Why Our Hope for the Planet Is Not Yet Extinct

NASHVILLE — Once upon a time, deep in the upland pine forests and hardwood bottomlands of the American South, a magnificent bird dwelt high in the treetops. The ivory-billed woodpecker was a denizen of old-growth forests, but by the end of the 19th century, vast stands of old-growth Southern forest were already gone. A confirmed sighting of the Lord God Bird hasn’t been recorded since 1944.

Reports of the elusive ivory-bill surface from time to time anyway. In 2004, a sighting in Arkansas inspired a frenzy among birders, but an exhaustive search by teams from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology turned up no definitive evidence of survivors. Last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the ivory-billed woodpecker extinct.

Now Steve Latta, the director of conservation at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh, believes his team of researchers has found the bird living in the marshes of Louisiana. Using drones and mounted trail cameras, they have amassed both images and recordings of the birds, in addition to more than a dozen observations by the skilled researchers themselves. Comparing the markings, morphology, and foraging behavior of the birds they observed with those in historic photographs and videos, the researchers concluded that the ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct after all. “Our findings, and the inferences drawn from them, suggest an increasingly hopeful future for the ivory-billed woodpecker,” they write.

It’s not easy for me to share their optimism, no matter how desperately I want to. An internal dialectic between hope and despair governs my days: The more necessary it becomes to create a hopeful future, the harder it is for me to imagine one.

Little piles of unshelved books teeter all over my house, and they are stacked according to a taxonomy that in most cases would be difficult for somebody else to recognize. But one of those piles consists strictly of new releases that contain at least one reference to wildness in the title: “Power in the Wild” by Lee Alan Dugatkin, “Saving the Wild South” by Georgann Eubanks, “Sounds Wild and Broken” by David George Haskell, “Wild Souls” by Emma Marris, “Wild Spectacle” by Janisse Ray, “Wild Design” by Kimberly Ridley and “Wild Belief” by Nick Ripatrazone.

Wildness — no matter how imperiled, no matter how remote — is a concept we all seem to treasure, even when actual wildness feels far beyond our reach. Perhaps especially then. I started keeping these books in their own stack, separate from the other titles they would ordinarily be grouped with, because lately it has dawned on me that maybe something is going on here. Environmental writers, or at least the marketing departments charged with promoting their books, seem to understand something about this moment in our culture — something that might be difficult to discern from the headlines alone.

The headlines are, of course, hideous. Climate scientists so discouraged by inaction that they’re thinking about going on strike. More evidence, this time from the PBS series “Frontline,” of just how meekly we have allowed the fossil fuel industry to manipulate us. China’s decision to stake its growing economy on coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. Tons and tons of plastic — tens of millions of tons — still entering our oceans every single year. A new report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shows how poorly we’re protecting even ourselves from what is coming.

So we cling to good news in whatever form it takes. Whether it’s tenuously hopeful global news (like the I.P.C.C.’s report that we still have time to prevent the worst ravages of climate change) or encouraging local news (like the people who are letting their lawns go wild to feed the bees), being reminded of what is yet possible goes a long way toward countering gloom.

Americans are now more attuned than ever to the peril the natural world is in, and that is my greatest reason for hope. Ideological holdouts may continue to insist that climate change is a liberal hoax, and clueless people may continue to give the matter no thought at all. But these groups are no longer the norm. According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 72 percent of Americans believe the planet is warming. Seventy-seven percent support research into renewable energy. The same percentage believes that children should be taught about climate change in school.

The Yale maps offer surprisingly hopeful numbers, but what may seem even more surprising is what’s going on in some of the reddest places in the country, including Tennessee. People here are getting the message about what’s happening to the natural world — to the oceans, to the polar ice caps, to wildlife — and they want to do something about it. Our elected officials continue to promulgate lies that promote fossil fuels, but they no longer speak for most of us.

And even the red-state leaders can sometimes be brought around by popular support for conservation efforts. In January, Tennessee officials partnered with The Nature Conservancy to protect 43,000 acres of wildlife habitat — the largest conservation agreement in state history. Last year in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law The Florida Wildlife Corridor Act, which allocates $400 million to address and prevent habitat fragmentation. “Astoundingly,” the writer Megan Mayhew Bergman noted in The Guardian, “the state senate passed the act — which defines the boundaries of the corridor — with a vote of 40-0, and the house with a vote of 115-0.”

Think about that for a minute: A conservation bill that passed both houses of the state legislature without a single no vote. In Florida.

No wonder, then, that evidence of a mythical bird living in Louisiana could engender such hope. If we can come together to save the Florida panther, why not the ivory-billed woodpecker, too?

Not every avid birder welcomed the news of this possibility, though, and with good reason: If they do exist, the very last thing a vanishingly small population of birds needs is yet another influx of habitat-trampling novelty seekers. “Ivory-billed Woodpeckers are extinct,” tweeted the artist and birder Walter Kitundu. “And even if they weren’t I would still prefer you believed they were and left them the F alone.”

Even a reasonable, carefully documented possibility is still just a possibility, and the paper written by the National Aviary researchers has yet to be peer-reviewed. There is certainly no guarantee that a family of ivory-billed woodpeckers is living in the remnants of hardwood bottomland still left in Louisiana.

But this particular possibility serves as a reminder that what we don’t know about the natural world is still incalculably more than what we do. Many things are still possible, good and bad, and some of those things might surprise us. Some of them might even lift us from our deepening despair.

It is full-on spring here in Tennessee. Peepers are singing their heads off in the nearby ponds. Five bluebird eggs are nestled together in one of my nest boxes. Last week a member of the Nashville Area Beekeepers Association gently moved a swarm of wild honeybees from the ceiling of my neighbor’s porch into a fabricated hive. Any day now, my old friends the broadhead skinks will be sunning themselves on my front stoop.

Wildness is everywhere, renewing itself among us, reminding us not to give up. And who could fail to feel hopeful, if only for a moment, in the presence of new life? Or in the smallest chance that old life has somehow come back from the dead?

Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South” and “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”

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