It’s 7 a.m.

Do you know where the songbirds are?

I have been struck by the silence of the woods as I take my daily walks.

Once in a while a chickadee will call in a high hemlock.

More rarely, I’ll see a nuthatch making its way sideways up a tree trunk.

Goldfinch

But for the most part, the forest is eerily silent, and even at my bird feeder the once lively ranks of brightly colored birds—goldfinches, purple finches, blue jays, cardinals, woodpeckers, juncos, titmice—have thinned.

It’s not an illusion, and it’s not an anomaly.

The Silent Spring predicted by Rachel Carson 50 years ago is well on its way to becoming a reality.

And the emptiness of the air is being mirrored in the waters.

Last week, over the protests of commercial fisherman, New England fishery management officials voted to sharply reduce the catch limits on cod, in the hope of saving this iconic Atlantic fish from extinction.

Cod was once the passenger pigeon of the sea, so numerous it was used as farm fertilizer and treated as if it were in endless supply.

After just a few years of commercial trawling—a blink of the eye in relation to cod’s million-year history on the planet—the cod, along with so many other fish species, is almost gone.

“The United States has watched the near total collapse of cod stocks in Canada,” reports The New York Times. “The demise of the fish populations was hastened by the widespread use of big trawlers equipped with radar and sonar systems that enhanced the ability to catch the fish. They expanded the area and depths that could be fished and sped up the process, diminishing the ability of the remaining fish stocks to replenish themselves.

“The big trawlers also swept up other fish that had little commercial value but played important predator-prey roles in maintaining the ecological balance of the species. Today the cod stock in the Gulf of Maine is at 18 percent of what scientists deem to be a healthy population; in Georges Bank, it is 7 percent.”

I well remember my sons’ disappointment when they threw some fishing lines into the glistening ocean off the coast of Nova Scotia.  Not a fish was to be had, and when we asked local people about it, they just shook their heads sadly.

The fish are gone.

Because we don’t eat songbirds, there is no “management agency” keeping track of their populations.

At best, there are conservationists and wildlife biologists trying to sound the alarm.

But the truth is that the collapse of biodiversity is too huge a problem for any one agency to deal with.  In the ocean it’s about greedy, reckless trawling; on land it’s about the relentless destruction of the forests and the poisoning of farmland and fresh water.

It’s about the continuing reliance on dirty fossil fuels, despite the robust evidence of the impact of climate change on planetary health.

It’s about the hubris of human beings, thinking that we alone can survive the biodiversity collapse we have engineered.

The saddest story I’ve read in a long time is about the bison in Montana.

You remember, the ones that were shot and left to rot by the hundreds of thousands in the late 19^th century?

The ones that were a hairs-breath from extinction, but were painstakingly brought back by breeders, and now roam “free” in national parks?

Well, the Montana legislature is proposing to restore the 19^th century practice of shooting bison on sight, treating any who dare to stray onto private property as “vermin.”

The once noble buffalo herds that thundered across the open prairies and mountain valleys of North America, reduced to a tiny fraction of their original population, are now to be shot for daring to step across an invisible property boundary to eat the green grass on the other side.

In the 1980s and 1990s, reports The New York Times, “Department of Livestock officials gunned down hundreds of famished Yellowstone bison that migrated into Montana in search of forage.”

Now a group of landowners and ranchers in Montana wants their state Legislature to make this practice law.

If Americans cared about the demise of the innocent creatures of the natural world a fraction as much as they care about their oh-so-beloved Superbowl, we would find the will and the way to solve the slow-motion nightmare of extinction.

We would figure out how to live sustainably on the magnificent planet that has enabled our remarkable rise as a species.

The truth is that human beings are the ultimate invasive species.

We are over-populating to the point where everything else is being crowded out beneath our monolithic spread.

What will happen when there are no more coral reefs, no more fish, no more forests, no more birds?

I’d like to give myself some comfort by saying I won’t live to see that day.

But realistically I have to face the fact that that day is just around the corner.