Bird Is the Word

Birds are awesome. They also provide a lens for understanding happiness, poverty, excess, and systems change.

Few things make me happier than a kingfisher. Photo by Boris Smokrovic on Unsplash

Several ideas have been rattling around my head for weeks. Instead of writing an explainer on each topic, today I’m going to tie them together with birds.

Bird is the Word

Birds are great. My wife Allie and I started birding when we moved to DC after two years in China. This hobby brought us so much joy that we cut the cake at our wedding to Eel’s I like birds.

I’ve long believed that birds are good for our mental health. Science is starting to understand why. According to the Washington Post, “research has consistently shown that more contact and interaction with nature are associated with better body and brain health. Birds appear to be a specific source of these healing benefits.”

Birds and birdsong connect us to nature. Participants in a study who listened to an audio clip of birdsong for six minutes felt less anxious, depressed, and paranoid as a result. And the benefits of seeing or hearing birds remain with you for hours after the encounter. So next time you’re feeling anxious or depressed, put on your headphones or step outside and listen to the birds.

After a particularly challenging bedtime with my kids, I listened to the six minutes of birdsong embedded in the Post article and felt much better as a result.

High Demand + Low Enforcement = Problem

For some people, observing birds and other wild animals in nature isn’t enough. People have been caught trying to smuggle hummingbirds onto airplanes in their underwear; at JFK, smugglers were caught with chestnut-bellied seed finches in hair curlers that were bound for the Guyanese community in Queens (apparently these birds can really sing).

These tidbits come from an amazing feature on Earth League International (ELI) by Tad Friend in the New Yorker. ELI is an anti-wildlife trafficking organization whose operations have “led to the arrest of an alleged jaguar-fang ring in Bolivia; helped the Mexican government pursue the Cartel of the Sea, a network in Baja California that trafficked sea cucumbers and totoaba; and sparked at least seven ongoing investigations by the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and the F.B.I.”

I want to unpack several parts of this piece in future posts, but my focus today are three forces that lead people to put hummingbirds in their underwear:

1. High demand for exotic animals may be baked into human nature. People want to have them as pets, hunt them, use their skins, put them in labs to use in medical experiments, or eat them for their supposed medicinal properties.

2. The global effort to combat animal trafficking isn’t taken as seriously as it should be and is therefore under-resourced . The anti-wildlife trafficking treaty, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), is toothless. It lacks an enforcement mechanism and is focused on facilitating trade. Governments spend $100 billion+ on drug trafficking and less than one billion on wildlife trafficking annually.

3. High demand for trafficked animals and a low (and decreasing) supply of them causes prices to rise. As globalization expert Nils Gilman told Friend, “Where price difference is based on differences of moral opinion, the likelihood of enduring profit margins is very high.” According to the article: a large bull elephant’s tusks can go for more than four hundred thousand dollars on the clandestine market; glass eels, used in soup and eaten broiled as unagi, can sell for twenty-seven thousand dollars a kilo in Japan; and rhino horn can be worth more than gold.

   Not surprisingly, many government officials charged with protecting wildlife are on the take from, or a part of, criminal wildlife trafficking syndicates.

To me living comfortably in Seattle, a bird in nature is something to be observed and appreciate in its natural habitat. To a person struggling to eek out a living in a developing country, that same bird could represent several months of wages to support their family. With few viable alternatives to make money and a low level of risk if you’re caught—wildlife traffickers aren’t treated as harshly as drug traffickers by the courts—people do what they must. And honestly, I can’t blame them.

Donuts (sadly not the kind you eat)

So how is it that two people can see the same bird from radically different perspectives? The most helpful and flexible framework I’ve come across is Kate Raworth’s donut. Picture a donut. The part you eat is the happy place (duh). Outside the donut is where people like me live a life that takes more resources from the planet than it could provide for 10 billion people (i.e. outside planetary boundaries). People inside the donut hole lack a stable foundation to build their lives on.

From the Donut Economics Action Lab and available here

To someone inside the donut hole trying to meet their basic needs, the bird is still beautiful, but it also represents a near-term economic value they need. That’s tragic. It’s equally tragic that the beauty of a bird isn’t enough for some living outside the donut. Their need to own, eat, wear, test, or exploit these animals pushes us further outside out ecological ceiling and creates the conditions and demand for poaching.

Thankfully, those of us who live beyond the ecological ceiling can do things to help bring our world into balance. There are leverage points we can push to nudge the system in a better direction. A huge leverage point is the goal of the system—the thing that, left to its own devices, the system will try to achieve.

The goal of our economic system today is growth. More GDP, more better. But it doesn’t have to be this way; in fact, it can’t be this way if we’re ever going to get everyone inside the donut.

