Birding to Change the World: A Memoir

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In this uplifting memoir, a professor and activist shares what birds can teach us about life, social change, and protecting the environment.

Trish OKane never expected to be a birder. It was a lone red cardinal and a bumptious cast of house sparrows that changed everything for OKane after Hurricane Katrina shattered her life in New Orleans. Watching birds thrive throughout the devastated city became her salvation and set her on a new path. Soon OKane found herself pursuing an environmental science PhD in Wisconsin, where she became a full-on bird obsessivelogging hours and hours in a stunningly diverse urban park, filling field notebooks with observations of bird doings and dramas, and volunteering in a wildlife rehabilitation center bird nursery.

But it wasnt until that park, her bird-watching haven, was threatened with development that OKane became an environmental activist. Taking her cues from the birds, she mustered a mighty flock of fellow human park lovers to raise their voices and save the park.

Each chapter inBirding to Change the Worldfeatures at least one species of bird that OKane has learned from. She recounts the astonishing science of bird life, including migration and survival strategies, along with many moving and compelling stories about birds and the humans who love them. In this heartfelt memoir, OKane shows what birds can teach usand how that education can be a transformative force for social change.

Reviews

"Not just a delightful story but a powerful one, showing how we can open doors into the natural world, and hence into the fight to defend it. Birds as teachersa wonderful idea!" Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature "Delightful and exceptionally readable. O'Kane's book may not actually change the world but it just might change the way you look at it. Dan Egan, author of The Death and Life of the Great Lakes "Trish O'Kane has discovered a terrific way to include more joy, beauty, awe, and wonder in your life: She teaches people about birds. With vivid lessons about the marvel of migration, the hope of nestingand the peril of our changing climateBirding to Change the World will do more than just change the way you view the planet. It will show you how to make it better, too." Mark Obmascik, author of The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession This immersive book is touching, funny, and profoundly human. Through tragedy and hope, outgoing community action and profound introspective reflection, Trish OKane leads us through the world of birds and through her own. If you are not a birder before reading this tale, you will be when youre through." Paul Robbins, Dean, Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison "What a marvelous book! Page by page, Trish OKane instructs and delights, teaching new ways to think about environmental activism, social justice, community, landscape, and the birds who revolutionized how OKane moves through just about every part of her life.Birding to Change the Worldis a brilliant and expansive guide to how to learn to be more human by learning to be more like birds. An instructive celebration of our wild wonderful world." Camille T. Dungy, author ofSoil: The Story of a Black Mothers Garden Fascinating, insightful, informative, and inspirationalBirding to Change the World shows how to be a person and a citizen of the world. I could not put it down. Bernd Heinrich, award-winning biologist and author of The Snoring Bird Trish OKane has written a moving, inspiring invitation to the great conversation going on all around us, a conversation that can yet save us from the loneliness of our species. Richard Louv, author of the international bestseller Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder This engaging new book by Trish OKane dissolves the boundaries between memoir, nature writing, conservation treatise, bird guide, and ecological manifesto. OKane is an intrepid educator who was drawn to birds through the sometimes-tragic upheavals of her life. Through her story we are reminded that birds can offer, simply by their presence, a healing of body and spirit, a call to earthen activism, instruction in social justice, and pure joy. Birds become a beautiful reminder of ecologys greatest lesson: that all aspects of life are always and forever interconnected. Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author of Rooted A human rights journalist embraces environmental justicein her engaging debut memoirA delightful homage to birds and nature in general. Kirkus Reviews Affecting. [OKanes] reverence for her avian subjects comes through on every page, and she retains a journalists keen eye for detail: 'The male cardinal reminded me of an Irishman, standing up to leave his pub at midnight, head held high and chest inflated as he sang his traditional a cappella goodbye song.' This soars. Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Author Bio

Trish O'Kaneis a writer and a senior lecturer in environmental justice at the University of Vermont, where avians are her teaching assistants. A former human rights journalist in Central America and the Deep South, she has written for the New York Times, Time, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in Burlington, Vermont, with her writer-husband, their dog, and three chickens.