BIRDING TO CHANGE THE WORLD

A human rights journalist embraces environmental justice.

O’Kane had been an investigative human rights journalist, hate crimes researcher, and writing teacher in a women’s prison before she moved to New Orleans in July 2005 to teach. A month later, Hurricane Katrina destroyed her house. As she witnessed her possessions drowned in the floodwaters, she realized “how much harm I had done just by the way I lived,” and she vowed to live differently. In her engaging debut memoir, O’Kane recounts her transformation into an avid bird watcher and environmental activist. She has devoted thousands of hours to watching birds, “filled thirty-three field notebooks with scribblings on their doings and dramas, helped raise baby chickadees, bluebirds, wrens, and swallows in tiny birdhouses, volunteered in a baby bird nursery at a wildlife rehabilitation hospital, and taught hundreds of college students and children about them at two major universities.” The first was the University of Wisconsin, where the author enrolled in graduate school. A class in ornithology set her on an unexpected path to closely observe the 141 bird species that inhabited Madison’s Warner Park, across from her house. When she became aware of plans to dramatically change the park, she marshaled community support, which evolved into Wild Warner, a neighborhood environmental defense group. As part of her graduate studies, she started a program pairing local schoolchildren with undergraduate students who served as birding mentors, a program she established again when she took a position at the University of Vermont. Her students, she proudly reports, are working nationwide “as teachers, environmental educators, urban planners, land stewards, lawyers, journalists, researchers, and environmental activists. They are scientists, nature center directors, and school garden coordinators.” Birds, she attests, “forged a new neural pathway in my brain, a joyful pathway” and a deep connection to community.

A delightful homage to birds and nature in general.