A vote for the ibis is a vote for justice
Hello, yes, it is me again, your friendly neighbourhood Guardian-newspaper-reader, refusing to stop arguing with you about the 2017 Bird of the Year poll.
The poll sounds innocuous enough. Birds, who doesn’t love birds*? Birb memes, pretty bird calls tinkling in your ears, birds pooping on you to bestow you extra good luck, birds fulfilling essential ecosystems services that we would be up shit creek without. And as I write, more than 130,000 Australians have cast their votes in this noble referendum.
But I am concerned that many of us have made a grave mistake as we have cast our votes.
I have had far too many conversations over the last week with people who have accepted the premise that the poll is actually about choosing ~the best bird in Australia in the year 2017~. As if deciding such a thing was remotely possible. As if you could just line up all these feathered friends from across the land, with different skills, tricks, and charms, and just… choose one, for it’s innate best-ness. As if this was not, just like literally everything else in the entire world, political.
I’ve sat and I’ve listened to you talk about the magnificence of the powerful owl, that time a Tawny Frogmouth sat on your fence and it was cute, your illogical love for the magpie despite it drawing blood from the back of your head enough times to count a solid tally.
But I have not heard a defence for voting for any of these birds that tackles the structural issues faced by many of Australia’s endemic bird species.
A vote for the ibis, on the other hand, is a remarkable political choice that cuts through to the heart of the issues facing modern ‘Australia’. “Why?” you may ask. “Isn’t the bin chicken just basically a meme? How does it relate to our cultural reckoning and/or structural issues facing humans and birds alike?”
GREAT QUESTIONS, READER. Let me answer them for you.
Cast your mind back a few dozen decades to the wetlands of NSW. The ibis, its white feathers gleaming in the sun, was the mascot of the swampy wetlands, using its long beak to unearth rich food from the mud, skinny legs stalking among the reeds. The sun is shining, white people haven’t ruined everything yet, and things are more or less peachy: the ibis is respected as the elegant — and even sacred — waterbird that it is.
Fast forward to today. The ibis is considered a public menace. If it’s not perched on a garbage bin with trash juice smeared over its greying wings, it has just speared its ruthless beak into your fresh laksa in the park, snaring some chicken (yes, creepily cannibalistic) and ruining the rest of your meal. The smell of their shit wafts through the summer breeze as you walk down Marrickville road, and in the city you trip over the contents of bin bags torn with the characteristic mark of that long sharp beak. The ibis is confronting and it makes you uncomfortable. And this, my friends, is entirely the fucking point.
What happened in between now and then? Huh? To what can we attribute this fall from grace?
Wrack your brain a little. Who cemented over/built mines on top of/‘relocated’ those wetlands that used to be the ibis’ happy home? Who is messing with the climate and rainfall, affecting the flood waters of inland rivers that ibis are so reliant on? Who threw away all that stinky juicy bin trash that is so deliciously alluring for our gawky feathered friends**?
SURPRISE, mates, it was US.
Yeah, we literally compromised the home of this poor species gave it the option of scavenging our sloppy scraps in the city or dying. And now we have the nerve to turn our noses up at the ibis for — god forbid — surviving off the approx 3.1 million tonnes of edible food waste that we throw in the bin each goddamn year??? Give me a break.
The ibis is a vision of our white Australian arrogance coming back to haunt us. Right now our planet is in crisis, and most of the birds on the bird of the year list are feeling the heat in some way or another. Last year, for example, waterbirds in Eastern Australia were found at the lowest numbers ever recorded. We need to tackle the capitalist, colonial attitudes in all of us — in the systems around us — that uprooted and dispossessed the ibis if we are going to succeed at all in tackling the ecological crises like climate change that are impacting these birds.
Yeah, look, I said it. A vote for the ibis is a vote for justice. Come at me.
And yet to be honest, voting in the ibis as 2017 bird of the year still falls short. It is not a reparation of the land habitat that we stole from these birds. It does not even offer a commitment to ensuring them a healthier future. But as the spectre that haunts our futile attempts at sterile cities, market-tradable ecologies and vanquishable waste, the ibis can start conversations that no other bird can.
So, vote ibis. Talk to your neighbours about it. And next time you see a bin chicken, celebrate the lesson of history that it is refusing to let you forget.
* I say this but I actually know a shocking amount of people who hate birds and want nothing to do with them. All I can say is that I am disappointed in you, friends, and also you should know that your lives will always be just that little bit more lacking than the rest of us who enjoy delightful bird-ful lives.
* NB: mostly businesses and corporations to be honest. Before you go and restructure your inner west grocery trip to start a new #zerowaste lifestyle, dwell for a sec on how much waste you produce each year vs how much waste is produced by Maccas in a day. System change not (just) behavioural change, yo.
Authorised by K. Huang, Sydney, for Fossil Free Unis
