Little Sparrow Falls

Phil Burpee, Columnist

Phil Burpee

Other than for a raggle-taggle of scriptural literalists for whom the great biological fact sometimes known as Creation came into being between early Monday morning and somewhere after the hockey game on the following Saturday night some sixty-six hundred years ago, it is widely accepted that life on this planet is inutterably ancient. Not long after the surface of the Earth cooled sufficiently, self-replicating molecules formed and fairly quickly assembled themselves first into single cells, and then into an ever-complexifying array of living things. Below is a tally of these occurrences, courtesy of Wikipedia.

The basic timeline of a 4.6 billion year old Earth, with approximate dates:

• 3.8 billion years of simple cells (prokaryotes),
• 3.4 billion years of stromatolites demonstrating photosynthesis,
• 2 billion years of complex cells (eukaryotes),
• 1 billion years of multicellular life,
• 600 million years of simple animals,
• 570 million years of arthropods (ancestors of insects, arachnids and crustaceans),
• 550 million years of complex animals,
• 500 million years of fish and proto-amphibians,
• 475 million years of land plants,
• 400 million years of insects and seeds,
• 360 million years of amphibians,
• 300 million years of reptiles,
• 200 million years of mammals,
• 150 million years of birds,
• 130 million years of flowers,
• 65 million years since the non-avian dinosaurs died out,
• 2.5 million years since the appearance of the genus Homo,
• 200,000 years of anatomically modern humans,
• 25,000 years since the disappearance of Neanderthal traits from the fossil record.
• 13,000 years since the disappearance of Homo floresiensis from the fossil record.

Grasshopper Sparrow

Our merry little band of living things is very, very old indeed. And every one of us is a direct linear descendant of a vast throng of ancestors stretching back hundreds upon hundreds of millions of years. Consider the little Grasshopper Sparrow that I hear buzzing away outside my window. She is tiny, but she is an inheritor of the bloodlines of that estimable family of creatures called dinosaurs who ruled the planet for some 200 million years before being laid low by a wayward asteroid that ploughed the Yucatan one fateful day some 65 million years ago. She is sublime. She has survived. She has paid her dues.

Our species, one of the youngest, is now in a state of exponential increase. When I was a kid we anticipated with a certain giddy wonder the imminent arrival of the three billionth person. We have now, a mere half-century later, seen the arrival of the seven billionth. We are amok, a mass proliferation of organisms on the swirling petrie dish that is our dear world. And with our headlong rush towards dominion, we have come to forget who we are, and what is our place in the order of things. We have fallen into the dangerous and unbecoming self-delusion of importance. But sadly, our only importance within a planetary context is a negative one. There is virtually nothing we do that provides net benefit to our fellow creatures, other than dying and rotting – and even that we seek to deny by pumping our carcasses with chemicals and sealing them in fancy boxes. If it weren’t for our art and music and philosophical inquiry, the efforts of our civilizations would be wretchedly superficial and forgettable – nothing but a tiresome series of conflict and over-weaning monkey-business. But we know a lot of stuff. The information thing we’ve got down pat. What a shame we can’t make formative use of it.

Athabasca Tarsands

Look at Bill C-38, the Omnibus Budget Bill currently before Parliament. It has breezed through the Senate and is rapidly on its way to Royal Assent and subsequent enactment. It is also known as the ‘Jobs, Growth and Long Term Prosperity Act’. Here, in this dippy and self-serving phrase, we can see the whole sorry conceptual apparatus of unbridled development at play. For it is within such jingoism that can be seen the still-persisting belief that economic vitality can somehow be achieved without due and careful regard for the wellbeing of the physical environment from which that very vitality is drawn. This budget bill contains measures to repeal the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act, set timelines for environmental assessment hearings, gives the federal cabinet the authority to approve new pipeline projects and overhauls the Fisheries Act to focus only on major waterways. This is only a taste of what this omnibus bill covers, but is a fair representation of the over-bearing emphasis on environmental aspects of various pieces of legislation, all conspiring to bring about in the country at large what has been known in Alberta for some time as a ‘streamlined regulatory environment’. What it says is this – “We’re too busy to be careful – so get outta the goddamn way.”

The little Grasshopper Sparrow is at once immensely delicate and immensely robust. It is also exceedingly beautiful, and its very minuteness against the vast backdrop of prairie, mountain, wind and sky is poignant beyond words. Here is a creature who is born with all the tools necessary to live its life and pass on its genes to the next of its kind. It asks no favours and tells no lies. It honours its purpose, which is to be a sparrow, and it gives no quarter to self-doubt or delusion. Such marvellous beings as this fall before our avaricious onslaught by the millions and millions every day. Countless voices are silenced, even as we crow and exult from every rooftop as to our greatness and the necessity of our continued advance across the face of the land. How wrong we are. How inattentive we are. How blind and deaf we are to the lyrical wonders of the world that surrounds, supports and enables us. How sad, and how exasperating, to see our elected leaders paying such homage to stupidity and short-sightedness as that represented by Bill C-38. Ministers Joe Oliver and Peter Kent ride shotgun on the belching juggernaut that Stephen Harper uses to grind his way through the natural world, as though the anticipated ‘jobs, growth and long-term prosperity’ were somehow to be achieved independently of the actual physical capital from which they must derive. Jobs and money come from work. Work is the action of manipulating the physical environment. The physical environment is this planet. It is a completely closed system. And it is circular, not linear. Goes around absolutely does come around. And you can only spend your collateral on operating costs for so long before you wind up flat bust. The line of credit dries up.

The little sparrow falls. Who really sees it? We are rather too busy to notice it tumbling in our reckless wake. And a flame we inadvertently snuff as we grind towards our crowded destiny, a flame which has shone for aeons, shines no more. We inherit an unimaginably splendid and anciently interconnected heritage of living things. How blithely we ignore and betray it. But all it takes is to look and to see. That little buzzing sound outside the window is none other than the Voice of Ages ringing down to us from the immemorial reaches of our collective heritage. All that is required of us is to notice – and to recognize amongst the living cavalcade of beings that surround us our brothers and our sisters and our fellows and our peers. For truly, we are nothing more than clumsy walk-ons in the Great Drama, and the least we can do is to remember the few lines we have been tasked to learn for the show.

Oh, that which is done to the least of our fellows is done to each and every one of us. What we poison or crush or pave over or lay low is a shadow we cannot flee. It is the shadow we glimpse as we pass by the mirror of our thoughtless exploits. It need not be this way, yet we accept the low cunning of our political masters. If we truly heard the plaintive song of this little bird, we would rise up in horror and heartfelt dismay for that which we allow to be done in our name. And for all the suffering that we visit upon the countless creatures of our world, what are we then to make of Maria Straub’s childlike ditty of yesteryear? -

“He loves me, too, He loves me, too,
I know He loves me, too;
Because He loves the little things,
I know He loves me, too.”

Phil Burpee

June 2, 2012