Solid New Intro

If my last album MB-LP was an album as a writing project, trying to think myself into the heads of people who saw the world very differently from me, then my next album Extinct! is an album as a research project. An omnivorous, note-taking binge on the way different academic disciplines deal with environmentalism and the way we think about the impact humans are having.

I started with a question my brother made fun of me for even asking: “why is extinction a bad thing? Why is biodiversity good?” Intuitively, it seems obvious, but I didn't feel like I could explain it to people with evidence, off the top of my head. I felt some urgency to be able to do that, especially because I'd taken a few classes in Environmental History while studying at McGill University, and that wasn't that long ago.

Fun fact: I'm writing this while on tour, on a bus rolling through Penetanguishene, ON. That's where, in 1904, someone saw the very last passenger pigeon in the wild. Passenger pigeons, along with the bison, are a classic example of how the mighty can fall. They were, for a time, the most common bird in the world—ten billion, maybe, in their North American Habitat—and now there are none. A little longer and sleeker than the rock doves that are our common pigeons today, they got together in flocks of staggering numbers. A continuous sky-river of birds a mile wide could take three days and nights to pass over. To exist in such close quarters and large numbers, they basically acted as automatons: throw a rock at the birds flying over, and they would swerve to avoid it, but for the next three days the birds following would mindlessly deviate in the same way.

So is it a bad thing there are no Passenger Pigeons anymore? If you're a passenger pigeon, then unquestionably. If you're a human, it gets more complicated. The birds had been around in modest numbers since the Pleistocene, that is, thousands of years, before exploding into the most numerous birds on earth. Their biggest competition for food and habitat was humans. They fed on the same tree products, seeds, and nuts as the indigenous people of North America did, and flocked together to communicate where this irregularly occurring food could be found. Finding this food required large, unbroken areas of forest which were surprisingly hard to come by in pre-Colombian North America, since native people were constantly burning the forests to create lots of boundaries between ecosystems where a variety of types of food can be found.

The arrival of Europeans changed the balance between humans and pigeons drastically. The diseases that spread across North American trade routes travelled faster than the newcomers themselves, killing a huge number of natives and removing the passenger pigeon's largest competitor for food and habitat. The forests, left unchecked, grew into huge expanses across which larger flocks of passenger pigeons could range. Their numbers exploded, and European settlers regarded them as both a nuisance (the Jesuits in New France got the pope to excommunicate the birds from the Catholic Church because of the damage they caused to crops) and a boon (pigeon meat was a major source of food and the original ingredient in Quebec's national dish, tourtière), but the birds were always recognized as a force to be reckoned with.

The rise of the passenger pigeon is a classic example of what ecologists call a “weed species”, an organism that takes a niche and runs with it in a short period of time. That should sound familiar. Humans are the ultimate weed species, and the speed at which European settlement in North America began to put pressure on the newly abundant passenger pigeon again, after the demographic collapse of the natives gave them a niche, is what doomed the bird to extinction. The passenger pigeon's extreme social/behavioral adaptation was necessary, since they lived in such dense flocks that absolute conformity was the only way to function. But their rigid patterns of behaviour also meant they weren't able to adjust to smaller flock sizes and sections of forest fast enough to save their species from going utterly extinct. Captive flocks kept in pens would quickly stop reproducing, and the re-settlement of North America necessitated the breakup of the massive forests and the control of species that would threaten the settlers' food supplies.

This year, in a museum in Glasgow, Scotland, I saw my first passenger pigeon. It was stuffed. Should I be sad that that's the only way I'll get to see them? There are still other types of pigeon around, and some people even hate those. Was passenger pigeon vs. human a fair fight, weed specie against weed specie, that we happened to win? Humanity's biggest competition for food these days is the carrying capacity of the planet. We're exhausting not just short-term, opportunistic species like the passenger pigeon, but long-established ones too. In isolation, losing the passenger pigeon might be a small thing, but is it symptomatic of a problem we have as a species? Are wee too good of a weed species? Are we just as mindless in throwing the rocks as the birds are in swerving to avoid them?

These are the sorts of questions I had when I started researching this album, as well as more ethical questions. How bad is it to make something extinct? At what point is it an acceptable trade-off? It seems natural to be rooting for humans, but how do you balance long-range concerns about the quality of life of future generations and the health of the planet with the needs of people living right now? Harder still, how do you convince other people to think about these things when they act?

I got a bunch of books out of various libraries and started making notes. I wasn't concerned with song ideas, just gathering information, collecting theses, and remembering the most interesting examples. I knew the project would be multi-disciplinary because I was asking all kinds of questions, coming at extinction and environmentalism with many different sets of concerns. So I decided to focus on specific aspects of extinction in turn. I would first read current biology and environmentalism to see what scientists studying biodiversity right now were saying about its importance. Then I would study paleontology and the history of earth's mass extinctions, to see what had already happened and what longer-term processes were at work. Then I would read philosophy and anthropology. Why do humans drive things to extinction, how bad is it ethically, and do we have the capacity to act differently? I then wanted to incorporate economics, as a way of looking at how we choose to act and value our environment. And throughout, I would be paying attention to the educational aspect; how the different disciplines were presenting their material, whether they were trying to inspire change or action, and how. I figured this would be important if I wanted to present some of what I learned in my songs.