Leading scientist sees widespread public awareness but not nearly enough progress on conservation
First in a series
The world sat up and took note when a team of scientists announced five years ago this week that nearly a third of North America’s bird population had vanished over the past 50 years. No research of its kind in decades drew as much news coverage, debate and public clamor.
It was a rare moment of opportunity for protecting birds. The scientists from seven nonprofits and government agencies that assembled this research hoped it would ignite a response that might help the breathtaking losses. Starting today and continuing in a series of posts in coming months, we’ll dig the impact of the Three Billion Bird project and what might be ahead during a time of advances in the science and technology of bird research and conservation.
Today’s post features an interview with Peter Marra, a member of that Three Billion Bird team and one of the nation’s leaders in avian research. Marra is the Dean of Georgetown University’s Earth Commons Institute for the Environment and Sustainability, a relatively new university initiative, and the former head of the Smithsonian’s Migratory Bird Center in Washington, D.C.
This series is part of our library of coverage of the Three Billion Bird research on Flying Lessons (listed below) that includes our book, “A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save our Vanishing Birds.” The book, published last year by Simon & Schuster, explores the work across the hemisphere to save birds, including how the Three Billion Bird research came to be.
Marra is a brilliant scientist who speaks his mind on successes and failings in the world of birds. This conversation, which happened to fall on the exact five-year anniversary of the release of the report in the journal Science on Sept. 19, 2019, is edited for space and clarity.
What do you think the impact of the Three Billion Bird research has been five years after its publication? Has it achieved what you hoped it would?
Pete Marra: I think I’d put it in this context of the major environmental things that have happened in the past that have really had important impact, of acts that have jumpstarted environmental movements. One of the biggest there ever was, in my opinion, was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which you know was transformative. Transformative almost doesn’t do the word justice, in terms of kicking environmental protection into the gear.
The reason I wanted this research was because it felt like we needed a high-profile paper that would try to jumpstart again the conservation movement in terms of birds. Over these five years, the study has been cited almost 2000 times, which is a lot for an environmental paper.
But has it been as impactful as it could? I don’t think so. It certainly hasn’t created any new agencies or an environmental movement. To me it’s been our chance to reimagine bird conservation, which is how I’ve been pitching it, in terms of how we’re protecting birds. And I honestly can’t say that we’re doing any more, from a conservation perspective, that’s getting us to a better place and that we’re not going to be at another 5 billion fewer birds 20 years from now.
So in terms of translating this work into concrete conservation, it hasn’t met your expectation?
Pete Marra: No, it hasn’t at all. And I feel like there’s been pushback from federal agencies. We couldn’t even get Recovering America’s Wildlife Act passed {called RAWA, major environmental legislation that’s currently stalled in Congress}. I mean, we couldn’t even get RAWA passed.
And I’m not sure this is the right analogy, but we’re just barely keeping this car moving. We’re out there with our hands, you know, taking pennies and nickels and dimes. Whereas you know, there’s certain groups out there, game species are still dominant. I mean, the amount of money that goes towards game species in the United States is absurd.
And we’re protecting species like Pronghorn and Elk and certain species of ducks for hunting and forgetting about all these other species that are just as integral to our persistence, not just our enjoyment, but our persistence on the planet. We’re not funding them the way they need. We’re not protecting them like we need to protect them.
When you think about what else might need to happen, it there anything you can see that could, to use your analogy, rev this car up?
Pete Marra: We need some big funding to focus on these species that we’re losing right before our very eyes. These 112 “tipping point” species. [A key part of bird conservation focus has been these imperiled species identified in danger of losing another half their population in the next half century]. We need our federal agencies to start to do important conservation science. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is not doing the work that needs to be done.
One of the reasons the Three Billion Bird report resonated with the public was because of the specifics – 2.9 billion birds lost over 50 years. Do you think there should be another round of research like this every five years or every 10 years to track what’s happening to these species?
Pete Marra: The reason this research hit home was because of the level of detail and the numbers, but it was also because we got it in Science [the leading scientific journal]. And it was the 2.9 billion loss. I mean that was a number that resonated with people, right? There’s a group starting work on doing a re-analysis [of the Three Billion Bird report}. We’re thinking about a re-analysis. The first meeting is like tomorrow. We’re still just talking about what it could be.
I think the next topic, if I were to make the call, I think the next interesting thing would be to explain time to extinction. What is the time until these species are extinct. I just think that’s such a powerful thing.
Here’s a link to our full library of posts on the five-year anniversary of the Three Billion Bird discovery and what leading players have to say about what’s being done — and what isn’t — to respond to these profound shifts in populations.
Where do you think the public is when it comes to birds? We saw this big rise in interest during the pandemic, which seems to have stuck to some extent, based on the numbers of people who say they’re interested in birds and birdwatching. Where do you think the public is on the whole issue?
Pete Marra: It’s hard for me to measure. But I’m encouraged by the number of people that are using Merlin [the popular Cornell Lab of Ornithology app that identifies birds in real time by their songs.]. I don’t think a day goes by where somebody doesn’t say, you know, I have this thing on my phone and you turn this on and all of a sudden I can figure out what this bird is. That is so fantastic to me.
People who don’t normally engage in nature or in science can all of a sudden engage and identify birds. And the pure joy that they get when they can identify a bird, identify something that clicks so many important sensors in people’s heads. In my mind it’s building that connection back to nature. It’s almost like they can pick up a guitar and start playing it without practicing, right? Something I dream about. All of a sudden they can pick up this phone. And they can identify a bird. It’s magical.
