nothing in the long run.

This field, where I look forward to hiking and looking for birds when winter is finally done, is proof of that.

You Can Go Home Again

Osprey pair, Marine Park, Brooklyn (RE Berg-Andersson)

When I was growing up along the southern coast of Brooklyn, I knew Sheepshead Bay, which gave my neighborhood its name, but did not know my junior high school was named for Shell Bank Creek, which flows to the north of Plumb Island and east into where Gerritsen and Mill creeks merge, in turn flowing into Plumb Beach Channel and on to Rockaway Inlet and, eventually, to the Atlantic Ocean.

I knew there was a neighborhood called Mill Basin and one called Gerritsen Beach and the little beach off the Belt Parkway I could walk to from my house was Plumb Beach. But the waterways for which they are named meant nothing to me. My family didn't boat and didn't fish.

When we went to Plumb Beach or occasionally Gerritsen Beach, we had to watch for trash (or worse) in the sand and in the water when we walked to the edge. We never swam and no one ever kept the fish they caught in Sheepshead Bay.

Fast-forward over 40 years. The federal government took over the waterways and beaches stretching from New Jersey's Sandy Hook through Staten Island, hooking east to Brooklyn (including the former military base, Floyd Bennett Field), Queens' Jamaica Bay and the western-most parts of the Rockaway Peninsula to create the Gateway National Recreation Area in 1972. Gateway, according to its website, is a "complex urban park, preserving 27,000 acres of land and sea across two states and three New York City boroughs."

This is when the cleanup began as well as recognition that these inlets, bays and creeks are what make this area of New York City unique. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of environmental activism, when people worried about the effects of polluted air and water on their children, their communities and themselves.

The federal government stepped in it because it was expected to -- a far cry from today when the idea of any federal government program enacted for the public good draws outcry from some areas and is considered a foreign and dangerous concept akin to socialism.

I left Brooklyn for college in the early 1970s, and did not spend much time visiting the beaches when I would return for visits. It has only been in the last 15 years, when my husband and I, while living in New Jersey, became interested in watching birds, did we start visiting some of these areas, which had become prime birding sites thanks to cleaner beaches and water.

Marine Park salt marsh (RE Berg-Andersson)

For instance, I had been reading about a Marine Park Salt Marsh area and some of the interesting birds found there, but I was having a hard time visualizing it. I knew Marine Park - I would ride there, alone, no mobile phone or pager, no child-safety helmet - on my bike, go around the paved, circular drive a few times and then either come home or visit my grandmother in nearby Flatlands. The area across the road was dark, dense with trees and covered in garbage. You didn't go in there. How could this be a salt marsh?

Well, the area was opened up and there was the marsh, where it had been all along. An educational center was built to explain the marsh's importance. Best of all, a paved path takes you along the marsh itself, which is the end of Gerritsen Creek. At one point, we could see where the end of Mill Creek starts (at the back of the Marine Park golf course on Flatbush Ave.). In the distance one way is the  Gil Hodges Bridge to the Rockaway Peninsula. The other way stands the reminder of 9/11 known variously as the Freedom Tower, One World Trade Center or That Ugly Building Over There.

Thanks to federal spending on Gateway, I have learned about the forts that defended New York harbor, seen hundreds of different types of  birds and visited an airfield that is now a wildlife habitat.

Had I been a birder as a child, I would not have seen the osprey, green herons, black-crowned night-heron, great and snowy egrets and other marsh and shore birds I witnessed at the Marine Park Salt Marsh.

Great egret and smaller snowy egrets (RE Berg-Andersson)

It's too bad my parents weren't inclined to have a boat and ply the waters so near our home to such exotically named places as Dead Horse Bay, Island Channel and the Raunt. Then again, what would I have seen in those dark, unenlightened times?

We didn't know what we had back then. We do now.

At a time when the Obama administration wants to broaden environmental protection and cut back on the forces that promote global warming, opposition in Congress and some states wants to bring things back to the way things were, when water was polluted, the air was brown and bins of coal dust were out for the garbage men to dump. (I saw these bins because coal was used to heat my public school, across the street from my home.)

Those people who think any rules that impinge on their ability to deplete the land of birds, animals and fish or pollute the air we all breathe or do whatever the hell they want without "government on our backs" don't know what we have either.

The Politics of Open Space

Friday morning I got an email from one of my neighbors.

Friends,
We’ve won the fight. Governor Christie has dedicated himself to preserving the 160+ acres of vacated property at Greystone as open space. This means that it will only be used for parks and passive recreation – no housing or commercial development!! As for the historic buildings, we do not yet know their fate. What matters is that no matter [what] happens with the buildings, the land is protected as green open space!