New System Goals: Happiness and Opportunity

To get our world operating in the green, safe and just space for humanity, part of the donut, we’ll need to change the goal of the system to prioritize something other than economic growth—especially in places where we live well outside planetary boundaries. No one needs to be eat glass eels that sell for $27K/kg to be happy.

On a personal level, I think that we can do a few things:

1. Decide what “enough” money and consumption is for you and consciously pursue goals that take you off of the more-is-always-better-treadmill and towards a goal set based on mastery, autonomy, and purpose once you reach that level.

2. Talk to others about how you’re trying to set goals and live values that don’t reflect the more-is-better mindset. Not in a self-righteous or judgmental way that evokes shame, but rather from a place of empathy and helpfulness.

3. Learn about different approaches. I like is EF Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, which calls for an end of excessive consumption and a rethinking of what good work looks like.

4. Get smart about larger structural examples of places—countries, companies, etc.—that are role modeling an alternative approach.

One such example is Bhutan. Since 2008, Bhutan has measured and tracked a Gross National Happiness Index (GNH) next to GDP:

A key difference between Gross National Happiness and GDP is that Gross National Happiness has a maximum value (1, which is reached when all citizens have achieved sufficiency in at least six of the nine domains), whereas GDP can grow without limit. Once all citizens pass the income sufficiency threshold (which was set at 1.5 times the national poverty line), additional income does not raise Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index, and resources would be better used to invest in other domains rather than continuing to raise income. In theory, this has deep implications for development policy: programs designed to maximize Gross National Happiness will prioritize equitable pursuit of universal basic needs over growth in material consumption. 

Reducing poverty increases GNH. No one is happy as a subsistence farmer struggling to get by. What’s so brilliant about GNH is that it caps the value of increased income at 1.5 times the poverty line. Once folks have 50% more than enough, the government doesn’t recognize an increase in happiness if people move to having 200% more than enough. This changes the goals and incentives of the government and the system.

But how can we make progress on a goal as challenging as poverty alleviation? Brilliant, capable people are distributed evenly across the globe; the scarce commodity is opportunity. People don’t need solutions given to them; they need to space and time create solutions for themselves and their communities. Here are four of the barriers that I think need to be overcome.

1. Access to stable housing - without access to housing, everything else falls apart. If you spend all of your free time and energy looking for a place to live, you don’t have the energy to focus on a longer time horizon. Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, which follows eight families in Milwaukee, is a must-read. While its set in the US, the general principal that uncertain housing results in a shaky future seems universal to me.

2. Property Rights - if you can’t prove that you own your home, you’re beholden to the whims of potentially petty or corrupt government officials. This is especially try for people who move from the countryside into slums outside urban centers. I like Hernando De Soto’s The Mystery of Capital on this topic.

3. Support would-be entrepreneurs focused on nonconsumers. These types of businesses take complicated and expensive products and reimagine them as simpler and more affordable options for people too poor to be considered customers by traditional businesses. For example, Mo Ibrahim created a wireless telecomm company called Celtel in Africa in 1998 when less than 5% of people had access to cell phones. It turns out that poor people wanted mobile phones (obvi); by 2005 the business was worth $3 billion. Today its worth $55 Billion and employees tens of thousands of people. To learn more read The Prosperity Paradox or check out the Christensen Institute.

4. Access to capital - without capital, people can’t start businesses. This is the insight behind the rise of microfinance institutions like the Grameen Bank.

I believe that if the people trapping those birds lived within the donut and had access to the things above, they wouldn’t need to hunt birds. Instead, they’d be able to appreciate the birds for their intrinsic beauty just like I do. They’d have the agency needed to control their own destinies.

Putting it All Together

Striving for all of us to live happy, productive lives within the bounds of the donut is a goal worth pursuing. I believe that we aren’t going to get there unless we start from a place of balance in our own lives.

We need to recognize that the happiness we derive from more stuff is the ephemeral, happy-like-a-kid-with-a-donut kind. Deep and lasting happiness comes from contributing to something larger and more important that ourselves, learning a new skill, or gaining mastery at a craft we’ve been honing.

Birding hits all three of these for me: it remind me that I’m a small part of our physical world; it’s a skill that makes me more present and aware; and there’s a certain joy to seeing a flash of color and intuiting that it’s a warbler

Writing hits all three for me as well. Hearing from readers that something I’ve written spoke to them or moved them is such a rush; seeing how much better this piece is that my first one shows that I’m getting better; and knowing that I have a long way to go before I fully find my voice or hone my style keeps me energized.

The truth is that the biggest leverage point is us, working together to envision and bring about a new and better way of living.

What’s your bright spot? How will you try to live within the donut? What can you offer today (knowing — and celebrating — that this will change as you do)?