This is an essay about the chickadees, a bird family of North America, and about climate politics. By the end, it’s going to ask you to join me in November in Newcastle, New South Wales, for the People’s Blockade of the World’s Largest Coal Port.

The Guardian environment editor Damian Carrington has said, addressing his journalism colleagues: “we’re all climate journalists now.” What he meant, I think, is that if your work is not already shaped by our situation in a vastly changing environment, it’s going to be soon. Everything we do now, we do under the force of a changing climate, and yet — I fear — we are still learning to speak of climate change in the present tense. Our language lags behind our experiences.

Some studies indicate that even people who care about climate change don’t talk about it often. My sense is that many of us don’t quite know how, and don’t really want to. Kari Norgaard’s 2011 book, Living in Denial, described the lives of Norwegians in a skiing town during their first winter with no snow. One of them called their own practiced silence about the changing climate “a skill, an art of living.”

The facts are too big to face a lot of the time, and much of what we take for granted as “life” is implicated in them, so the discussion is hardly comfortable, and sometimes it doesn’t even make much sense. It sometimes seems to me — perhaps especially while reading Amitav Ghosh — as though the categories I have available for thinking and talking and writing — the ones given to me by my Euro-American culture and education — are failing. I am not always sure I have the resources of mind and spirit that would be required to know what a good life is, in Australia, now.

Our generation is not the first, of course, to face ecological and cultural devastation wrought by human powers, and to find that practical reason itself may be failing us. I’ve been thinking again lately about Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope, his 2006 book about Chief Plenty Coups, an important leader of the Crow or Apsáalooke people of North America.

Plenty Coups was the leader who shepherded the Apsáalooke through the period in which they gave up their traditional nomadic life in the Yellowstone River Valley under the force of US colonial violence and settled on a reservation in Montana in the late nineteenth century. They exchanged hunting on the plains and fighting with the Sioux for settled life on territory that was consistently encroached upon by the United States. Plenty Coups recounted this experience as — basically — the end of everything. He said, to the white man who wrote down his story in 1930, Frank Linderman, “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.”

Jonathan Lear’s book asked what it might mean to take Plenty Coups’s words as true. Somehow, when the buffalo went away, things themselves ceased happening. Lear suggests that the loss of the buffalo and associated traditional nomadic life was, in a sense, the end of practical reason, the end of the possibility that any intelligible thing could happen, because — living on the reservation — the Crow no longer had a viable conception of the good life. Pretty Shield — one of Plenty Coups’s contemporaries — told Linderman, “I am living a life I do not understand.” And yet for Plenty Coups, Lear writes, “these were the circumstances in which he was called upon to act.” Plenty Coups was the leader of a nation, required to act, but without concepts for understanding what that could possibly mean.

And yet, part of what Plenty Coups and the Crow achieved in Lear’s telling was — incredibly — to find a way through the end of everything. In that context, living without the categories that had formerly governed their lives, Plenty Coups, in Lear’s account, performed the incredible task of transforming the virtues that had shaped traditional Crow living toward new ends.

One key to this new vision of Crow life turned out to be a dream Plenty Coups had as a young person, a dream about a chickadee who survives a storm. In this dream, a voice said,

Listen Plenty-Coups, in that tree is the lodge of the Chickadee. He is least in strength but strongest of mind among his kind. He is willing to work for wisdom. The Chickadee-person is a good listener. Nothing escapes his ears, which he has sharpened by constant use. Whenever others are talking together of their successes and failures, there you will find the Chickadee-person listening to their words.

The chickadee became an example to Plenty Coups of the kind of person he should be, living and leading through devastation.

The thing about the chickadee is that it listens and learns from others. And this is the virtue the Chickadee-person tries to adopt. In Lear’s interpretation, chickadee listening is not a first order virtue of the kind the Crow cultivated in their traditional way of life. It does not specify what skills to acquire, or for what, or from whom. As Lear writes,

the only substantive commitment embodied in the chickadee virtue is that if one listens and learns from others in the right way — even in radically different circumstances, even with the collapse of one’s world — something good will come of it.

This is the virtue Plenty Coups thought was required when all you know is that you have no idea what is coming, or how anything good might come out of it. Chickadee virtue is for times like that. It’s the virtue required to regain practical reason through catastrophic loss. It seems like it would be good for times like ours too.

*

Chickadees flit through other landscapes as well. Borrowing the phrase from Lear, the literary scholar Branka Arsić works as what she calls a “bird-philosopher,” in part in homage to nineteenth-century US author Henry David Thoreau for whom, as she recounts, birds are everywhere. She writes, “[t]hey are everywhere in his Journal and his walks because they are always on his mind as he learns their different languages, caught in a genuine bird-becoming process.” Arsic points out that for Thoreau too, as for Lear, “chickadees are extraordinary beings ready to listen to and follow what is different.”

