So much for our vaunted free market economics and laissez faire government; it ain’t working. When US businesses and their investors ask for carbon emissions growth to be reigned in by US government it’s got to be for a dayam good reason.
Are you people in Washington D.C. even living on the same planet?
Link to Financial Times article.
‘Bird lady’ was friend to Coast wildlife, birders
Judith Toups, Sun Herald columnist, dies
JEAN PRESCOTT, jtprescott@sunherald.com
Judy Toups, the Coast’s renowned “bird lady,” is going to miss spring migration this year for what probably is the first time since her ornithological interests began in 1972. It is not by choice. Toups died quietly at home Tuesday in Decatur, Ala., of complications from medical problems. She was 77.
Overwhelmed by Hurricane Katrina’s destruction – of bird habitat and the property of myriad friends and acquaintances here – she moved to that small Alabama town barely a year after the storm.
Born at the front-end of the Great Depression, in 1930, Toups met and married a handsome sailor from Mississippi – Jay Toups – in Gloucester, Mass., just minutes from her hometown of Magnolia, and returned with him to his home state in 1965, the year he mustered out of the Navy. They would settle in Gulfport and raise six children there: Jeffrey, young Jay, Patrice, Christine and twins Drayton and Desmond.
Toups’ parents realized, on one of their visits to the Coast, that a stay-home mom of six young children desperately needed a diversion. Someone bought a feeder. Someone else identified a bird, and Toups was off and running.
Everyone who knew her has an extraordinary personal story to tell.
Coast artist and veteran birder Alison Henry recalled her first field trip with Toups: “Here I was meeting the rock star of birding.” As the group gathered in the pre-dawn blackness, “Judy said, ‘Oh, good, everybody’s here. Now all we have to do is wait for the birds to wake up.’ I thought it quite remarkable. She was a brilliant teacher, a best friend and an honest critic. I was addicted to her as a person.”
Don McKee, another Toups friend and fan said Tuesday, “My opinion is that all of nature has lost a very dear friend, especially our avian friends. She will be remembered always as the mother of birdwatching in Mississippi. I don’t think of her as gone,” McKee said. “Today she’s soaring with the eagles.”
This writer’s personal story goes something like this: In the late 1980s, she performed a daring rescue of a sharp-shinned hawk from the front screened porch of a house where we lived in Bay St. Louis. The bird had barreled through the screen in pursuit of a squirrel and had been trapped on the porch, disoriented and unable to find the door and freedom. With only a quilt between her and sharp beak and talons, Toups dropped the bed covering over this formidable raptor, and with yours truly carrying the trailing tails of the quilt, she carried the swaddled bird outside and let it go.
What a woman.
At that point she had been writing a weekly column for the Sun Herald for 15 years; nearly 20 more years would follow.
Toups founded the Mississippi Coast Audubon Society and advanced its conservation causes, including the high-profile protection program for least terns and black skimmers, “Nest in Peace.”
She taught Seashore Methodist Assembly elderhostels and sent fledgling birders out across Coast terrain in search of native and visiting birds. Birders from every part of the United States knew her.
She developed the Mississippi Coastal Birding Trail map, and wrote two books on birding the Gulf Coast, plus innumerable articles for every birding journal ever published in late 20th-century America.
There is a trail named after Judy Toups in Jackson County’s Ward Bayou, and she has been honored by birding societies too numerous to count.
Daughter Christine Toups remembered, “Just a couple of weeks ago, I told her, ‘I plugged your name into Google, and almost 20,000 entries came up, Mom. You’ve been Googled.’
“She calmly turned to me and said, ‘Funny, I didn’t feel a thing.’”
Typical Toups.
Peck Funeral Home in Decatur is in charge of arrangements, which were incomplete Tuesday.
My mother was a well-known birder, writer, lecturer and teacher who passed away February 27 from lung cancer. She lived from the Great Depression of the 1930s to the new Environmental Great Depression of 2007. She was a true friend of the environment.
This time, the depression isn’t simply economic. America recovered from the Great Depression. This time it’s environmental. Can mankind recover from bankrupting the planet’s natural environment?
While the earth and all its creatures are suffering from our studious neglect and institutionalized indifference, people in this beautiful country continue doing what they have always done, which is buy into an economic paradigm that equates progress with our ability to consume everything that isn’t nailed down, trash it when we’re done, and leave finding a solution to the problem of our declining environment to the supposed experts.
Just after my mother passed away, I was excoriated by someone I care about for taking a “superior” tone about the source of the world’s environmental problems, such as NASCAR and the huge industry behind it. I was told that people “around here” don’t want to hear criticism about their favorite forms of recreation, all of it mechanized and resource intensive. Moreover I was told that I could expect any number of threats from “Bubba.”
Well Bubba save yourself the dime. I’m onto your games and they suck because they’re suicidal. I’m reaching out to give you a hand to save you from yourself.
I’m sorry if anyone finds the truth offensive. Too damn bad. People who can pull their heads out of their asses long enough to see what is going on make great environmental crusaders. You should try it. I might not come off as superior to you.
NASCAR is the problem. NASCAR sponsors, drivers, fans, mechanics, tracks, bobble head announcers, cameramen, etc., are the problem. Bikers are the problem. Bike week is the problem. NFL is the problem. NFL fans are the problem. Stadiums where lots of people drive to week in and week out, year after year, and watch their precious teams are the problem.
Whatever is unnecessary by environmental measure is the problem.
If you identify with corporatized recreation enough to get mad at someone who insists the stuff that passes for “recreation” in a large swath of middle America is a big part of our environmental problems, you should take a harder look at what’s killing the planet and where it’s coming from.
Any mirror will do.
