headlined environmental story of the century. This was a lead with real players: the Nature Conservancy, the Department of the Interior, the state of Arkansas, and the prestigious Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Several rich tycoons had been smuggled in to see it. Private jets, my friend told me, were clandestinely dipping in and out of the Arkansas bayou on a regular basis. The bird had its own Secret Service–style moniker: “Elvis.” The president of Citibank as well as the President of the United States had been briefed. Arrangements were under way to have Laura Bush make the announcement at the ranch. Oh, man. I would do this. I was pumped.
The next day, April 29, 2005, the story leaked and blazed across the front pages of 459 newspapers. EXTINCT? AFTER 60 YEARS, WOODPECKER BEGS TO DIFFER declared the
Washington Post
. The head of the Nature Conservancy intoned, “This bird has materialized miraculously out of the past but is also a symbol of the future.” The eminent director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, in an ironical choice of metaphor, said, “This is dead solid confirmed.”
II. Resurrection Accomplished
I awoke that morning to a National Public Radio reporter tromping through the bayous of Arkansas. “These swamps are like flooded cathedrals with thousand-year cypress trees rising like columns out of the water,” said Christopher Joyce. I am always riveted by those radio pieces that take you to some exotic location—the crunching of the sticks, the trickling of the water—and create the place on the soundstage of your head lying on a pillow. In this case, though, I enjoyed it while simultaneously feeling like Wile E. Coyote after a misfired boulder lands on his chest.
Knowing that Christopher Joyce had probably received the same phone call I got drove me to manically consume these accounts as they broke in magazines, radio, television, and websites. I knew the punch line already and I knew that it had all been orchestrated. I knew the main characters and that they had been prepped. I knew the background. I had done the homework. Once I quickly worked through the usual Kübler-Ross stages of reporter despair—denial, anger, jealousy, I hate everybody—I watched something I had never seen before.
I observed a massive new truth stand up in American culture. Right away, the ivory-bill came to represent issues much bigger than a single bird. The Lord God Bird signaled to America that maybe all that news of environmental destruction was overstated. The Bush administration seized upon this story—and the Department of the Interior’s Secretary Gale Norton took command of it—for precisely this reason.
It wasn’t quite as if Galileo had called a press conference to announce that the earth revolved around the sun or as if Darwin summoned the scriveners of Grub Street to explain for the first time how changes in species can occur through natural selection. But it was a small-picture version of something like that, where a brand-new understanding totally at odds with accepted opinion becomes fact in one fell swoop.
The story of the ivory-billed woodpecker is a case study of how professionals in our time can deploy new tools and media to proclaim a new truth. But it is also about how outsiders, many of them amateurs, can swarm this new fact with questions and contradictions to uncover an even more intriguing reality. An absolutely opposing reality. The story of the ivory-billed woodpecker is a tale of professionals erecting a citadel of expert opinion around a new truth, with a sequel about a messy band of amateurs assaulting that fortress and tearing it brick by brick to the ground.
All fortresses get declared by a flag, and the ivory-bill was no different. That press conference on a bright spring day in Washington, DC, was magnificent in an Andrew Lloyd Webber way, an impressive display of contemporary institutional theater. The Department of Agriculture was there. The Cornell Lab of
The next day, April 29, 2005, the story leaked and blazed across the front pages of 459 newspapers. EXTINCT? AFTER 60 YEARS, WOODPECKER BEGS TO DIFFER declared the
Washington Post
. The head of the Nature Conservancy intoned, “This bird has materialized miraculously out of the past but is also a symbol of the future.” The eminent director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, in an ironical choice of metaphor, said, “This is dead solid confirmed.”
II. Resurrection Accomplished
I awoke that morning to a National Public Radio reporter tromping through the bayous of Arkansas. “These swamps are like flooded cathedrals with thousand-year cypress trees rising like columns out of the water,” said Christopher Joyce. I am always riveted by those radio pieces that take you to some exotic location—the crunching of the sticks, the trickling of the water—and create the place on the soundstage of your head lying on a pillow. In this case, though, I enjoyed it while simultaneously feeling like Wile E. Coyote after a misfired boulder lands on his chest.
Knowing that Christopher Joyce had probably received the same phone call I got drove me to manically consume these accounts as they broke in magazines, radio, television, and websites. I knew the punch line already and I knew that it had all been orchestrated. I knew the main characters and that they had been prepped. I knew the background. I had done the homework. Once I quickly worked through the usual Kübler-Ross stages of reporter despair—denial, anger, jealousy, I hate everybody—I watched something I had never seen before.
I observed a massive new truth stand up in American culture. Right away, the ivory-bill came to represent issues much bigger than a single bird. The Lord God Bird signaled to America that maybe all that news of environmental destruction was overstated. The Bush administration seized upon this story—and the Department of the Interior’s Secretary Gale Norton took command of it—for precisely this reason.
It wasn’t quite as if Galileo had called a press conference to announce that the earth revolved around the sun or as if Darwin summoned the scriveners of Grub Street to explain for the first time how changes in species can occur through natural selection. But it was a small-picture version of something like that, where a brand-new understanding totally at odds with accepted opinion becomes fact in one fell swoop.
The story of the ivory-billed woodpecker is a case study of how professionals in our time can deploy new tools and media to proclaim a new truth. But it is also about how outsiders, many of them amateurs, can swarm this new fact with questions and contradictions to uncover an even more intriguing reality. An absolutely opposing reality. The story of the ivory-billed woodpecker is a tale of professionals erecting a citadel of expert opinion around a new truth, with a sequel about a messy band of amateurs assaulting that fortress and tearing it brick by brick to the ground.
All fortresses get declared by a flag, and the ivory-bill was no different. That press conference on a bright spring day in Washington, DC, was magnificent in an Andrew Lloyd Webber way, an impressive display of contemporary institutional theater. The Department of Agriculture was there. The Cornell Lab of
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