I have written before about the good and bad of living near 600 acres of open space. The old mental hospital was closed in 2000 by another Republican Gov. Christie - Christie Whitman - after years of bad publicity involving abuse of patients. A smaller, more modern facility was built at one end of the state property. The rest of the land, about 400 acres, was sold by the legislature for $1 to Morris County in 2001.

When my husband and I first moved to Morris Plains in 1993 I walked up Central Avenue to the steps of the old administration office, a hulking stone building whose exterior has been used in movies and on TV, including an episode of “House.”

Along Central Ave. were other hulking stone buildings where the patients had been kept. Although empty, the whole area was eerie and I quickly left. Since the county took over many of the large buildings - although not the administration building - have been pulled down. Some of the resulting space is now used for athletic fields. I walk there and it is no longer eerie and I have found a lot of interesting birds.

But after the new hospital was built a lot of that 200 acres of state-owned land was left over.

The governor in power by then, a Democrat by the name of Jon Corzine - the same man who is now in trouble for some bad bets he made on Europe that sent his company, MF Global, into bankruptcy court - thought the land should be sold for housing or commercial use. A group was set up to study the possibility.

This is when the organization created by my neighbor and a lot of others, Preserve Greystone, came into being. New Jersey is already overbuilt. Go to central NJ and count the number of farms for sale or the number of McMansion developments that sprang up on former farm land to get an idea of what could've happened to the Greystone land.

Had Corzine been successful, the little borough of Morris Plains would’ve become a very different place and a lot of us would’ve moved. While Greystone is in Parsippany, most of the traffic, already bad, would’ve been coming though my town’s streets.

But Corzine lost his re-election bid and Chris Christie, whose previous political job before becoming U.S. Attorney under George W. Bush had been on the Morris County Board of Freeholders, was elected. Preserve Greystone waited to see what the new governor would do.

With a reputation for wanting to do as much as possible to bring business to the state, even if that means weakening a lot of the laws that protect our land, water and air, no one could be sure what that would be.

I was amused by his press release, which read in part:
"My Administration is committed to implementing a plan that finally provides a responsible resolution for the future of the shuttered facilities at Greystone Park and the property they sit on. By doing so, we are fulfilling the state’s obligation to clean up this dormant site in an environmentally and fiscally sound manner."

Of course, the man was elected in January 2009 and he waited a helluva long time to decide to be the Housekeeper-in-Chief. With state funding to towns and counties cut hard by his administration it‘s a wonder he found the $27 million to do this cleanup at all.

Or is it?

As I said, I got the email Friday. That day the Star-Ledger ran an article about the Greystone plan.

On Saturday morning I went to the Post Office early and got the mail from Thursday and Friday. In it I found the mailing pictured here.

I got a sick feeling looking at these two Republicans announcing how they and others had procured Greystone’s freedom from development, and urging me and others to vote for them and other Republican candidates.

Notice there is no mention of Preserve Greystone.

Was this all a coordinated plan to help the Republicans stay in power in Morris County - as if the Democrats were putting up much of an opposition?

I have no doubt as to the sincerity of my neighbor’s bipartisan organization and its hard work in giving Christie the push he needed to finally do something.

But I don’t think it is any coincidence the Republican governor should announce this plan the same day the Republican candidates for borough council sent me a mailing proclaiming their part in it.

Politics as usual.

I got the same sick feeling in 2002 when Democrat Jim McGreevey became governor, threatening to undo the legislature‘s approval of that $1 land sale.

He said it was a giveaway to the “rich people” of Morris County and the land should be used for low-income housing. McGreevey knew that while a mainly Republican county, the towns of Morristown, Dover and others tend to vote Democrat. They are not rich towns.

But he was playing to his more solidly Democrat urban base elsewhere in the state.

It was an insult to those of us middle-class Democrats who happen to live in Morris County.

By the way, McGreevey was mayor of Woodbridge Township in Middlesex County before running for governor. Woodbridge is one of the worst examples of overbuilt suburban sprawl in the state.

Politics as usual.

Just like Corzine and his plan for commercializing the remaining state land. Just like the Republicans running for council grabbing the coattails of movements like Preserve Greystone to proclaim their part in the victory.

It’s hard not to be cynical.

At least Greystone remains open, a shelter from suburban sprawl and a buffer against the kind of build-out a lot of other towns allowed, taxing their resources and changing their character.

In this case I guess we of Morris Plains are indeed rich, and very lucky.