Trish O’Kane has had, in a sense, previous lives and careers before the present one. For ten years she worked in Central America, mainly Guatemala, as an investigative human rights journalist. Later she moved to Montgomery, Alabama, investigating hate crimes for the Southern Poverty Law Center.
O’Kane lost her home and all her possessions in New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina and was understandably depressed and miserable when an encounter with a bird, a red cardinal, turned her life around. As she explains, nature has power, not only to teach us lessons about how the universe is organized, but to affect us to our cores, to act as therapy, to heal us.
O’Kane decided then to seek a PhD at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and there immersed herself in environmental studies and, more importantly, developed ways for university students and even middle school students to achieve a closer relationship with the natural world–not tropical jungles or desert stretches, but the flora and fauna of Warner Park, an urban green space.
O’Kane organized college students, taught them about the park and then paired each of them with a middle schooler. Each pair spent time together, weekly, really looking at the lake, the wildlife, and of course, especially the birds. It changed their relationship to the park and, it is not too much to say, changed their lives.
To save the park from catastrophic decisions by the city commission, O’Kane’s warriors organized, wrote letters, made posters and attended a stupefying number of city commission meetings. The passion, the devotion, needed to endure those hours of commission meetings is present in this book, in her prose. One is dazzled by the intensity.
The city had many bad ideas. They wanted to pave more park—for parking spaces. O’Kane reminded them and us of many reasons why this would be wrong. Besides the obvious, drug dealers like parking lots because they can quickly drive in and out.
She and her band worked to make the park cleaner, and in so doing, demonstrated what a huge amount of trash we throw onto the ground and into the water. She and the students, even the middle schoolers, made bird lists, sighting everything from a bald eagle to hummingbirds, and lists of flora and fauna, proving how many species were there—a diversity beyond imagining if you do not do the numbers.
The Canada Geese flock were a problem, as those big beautiful birds with their impressive child-rearing practices often are, and O’Kane explains how, to prevent the city from having a “roundup,” by which was meant a mass killing of dozens of geese at a time, it was possible to simply addle the eggs, on the nest, by coating them with corn oil. Her eggs would not hatch and the mother goose would move to a better location. There is always a better way.
