Are we supposed to round 'em up and force them into the woods?

the white man’s burden?

Just as hiking and camping have been declared racist because few inner-city blacks have an interest in the activity, now Yale scientists [sic] have found that bird watching is also an act of oppression

Our nation’s legacy of racist housing policies could be warping our conservation and climate efforts today, particularly when it comes to trees and birds, according to a recent study out of Yale University.

Crowdsourced bird sighting databases are important for conservation, as they guide biodiversity conservation and restoration decisions at all levels of municipal government. The recent Yale study shows that observation data largely comes from white, affluent neighborhoods, and that similar data from historically redlined neighborhoods are severely lacking.

“I can show you how blatant it is,” said Diego Ellis Soto, a Yale Ph.D student as he pulled up a computer screen of his findings for CT Insider.

Soto overlaid bird sighting data onto digitized maps of historically redlined neighborhoods — areas segregated by housing or insurance industries that are heavily populated by minorities — and checked for correlations using software. What he found shocked him.

Bird sighting data is extremely dense and deep in the affluent Prospect Hill neighborhood, home of Albertus Magnus College, several Yale departments, and many historic manor homes. The neighborhood has about 3,000 bird sighting records per square mile with 109 different species of birds. 

Yet Dixwell, a historically Black neighborhood only a couple blocks away, had a thousand times less recordings of bird sightings. Soto said that New Haven had some of the sharpest disparities in the nation. 

So, bird counts are down in black neighborhoods because too few blacks are out there with binoculars? So what? Not my job, man.

Even if the current conventional thinking is right and everything awful was caused by systemic racism imposed by whites, is it our responsibility to make everything right again, or could these victims do something about a specific problem by themselves? For instance, what can a white descendant of slaveholders (from Poland, perhaps, or a Lithuanian ghetto) do to persuade reluctant innercity residents to venture into the great outdoors to hike, perhaps to count birds? People like these:

'Bad things happen in the woods': the anxiety of hiking while black

Aaron Jones, 32, Chicago

A few years ago, a white friend suggested we go on a hike. All the fears I had about being in nature hit me in the face. It’s a very real fear for black people, especially those from urban communities, that bad things happen to black people in the woods, like lynching. It’s something that you see again and again when you look at the history of the civil rights movement and slavery: black people going into the woods and not coming back.

My friend had grown up hiking. I talked to her about my fears and she respected my apprehension. I said to myself: “You’ve got to do this now or it will never happen.”

But, terrible white people aside, could some other factors explain why blacks don’t want to go to neighborhood parks and look for pigeons?

I grew up in kind of a rough neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, so my mother kept us in a lot. Our house was across the street from a public park but it was rife with gang violence so we never went there.

Or maybe it’s this, as expressed by one Marjorie Leach-Parker, 68:

But even now in my position as [local chair of the Sierra Club], I will still only go on hikes when I’m with a group of people I know. I live within walking distance of a nature trail and I would never go there by myself. It’s not the younger generation but the older generation that you see that look at you like you have no business there. Like you don’t belong. It’s like: “Get out. Get away.” Even though it’s public land, some people are like, “I’m white and therefore I have more rights and I’m better than you.” And some black people still think, “I’m black and if I’m out there, I’m supposed to be cleaning up or waiting on you.” Sometimes when I introduce myself to groups across the state, I have to take a deep breath because I’ll think: “Are these people going to respect me?”

Within the Sierra Club, everyone is seriously nice, but understanding things from a different perspective is missing sometimes. I mean, why would a guy living in a $500,000 house know what it feels like to live in a place that you rent for $500 a month and the environmental issues that go with that? That people are just dumping trash in your neighborhood? A lot of older white people don’t know how to communicate with a black person of the street and the same the other way around. The older generation needs to be more embracing and think about how other people feel.

And of course, there’s always the great standby, Orange Man™:

Thwarted hiker Miss Tiffany Tharpe, 26:

After Trump became president, I became a little nervous about traveling in the US. Racism became more overt. Just after the inauguration I went with a couple of friends to western Arizona. On the way, we passed lots of gun stores, some with Confederate flags, and I felt very uncomfortable. When we got there I mostly felt OK because I was with friends who blended in, but there was this one old man who stared at me from the other side of the street. He was eating an ice cream and wearing a Make America Great Again hat. I felt challenged and stared back until he looked away.

The shame of this is, once exposed to the great outdoors, many people of all races enjoy it. Here’s Mr. Jones again, quoted above:

When we started the hike, I had to let go of a lot of what I was feeling. An hour into it, we stopped to take in this view and I was amazed by everything I was experiencing. I loved not hearing the commotion of the city. No cars, no yelling, no arguments on the corner. Just the water, the birds and the wind. It was like a reset button. I remember thinking, “Why haven’t I been doing this all along? Everybody should be doing this. There’s nobody that shouldn’t be hiking!” It was overwhelming to realize that something I’ve always believed isn’t for me actually is. I had spent so much time being nervous about it when it was what I needed.

I now go seven to eight times a month. Five days a week I work in sales, spending my time in ginormous condo buildings and busy infrastructure. As soon as I hop in the car to get out of town, the weight of the week lifts. I take my six-year-old daughter so that she knows earlier than I did that this is something beneficial. I let her lead the way on our path and allow her to make decisions for what she’s doing in nature. My mom’s proud of me but I’m still working on getting her out for a hike.

Jones was persuaded to try hiking by a white friend, and good for her, but ultimately, it was up to Jones himself to overcome his fear; notice that he’s yet to be able to persuade his own mother to venture out, and if he can’t, would she listen to “an old white man”, as Marjorie Leach-Parker would describe me? I think not.

If you want more colored birdwatchers and campers, raise them yourself. A good start might be to bring Scouting back to the inner cities, as unlikely and daunting as that might seem. They’re still there, and still doing good work.