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  • War Is for the Birds:Birding Babylon and the "Military-Industrial-Environmental Complex"
  • Molly Wallace (bio)

Who thinks of the sooty falcon,the rustic bunting, the common babbler,the ring ouzel, & red-breasted merganser,& all the other birds of Iraq?

—Jordan Jones, "Birds of Iraq"

We're people united by our belief that we must be good stewards of our environment.

—George W. Bush, 20 October 2007

Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club, . . . and kiss my ass!

—Kurt Vonnegut, characterizing the George W. Bush administration

For the Birds?

It took Kurt Vonnegut some twenty-three years to write Slaughterhouse-Five, his account of the firebombing of Dresden, which he had witnessed firsthand. He attributed this time lag to several historical factors—his own (im)maturity the extent to which Vietnam freed him and other writers to tell the "scruffy and essentially stupid" truth—but also to the fact that this incident, like war in general, was "unspeakable" (Vonnegut 2007, 20). When he did finally turn to Dresden in the novel, he dramatized this unspeakability by giving responsibility for speech to a bird, whose query also closes the book. Commenting to his editor [End Page 126] on the disjointed form of the novel, the narrator, presumably Vonnegut's avatar, writes:

It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?"

(1991, 19)

In posing this searching if inarticulate question, Vonnegut's imagined avian highlights the absurdity and senselessness of war by envisioning it from the outside. In the still and desolate aftermath, the bird speaks of the unspeakable, saying "all there is to say," which is to say essentially nothing.1 It is as though Vonnegut inverts the question posed in the poem from which I have taken my epigraph, asking not "who thinks of the . . . birds of Iraq?" but what might they think of us? And if the bird that responds to Dresden is any indication, one can only imagine that the answer would be "not much."2

Birds, speaking or silent, have long served as figures for chronicling the destructiveness of humankind. And though Vonnegut's bird is not itself a victim, it shares a certain family resemblance with those birds used to mark the effects of massacres on the planet as well as on people. From Rachel Carson's "silent spring" to Terry Tempest Williams's "unnatural historical" account of bird life and nuclear testing in Utah, birds have offered a kind of metaphorical barometer of environmental destruction, a set of figurative and literal indicator species for novelists, nature writers, and scientists alike. And the latest war in Iraq has raised new ornithological concerns. Commenting on the threat war poses for migrating birds in South Africa, for example, Les Underhill, Professor of Avian Demography at the University of Cape Town, notes that the fragile ecosystems of the Middle East lead to a concentrating of human and bird life—"the scattered patches which are not desert represent the most productive areas, and hence become both the feeding grounds for the migrating birds and the battle grounds for the armies." And thus, though "the war in Iraq might seem a long way away for most of us in South Africa, the birds we see on our next club outing might become the victims of the habitat destruction caused by war." In the context of the then-looming U.S. intervention in Iraq, [End Page 127] he quips, "the concept of 'bushbirds' takes on a whole new meaning" (qtd. in "War in Iraq"). The implication is clear: international politics and international conservation are inextricably connected, and if environmentalists are concerned about saving birds, they ought to be concerned...

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