Binocular Vision: The Politics of Representation in Birdwatching Field Guides

Chapter 5. Birding on Toxic Land

| 125 | chapter FIVE v Birding on Toxic Land Some of the natural areas where birders watch birds are toxic. The competitive birding event called the World Series of Birding, North America’s most publicized big-day birding event, takes place in New Jersey, the state with the highest density and number of EPA Superfund sites in the nation (Environmental Protection Agency 2007a, 2007c). Anothercompetitiveformofbirding,knownasbig-yearbirding,regularly involves participants looking for rare birds at active trash dumps such as the Brownsville dump in south Texas (Kaufman 2000, 94–104; Obmascik 2004, 120–23) and reclaimed dumps such as the Montlake Landfill in Seattle. Similarly, birders involved in the practice known as listing sometimes look for birds at sewage treatment facilities, many of which process toxic sludge into fertilizer. The environment and science journalist Jeff Tollefson reports that “some 60% of the residual sludges from the process—several million dry tonnes annually—are now used as fertilizers rather than being buried or incinerated” (Tollefson 2008, par. 7). In this chapter, I supplement the previous discussions of field guides and birdwatching to attend to representations of the more task-oriented and sometimes competitive bird-identification activities of birding. Studies of other organized outdoor pastimes have shown that daily practices are embedded with political and environmental perspectives. Iain 126 | CHAPTER FIVE Borden has argued, for instance, that skateboarding is not just a hobby but a set of practices that redefine aspects of urban and suburban environments (2001). In a study of parkour, in which participants interact acrobatically with such things as stairwells, rooftops, and parking structures , Michael Atkinson describes practitioners as having aesthetic and spiritual commitments while “challenging dominant social constructions of [the] urban environment” (Atkinson 2009, 179). For Atkinson, parkour is not just a gymnastic overtaking of urban spaces; it is an anarchoenvironmentalist practice that challenges fundamental relationships between the body, mind, city, and “nature” (170–71). Birding is much less radical. In particular, the practice of birding in toxic locations creates a text that can be read as environmentally conservative given the ways it validates ongoing and entrenched forms of environmental degradation. When birders frequent the sites I discuss, they create readable texts of their practices that enact a rhetorical inversion what Kevin DeLuca has called an image event. For DeLuca, “tactical image events” are vivid scenes of ideological conflict, protest, and confrontation , and they have been used by environmental activists to dislodge dominant environmental ideologies in the public sphere (DeLuca 1999, 2–22). DeLuca writes that “radical environmental groups are using image events to attempt both to deconstruct and articulate identities, ideologies, consciousness, communities, publics, and cultures in our modern industrial civilization” (17). By birding at toxic sites, particularly in widely publicized birding competitions, the practices of competitive birders sanction mainstream environmental ideologies. The presence of birders at such sites creates a sense that far from having no human utility, polluted environments provide a service to niche groups of environmental enthusiasts. Through these practices, I argue, a subset of the larger birdwatching community creates a risky sense that environmental toxins have become harmlessly integrated into what are imagined as thriving industrial ecosystems. Even while some competitive birders take advantage of toxic sites, competitive birding gets billed as environmentalist. Birding is like birdwatching in having benefited historically from conservationist policies, habitat protection, and environmentalism more broadly. For instance, federal legislation to protect birds such as the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and the Endangered Species Act of 19731 have limited overhunt- | 127 Birding on Toxic Land ing and human impact to several endangered bird species. The establishment of wildlife refuges and bird sanctuaries has helped sustain breeding bird populations in particular (Philippon 2004, 72–105). Radical environmental groups such as Earth First! have used direct action to produce image events (DeLuca 1999, 104, 159) meant to intervene in the logging of old-growth forests and thus help preserve such threatened species as the Spotted Owl (Moore 1993). Although these forms of environmental action have helped protect birds, thus benefiting birders, carefree birding at toxic sites makes the pressing environmental problem of toxic pollution seem benign. Some competitive birding events do raise funds for environmental advocacy groups and many birders never visit toxic locales, but constructing birding at toxic sites as part of conservationism or environmentalism overlooks the anti–image event the practice creates. Phaedra Pezzullo, in her book Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice (2007...