LYRICS:

In the nineties I started to notice that the sounds outside my rural window were quieter than usual. My bedroom, sat on a hill between the woods (aka "out back") and our fields (aka "out front). There weren't as many insects chirping at night. And where were the bats and owls? My dad kept bringing up the missing bobolinks and bluebirds. Were we just imagining that there were fewer songbirds or were they disappearing across our region?

Today, when I go back to my parents' place, the silence in the woods and pasture sometimes feels ominous compared to my memory of the once-deafening birdsong and insect chirps. I think about the aerial sprayers flying over nearby fields while I waited for the school bus as a kinder-beaner. I think about the millions of acres our own government subsidizes/insures to be planted with seeds that are coated with insect poison or genetically modified to tolerate it.... Why are we still incentivizing this instead of helping farmers transition away from nonsensical anti-life practices like giant monocultural stretches of land and the eradication of grassland/pollinator habitat? These poisons kill the very insects many songbirds need to survive. And they wipe out too many pollinators that aren't even noticed! Their residues then run-off the land and flow downstream hurting others along the way.

Yes: we need food and we need hard-working farmers who care about land stewardship. But: we also need to reconsider what we do and don't fund/cultivate as a nation of taxpayers that supposedly values healthy food, water, air, and land quality for all. I really get upset when Americans treat this like a "rural problem" because the money that funds the industries and chemicals injected into these ecosystems often comes from people living outside these regions. Moreover, millions of urban consumers purchase the biofuels and support the farm bills that supposedly "feed us all." From my perspective, this is definitely a problem Americans EVERYWHERE need to help solve.

How can we better support biodiversity in our own communities? Are there places where we can shift funds away from old programs that no longer make sense toward more sustainable practices? Are there areas, where agriculture really feels alive, diverse and culturally responsive instead of mono-culturally oppressive?!? (the answer is YES btw...) I want the bluebirds to come back to these pastures but, in some regions, the system wasn't built to value them.... AT ALL. Meanwhile we continue to treat so many millions of acres with chemicals so we can feed our fuel and CAFO industries... True agriculture doesn't need to look like this. Our grandparents', grandparents would be appalled.