Home

Phoenix: deluxe birders’ edition out now in Orange & Bee!

This is a story about destruction and coming back to life. Grab your binoculars. I’ll show you where to look.

You can read about the genesis of the poem here.

When I heard the poem was going to be released on September 11, I thought it fitting. Twenty-five years ago, planes struck buildings in the United States in an act of terrorism, sparking fires that smoldered for months. I was doing my job–driving from one barn to the next, tending cows, hearing the story in pieces from the farmers I served. I worried for my then-partner who had been scheduled to board a transcontinental flight that day, worried for her advisor who had an office at the Pentagon.

I didn’t yet know my current partner, but she and her advisor were about to head to New York City to measure the smoke as an occupational health risk to the many responders, particularly the Teamsters driving the trucks to haul away the rubble.

What I did know–right away–was that these fires would transform the world. What rose from the ashes would be warped and scarred, that sparks would fall in places I could not see right away. That more things would burn.

“Phoenix: deluxe birders’ edition” is my hope for rebirth–that we can emerge from ashes transformed into a people more strong than we were before. More beautiful.

It also is delightful homage to the various phoenix stories of myth, immortal birds that smolder in mythologies from Russia to Greece to China. But with a scientist’s twist, an ornithologist’s perspective.

N.B. 1: The quote is from Richard Feynman, adapted: “”Philosophy of Science is as useful to scientists as Ornithology is to birds.” (Bit of an in-joke for those of us with science PhDs–you know, those doctorates of philosophy in science. Perhaps the phoenix is the ultimate metaphor for the process by which you become PhD–the most authentic example of a crucible I ever have found.)

N.B. 2: ‘Bird on Fire’ also is a book by Andrew Ross (Oxford University Press, 2011) about Phoenix, Arizona–at that time considered to be the world’s least sustainable city. I was teaching sustainability and resilience to my public health students–showing them measurable ways to rise from the ashes–when I got the happy news from Orange & Bee that Phoenix had found a nest.