“What is a plausible world that we can imagine?” is the prompt suggested by Jonathan Cloud to guide those of us contributing to this book. As parrot conservationists we often engage in this exercise to imagine a plausible world, but more often than we’d like to admit, to ourselves or to others, we cannot fathom a way to get to a more just world and what that might look like exactly. We must work with a reality we never wished for, which is that 23% of the world’s parrot species are critically endangered, and, in so many cases, we are losing ground despite our best efforts. In light of not being able to imagine what may come, we can only live into it and through it. This takes some courage to promise to live in a way that expresses solidarity with all of life.
The very act of courageous commitment, by others who have invited us into their reality, has taught us that there is a regenerative possibility in every moment. Time and again, we don’t know what that possibility will turn out to be or what it might produce. For we only see a small reflection of the world that returns to us from the projection onto others of our own lives, culture, and species. But when we promise to show up in solidarity with those we work with, both people and parrots, amazing things happen in the moment. And with enough of these seemingly incongruent instances of hope and beauty, fragile successes can be won, though they may not be what we set out to do.
For instance, in Honduras we began in 2010 to monitor scarlet macaw nests from which chicks were illegally removed for the domestic and international wildlife trade. The indigenous Moskito people who live in La Moskitia, Honduras already knew that trapping had decimated the parrot population, and the data we gathered confirmed and offered witness to nearly 100% poaching in the pine savannas of La Moskitia at that time.
The people in that region of Honduras were hungry for the return of their parrots and for cash income, for they are subsistence farmers and hunters. Engaging in parrot conservation as rangers was a way for them to gain employment and to reverse what seemed the nearly assured disappearance of the national bird of Honduras from their lands. For a solid eight years now, many communities have become involved in protecting the scarlet macaw nests and livelihoods have been augmented.
The annual poaching rate of the macaw nests now hovers around 15-20 % of all active nests stolen, but even this amount of success requires incredible effort and risk in this violent, corrupt, and drug trafficker-infused region. At any moment it seems that the forest will completely fall to special interests as threats, assassination attempts, and killings occur regularly. Yet the commitment and empowerment of the people has never been stronger. Their love of the macaws and the call to sacrifice much for this bird and their ecosystems grows stronger every year. Not a week goes by when some bird is not rescued or saved from a situation that would otherwise doom the bird to suffering or a lifetime in captivity. More outside interests, such as other nonprofit organizations, are also witnessing this story and offering aid when they can.
So, though all efforts might not stave off severe diminishment of ecosystems, wildlife, and indigenous culture, the beauty, saving, and savoring of life on a day-to-day basis might yet yield a different outcome. We never imagined that it would take so much work and risk with no assured successful outcomes on the far horizon and that so much good could be accomplished in the short term.
This story is similar to the many other collaborations in which we engage as a small, US-based nonprofit organization called One Earth Conservation. So changed have we been by the unforeseen successes, failures, and unknowingness that is the art of conservation, that we have come to see our conservation guided by the concept of “unconditional solidarity,” which is the promise to be in active and concrete solidarity with all of life. With greater awareness of the implausibility of what we dare to do in conservation with parrots, people, and the planet, and as this awareness opens us, the more our faith grows in the unexpected possible beauty of life around us. The interactions of Earth’s systems and species are staggering, and we are awed by how there is no beauty without tragedy, or its corollary, there is no tragedy without beauty. There is so much more to it all than can ever be known by mere humans.
We feel that conservation is ultimately about witnessing this beauty, the loss of the world’s parrots (and other species), and the degradation of the systems that were and are the cauldrons of their evolution. More often than we’d like, it seems implausible that anything we can do will win the day. We know not what the solutions are, or if there are even any that will make a difference. All we do know is that the compulsion to love and to hold and be held spurs us on to try, to love, to mourn, to promise, and to know that together we might live the immense beauty that is at once both within us and beyond us. As parrot conservation projects grow, the beauty and the tragedy within them become ever more evident and the outcomes realized seem so much more fragile and transitory than we could have imagined. And yet we still try, grow, and evolve, not as individuals but as a multispecies community, our very lives the art of the impossible.
We can, if pushed to do so, discern through the complexity and mess of life a layer of what seems like success, and that we can report such successes as positive outcomes to our funders and to the public. We write reports about how we have trained more conservationists, helped them create more sustainable lifestyles, provided more income for those marginalized, ensured that more nests are protected, increased the number of parrots, and developed stronger and more capable teams. The inner intuitive eye sees more than this or what our conscious minds can fathom. Life dictates our efforts not in terms of success or failure, but only as lived experiences of courage and commitment to face each moment and each day.
So, what is plausible is what we experience with every breath – death, loss, extinction, violence, love, care, and the miracle of co-evolution. We cannot help but live in unconditional solidarity, for we are intimately connected to all others. What is plausive and unavoidable is what we are doing, and have done, and cannot be undone. We just have to have courage, together, so that the collective networks in which we are enmeshed might vibrate with all the unknowable possibility that life is.
And maybe, just maybe, ultimately the fates will be a tad kind to us all.