Condors!
Miracles do occur: California Condor enjoying a fall morning in Zion National Park
Y’all. There are actual live, wild California Condors living in Zion National Park and we saw a pair. They were just chilling, enjoying the late morning air currents, soaring along with their 10 freaking feet of wingspan like it was nothing unusual. But of course, their existence, especially in the wild, is nothing short of a miracle.
In the 1980s, when their global population was down to 22 birds, the decision was made to bring them into captivity with the hope and goal of saving the entire species from extinction. I remember the news stories, the fears that it wouldn’t work to breed them in captivity, the special puppet that was built to help feed the chicks when they were born, the efforts to raise them in captivity but then release them into the wild. It was a long shot, a desperate gamble, a chance for humanity to redeem itself in some tiny way for all the havoc we have wrought upon our planet.
Somehow, it worked. There are now over 500 Condors in the world, with more than 300 living in the wild. All of this happened not just during my lifetime, but during my adulthood. It worked because people decided to work together across disciplines, to trust the science, to imagine a better future, to honor the world we live in, and take responsibility for what we nearly obliterated.
That gives me hope, hope on many levels. As we roll into the US elections this month, it gives me hope that maybe we can collect the last (metaphorically speaking) 22 GOP leaders with a modicum of integrity, and if we are careful and creative, we can rebuild their numbers. We need to nurse the GOP back to health, so that we can have rational discussions about what is best for all the people in the US and in the world. And by people, I mean all creatures, and by best I mean ensuring freedom, dignity, and opportunity for generations and centuries to come. We need to get back to a time when we had rational discussions about the tax code, the role of regulation in protecting humans and the resources that we rely on, about energy, education, healthcare and more. It’s not rational, not useful to talk about punishing political enemies, about using the US military against US citizens, about whether or not democrats can freakin’ control freakin’ hurricanes.
Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine a California Condor would one day fly close enough that I would both hear and feel the wind from its wings. In today’s political environment, it feels naive to believe that people can come together to work for something larger than ourselves. The GOP’s campaign of fear, focusing on demonizing immigrants, of people of color, and now of anyone who thinks something different from Trump, paints the picture of a world that I simply don’t want to live in. To paraphrase Tim Walz, when I look down the street, I want to see a neighbor, not a scapegoat. I want to experience love and wonder and hope, not fear and anger and resentment. When I look up, I don’t want to see US Military helicopters in my city hunting for the ‘enemy within’, I want to see California Condors, soaring on the thermals.