And I’m amazed at how much the public knows about the [Three Billion Bird] paper. It’s really awesome. But I don’t think the public knows what they can do. We try to tell them all the time: The seven simple actions — keep your cat indoors and things like that. But I don’t know if there’s fewer people letting their cats outdoors. I don’t know if there’s more people putting decals on their windows. I don’t know if there’s fewer people or more people that vote with the environment in mind.
As a dean at Georgetown University, you’re surrounded by students, and you’re getting a sense, I assume, of what level of interest they’re bringing to these questions. How much is the next generation interested in questions of birds and wildlife?
Pete Marra: I do see a lot of people interested in birds. I think there’s a lot of people interested in environmental issues. The reason I do what I do now is because I think this is the best thing that I can do: To say that birds are [the symbol] of environmental destruction. So I’m putting out thousands of students a year that have a different pair of contact lenses that allow them to focus on the environment and not just focus on getting a job and making a profit. But whatever they’re doing for their career, it could be environmental, could be business, it could be law, but they can focus those contact lenses on to an environmental issue, and that will always be the lens they look through, right?
So that to me is sort of, you know, repairing the earth. So it may not just be birds. I can make them appreciate birds. But I can also make them see why clean water matters, why food security matters, why environmental justice matters, why energy transitions matter, why the climate change crisis is an existential threat. These are all things that will save birds. And these repairs are not easy. There’s no easy fix.
What’s your view of what the problem is with our federal agencies and our state agencies? What’s going on that’s preventing them from rising to the occasion of what ought to be a moment of action?
Pete Marra: I don’t know exactly. I’m guessing that at the state agency level, a lot of the problem is funding. And it’s a lack of recognition of the importance of environmental efforts at the state level. Some of them will rise to the occasion with climate change, as they should.
But biodiversity is not something that hits your pocketbook. And you know we have elected officials that are in these positions who are making the decisions on the funding and elected officials are not, for the most part, prioritizing how we protect biodiversity. And in our generations in their lifetimes, it doesn’t seem to matter to them.
At the end of the day, our federal agencies like U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, right now my understanding is they’re just so bogged down with permitting and regulations, they’re not working on fish and wildlife anymore. I think there are some folks out there doing the incredibly important work all over the country. But when I talk to people on the ground with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, what I hear is frustration, what I hear is that they feel disenfranchised with the higher levels of the organization.
And for the most part, people don’t have a connection to nature. They don’t have what we call ecological belonging. If you don’t understand your own connection to nature, why would you value it? If you don’t really understand science, why would you value it? And we’ve got our educational systems. We’ve generally done a really poor job of teaching people about the importance of the environment, the importance of science, and we’re just seeing the symptoms.
One of the major things that came out of the Three Billion Bird work was Road to Recovery, the research initiative you’re helping to lead to zero in on the most threatened bird species. How is that going? Are you getting the funding you need? Are the findings what you’re hoping for?
Pete Marra: I feel like we are doing some really awesome work. A lot of people across the United States, Canada and Latin America and the Caribbean are really passionate and excited about the Road to Recovery. So I feel like we’re actually having a pretty interesting reach. We have a lot of webinars, and we’re bringing information together.
And what we’re doing is researching these 112 [tipping point] species, really organizing and supporting the working groups of people, the scientists. The funding has been hard to come by. We’ve been funded primarily by one foundation, a little bit from a second. But we need a lot more money. And that’s where it’s been a little bit of a challenge.
And how many species are you working on now? Last time we spoke, it was the first small group of these tipping point species.
Pete Marra: We’ve gotten funding for a group of 4 species, but there are 112 tipping point species that we categorize as red, orange or yellow — red being the most concern. There are teams of people working on each of these. The work that needs to be done to is to identify the causes of the declines, how do we stop the declines?
Question: One last question, which is how do you make the argument in a time when so much is going on in this world, from war to terrorism to elections that take all our attention. Why should birds be a higher priority than they seem to be?
Pete Marra: Birds are the canaries in the coal mine. I don’t think that they should be a higher priority than a than a Gopher tortoise or sea turtles, but I think all these things should be high priorities. If we can demonstrate that they are in trouble, they need to be high priorities. I think as a nation, people need to be devoting much more attention to their environment that they are part of.
That means protecting the species that we share the planet with. I’m not ready to triage, even though I talk to people that talk about it all the time. I think it’s almost like it’s out of exhaustion. They’re ready to give up. I’m not ready to give up.
By triage you mean let’s just focus on a small number of the most imperiled and give up on the rest.
Pete Marra: Yeah, exactly — that we’re not going to be able to save everything. That sends shivers down my spine. I want to walk away when I hear that comment. And I hear it. It’s just crazy to me. It’s like, let’s just keep driving these cars and screw the next generation. And let’s just keep burning fossil fuels. Screw the next generation.
No, why shouldn’t the next generation have the same rights we had? The next generation has rights to enjoy, you know, a Black Rail or a Sea Turtle or a Blue Whale. I mean, these things are priceless. Every one of these species is priceless. It’s like that old comparison. I love bringing it up. Every one of these species is like a piece of art that cannot be replaced. It’s like a Mona Lisa or a Homer or a Van Gogh. Why would we give that up?
Three Billion Bird coverage
Notes: This post is the first in a series of interviewers with key players in the Three Billion Bird research. Watch for future posts in the coming weeks. And here are links to some of Flying Lessons’ pieces on this landmark study that has helped lift the veil on what’s happening with bird populations. Here’s an explainer published when the study was first released. Here’s an essay calling for more aggressive leadership in the push for bird conservation. Here’s a section of our website on how anyone can help protect birds in large and small ways. And here’s a look at how the lockdown during the pandemics seemed to have helped birds when so many people withdrew from their habitats.
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