When a New Yorker writer flies off the handle

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The April 6 issue of The New Yorker disappointed me. Therein lay what can only be described as a rambling rant decrying the National Audubon Society, of all organizations. I mean, who takes pot shots at a nonprofit organization committed to protecting birds? Everyone loves birds. What’s not to love about the Audubon Society?

The magazine especially disappointed me because it has devoted vast vats of ink to publishing the work of my second-favorite environmental author (after Rachel Carson), Elizabeth Kolbert, who in 2006 released “Field Notes from a Catastrophe,” one of the most elucidative texts I have read on the growing threat that climate change, a.k.a. global warming, poses to the environment and, ultimately, to humanity.

This time, however, The New Yorker published Jonathan Franzen’s “Carbon Capture: Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?” In his 7,000-word diatribe, Franzen, a celebrated novelist, frequent New Yorker contributor and Pulitzer Prize finalist, makes a ludicrous argument: The Audubon Society, once a vital activist organization devoted to ensuring the long-term survival of countless bird species, is now a bloated bureaucracy, known in recent decades for little else beside “its holiday cards and its plush-toy cardinals and bluebirds, which sing when you squeeze them.”

Strangely, Franzen claims throughout the piece that he’s a staunch environmentalist –– and always has been, thank you very much. Specifically, he says, he’s a bird lover of the highest order. So why does he go after the Audubon Society with such malice?

Apparently, the organization ruffled Franzen’s feathers, so to speak, because it allegedly refused to address bird kills caused by massive windows at the new Minnesota Vikings Stadium, which is now under construction in Minneapolis. According to Franzen, “The new stadium is expected to kill thousands of birds every year.” Patterned glass could substantially reduce bird deaths, while raising the stadium’s price by one-tenth of one percent, he writes.

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