Thoreau’s relationships with chickadees expressed a kind of reconciliation with his ecological context. Jane Bennett has written about a moment in Thoreau’s Walden that seemed to express the fulfillment of his longing to be an inhabitant of nature himself. In her 2002 book Thoreau’s Nature she points to the moment in Walden, in “Winter Animals,” when Thoreau described a chickadee alighting on an armful of wood he was carrying. Bennett wrote that it was “one of his best moments at Walden.” That was because, as she described, it had shown him something about what it looks like to become “part and parcel of Nature” a position he advocated at the beginning of the essay “Walking.”

That moment with the chickadee in Walden probably draws on a passage from Thoreau’s Journal, one that I describe in some detail in my 2021 book Thoreau’s Religion. There, I used religion and related key terms as critical categories with which to interpret Walden, and I argued that this mode of interpretation resists caricatures of Thoreau as asocial, apolitical, and areligious, resists seeing him merely as a nature crank going it alone in the woods. I tried to show how Thoreau’s sociality, politics, and religion are all of a piece, composing a kind of religious practice I describe in the book as a form of political asceticism oriented by delight.

I take Thoreau’s moment with the chickadee as an example of the interspecies sociality that Thoreau experienced at Walden and sought to represent in the book. In the passage from the Journal, Thoreau is not alone with the chickadee — Alek Therien the woodchopper is with him, having come to visit during Thoreau’s first winter living at the Pond. Thoreau is chopping wood and some chickadees come by, pecking around. Thoreau and Therien discuss chickadees, and what the words are for “chickadee” in English and in French. Therien talks about how the birds often join him for lunch in the woods, and how much he likes to have them around. Thoreau writes:

Just then one flew up from the snow and perched on the wood I was holding in my arms and pecked it and looked me familiarly in the face. Chica-a-dee–dee-dee-dee-dee, – while others were whistling phebe–phe-bee — in the woods behind the house.

The language of the chickadee appears in the Journal, transcribed by Thoreau’s hand. I take this as a sign of Thoreau’s respect for it. In an early draft of my book, I made this point, but I described the words of the chickadee as indecipherable. A wise advisor asked whether I knew that for sure.

So, I did some research about what chickadees mean when they call. And what I found made me think that Thoreau and Plenty Coups might have taken chickadees as an example of something more than the listening that Lear and Arsić describe.

Research on chickadee vocalisations is active and ongoing among biologists, who have documented that chickadees convey quite complex information in their calls. One of the most important calls they make is described by the literature as a mobbing call. Chickadees make this call in response to a threat, often a predator, and they convey all kinds of detail about predator type, size, directionality, and urgency. One early article in this literature, from 2002, stated that “this social signal appears to serve as an alert to other chickadees, causing them to rally to the vicinity of the predator and join in a chorus of calling.” In some cases, the mob that joins in not only warns other chickadees with their calls, but eventually harasses the predator away.

Chickadees are tiny birds. They are cute. They are good listeners. And they can also — when they come together — make a hawk give up the hunt. I have to think that Thoreau and Therien and Plenty Coups — who listened to chickadees — would have known this, too.

My interpretation of Walden takes this powerful, fierce fact about the chickadee as a kind of touchstone for what Thoreau was trying to achieve in the book. Walden was a beautiful, polished thing, revised over eight drafts into something sparkling. And it demonstrated Thoreau’s deep commitment to listening. But it was also something like an alarm call, a warning that then-present economies and philosophies of nature were undoing something in the fabric of being itself. Such a call expressed a hope on Thoreau’s part, I think, that the writing life could be something like a chickadee life. Lots of listening, for sure, lots of learning from others in the right way. But also a call to others, and a hope that we can build a mob together. Thoreau thought he might be like the chickadee and his writing might be like the chickadee’s call: Can you hear me? Will you join me?

When I participated in a coal blockade at the port at Newcastle in New South Wales in November of 2023, I thought gratefully of the chickadee’s call. Everyday people gathered there, in our thousands, in small boats in the channel, to block coal ships. The coal exported from Newcastle produces 1 per cent of the earth’s annual carbon emissions each year. Those coal ships are the middle part of a story that extracts coal from First Nations in Australia and sells it on to coal plants in other frontline communities around the world. The paddlers in the port were there, having come from Newcastle and from around Australia, because we were concerned about a climate future where the rich just get richer and the rest of us, including fossil fuel workers, suffer. We blocked the port for over thirty-two hours, demanding better climate policy from the Australian government, who must support an urgent and just transition away from fossil fuels. The first step is to make the government stop approving new fossil fuel projects. We need a mob doing it together, and organizers around the nation are calling out.

