Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

It is a product of two interlocking realities of this new world of ours — globalization and global warming. West Nile Virus arrived in the US sometime around 1999 and spread quickly across the northeast and mid-Atlantic, then to the midwest and finally all the way to the West coast.

I was one of its victims. I came down with West Nile Virus in the summer of 2003, along with several friends and neighbors. Only later did we hear that the local health department had spotted the telltale signs in our nearby park — dead crows — but didn’t bother to alert the community. We might have taken more precautions.

Some get over it quickly. I didn’t. It would be a year-and-a-half before I felt completely well again. For months, I experienced fatigue and neck pain — and the fatigue was the last thing to let go. One old friend actually had dangerous brain-swelling, and with it extreme headaches. She also experienced nerve issues in her legs that lasted months as well.

Not a nice disease.

What brings this to mind this morning is a front page article in today’s Washington Post describing how WNV has caused the decimation of some of our most reliable bird species here in the East, including chickadees, robins, tufted titmouse, and the Eastern bluebird.

I recommend this article to you because it shows once again how easily an entire ecosystem can be effected by one microscopic critter. A virus kills millions of birds and it impacts life forms up and down the chain of life.

Here around the suburbs of Maryland during the worst years of the onslaught, we experienced 100 percent loss of crows. Annoying as they may be, they serve on invaluable service as scavengers, cleaning up dead carcasses, for one thing, and controlling bird and squirrel populations in that old predator-and-prey balance of nature. It was a very creepy thing, to have an entire species disappear.

That was in 2003-2005. It was strange and eerie — the silence of the crows, their total and utter disappearance each of those years somewhere around late August-early September.

WNV is spread by birds, a particularly ingenious and opportunistic way for a virus to fan out. This article notes the various impacts throughout the ecosystem of the loss of bird population, important education for us if we are to truly understand what it means to disrupt the healthy functioning of the biosphere.

Another article from the Science Daily reporting on this new study, speaks not only to the impact on our beloved ‘backyard birds’ because of WNV, but also to the profound impact on our own human species.

[WNV's] subsequent spread and continued transmission throughout North America have resulted in over 26,000 reported cases, 996 human deaths, and an estimated 280,000 illnesses, making it the most important mosquito-borne disease in the USA.

I had a lot of company.

Meanwhile, I love birds, have long had a feeder in the back yard and can easily spend hours watching all their wonderful crazy life. So I find it hard to absorb this:

“The extent of these declines shows how devastating introduced pathogens can be. The globalization of trade and travel that brought West Nile virus to the western hemisphere has completely altered our bird communities and may make some of our backyard birds relatively uncommon.”

This according to Dr. A. Marm Kilpatrick, one of the researchers involved in this study.

Globalization brought the disease to us, and global warming is helping to spread this and other mosquito-born diseases. One of the things that keeps health specialists awake nights is that global warming will mean more mosquitoes in many more places, places where they did not exist before. And mosquitoes famously spread some of the world’s biggest killers, like malaria and dengue fever, both poised to move into the US in the near future.

Back in the 1980s, another mosquito made its way into the mid-Atlantic by way of the Houston port and a shipment of tires from the Far East. It’s called the Asian Tiger because of its stripes, and it is a carrier of things like dengue and yellow fever.

I came down with West Nile Virus when it was in the headlines, and it was odd to be part of this big news story. But it felt terrible, cost many work hours for my little non-profit of which I was director, and put a lot of pressure on my home life with two of us ill at the same time.

Our beloved outdoors are becoming more and more threatening each summer as the Earth warms. How very, very sad, a loss I cannot possibly put into words.

[tags] West Nile Virus, globalization, global warming, mosquito-borne disease, Asian Tiger mosquito[/tags]

Photo credits:

Tufted titmouse: http://www.birding.com/topbirds/6988ttm.asp
Chickadee: National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) - NIEHS