*

With the political significance of the chickadee’s mob in mind, reading Lear is different, too. There is one short footnote in Radical Hope that points to the power of the chickadee:

Though I have not found reference to this in the Crow literature, a student at the University of Chicago who has worked in Canada surveying and banding birds tells me that the chickadee has a dual nature. It is not only an intelligent bird that pays attention to its environment; it is also extremely aggressive. It will fight off and even kill much larger birds that come into its territory.

Jasmine Spencer has written an article in American Indian Quarterly that gives a much more powerful role to the chickadee than we get from Bennett, or Arsic, or Lear. In it, Spencer argues that Plenty Coups’s so-called autobiography, the one Lear relied on, is better read as a “multispecies, multivocal text composed of many voices and viewpoints, both human and more-than-human, including buffalo, chickadees, and eagles.” On her reading, the chickadee speaks, even through the page.

I wrote Thoreau’s Religion because I had the sense that those scholars who focused quite closely on Thoreau’s religion usually underemphasized his political commitment to justice for all beings. Sometimes scholars described him, as he described himself, as a mystic, but in so doing they unintentionally participated in a long history in which the ascetic practices taken up by religious mystics have been depoliticised — represented as spiritual in a sort of other-worldly, individualized sense — when in many emblematic cases ascetics like these have also been, at the same time, economic reformers taking aim at wealth inequality and labor injustice. I thought this meant that contemporary followers of Thoreau should take a different lesson from Walden than they usually had. Thoreau’s call was for us to rise up together.

And so, by offering the description of Walden that I have, I also hoped to transform Thoreau’s place in environmental thought, where I am convinced that his reception in the twentieth-century United States was distorted by white supremacy and growing wealth inequality. It was too easy for elite white readers living in an apartheid society to read the middle passages of Walden as an endorsement of their loving relationships to nature, while ignoring the sense in which the book also condemned their wealth and class advantage as a symptom of a society that was still ignoring the radical economy of the Gospel they purported to follow. As Drew Lanham said in 2021 when speaking to the Thoreau Society, “that part got washed out, because it was inconvenient to talk about.” (A written version of his talk is available here.)

But the transformations of our own time give us the opportunity now, I think, to reread Walden with a critical view on the ways in which twentieth-century politics may have distorted its reception. And that is the reading of Walden that my book aims to provide, one that can show how, for Thoreau, commitment to a flourishing ecology was also commitment to a just economy, and all of that was part of a holistic — if idiosyncratic — religious life that he was hoping to call others into. This calling is what urged me to join the blockade in Newcastle in November 2023, and it is what will send me back there again this year.

Thinking about all this again, I went back to the chickadee literature, to see if there was anything new I should know about in the ongoing work of the biologists. There was an article from 2020 that I hadn’t seen — a study about how traffic noise affects chickadee calls. They, like us, are living in rapidly changing environments. Traffic noise can mask their calls, interfering with their ability to work together to resist threats. What the study found is that chickadees alter their calls in response to traffic noise — they seem to talk around it.

I find myself usually less capable than the chatty chickadees these days. Climate change often leaves me speechless. How to transform our societies and ourselves when we stand before a generation facing the sixth extinction and an unlivable future is not a conversation I know how to have. Words fail me.

When I am feeling struck by silence in this way, as I often am, overwhelmed, afraid, and just plain sad, I find myself turning again to Thoreau, who, as Branka Arsić argued so beautifully, shaped his life around a kind of perpetual mourning, constantly reckoning with what is passing away. Arsić wrote that her reading of Thoreau tells “the story of extreme grief and its ethics,” an ethics “so dedicated to the loss that it is reluctant to be prevented by sophisticated ontological divides from pursuing its effort to recover what it grieves for.” Thoreau insisted that what was lost — even lost to death — persists and might be found again.

He can also teach us something about gathering together, like the chickadees do, to defend the things that need not pass away. And so, again, I will return to Newcastle. Last year we gathered 3000 people over four days to block the shipping channel for 32 hours, and this year we are all coming back, and we are bringing all our friends. Over ten days, during set up, training, mobilization, a 50-hour blockade, and a convoy to Canberra to bring our demands to Parliament, we are aiming to bring out 10,000 everyday Australians who know that fossil fuels must end urgently, and that in the meantime the fossil fuel companies should pay for a just transition. In this, we are hoping to be like the chickadee, gathering together, calling out to one another to resist a common threat. It will be a joyful mob.

So we, too, are asking you: Can you hear us? Will you join us?

Image: Ennif Pendahl

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