The Geese have arrived (earlier)!

I have noted the arrival of the geese in a couple of previous posts (Oct.1 2019 and Oct.7 2020). This year, they arrived about a week earlier than last year – in the last week of September.  Eventually, thousands of  bean geese (Anser fabalis) winter around here, having come from their breeding grounds in Mongolia and thereabouts. Apparently, the FAD (First arrival dates), as it is technically called, has been getting earlier and earlier due to global warming.  The authors of an article in the Journal of Ecology and Environment wrote back in 2018:  ‘Average temperature of September in wintering grounds has increased, and the FADs of the geese have advanced over the 22 years. Even when the influence of autumn temperature was statistically controlled for, the FADs of the geese have significantly advanced. This suggests that warming has hastened the completion of breeding, which speeded up the arrival of the geese at the wintering grounds.’ (1)

I always find it reassuringly ironic that the geese have to fly over North Korea and the DMZ to get to us. In other words, for them, there is no divided Korea. There is no Korea, North or South, just breeding grounds and wintering grounds. Adopting a ‘bird’s eye view’ in this context helps to put human history in tragic and absurd perspective. But it also drives a deep wedge between the natural history that addresses the lives of the geese and the human history about the lives of North and South Koreans.

This year, the geese’s arrival coincided with my reading of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s excellent The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021). His book added an additional significance to the event. The  annual rhythm of bird migration serves to reinforce the assumption that nature as a whole is permanently cyclical.  But now that we’re in the Anthropocene we are becoming aware that while nature has clear repetitive cycles based on the changing seasons, these are far from eternal. They just seem that way because of our very limited sense of historical time. Geological time, which deals in millions of years, reveal that massive changes occur in nature, sometimes absolutely devastating changes.

But humanly-caused global warming is now happening at such an alarming rate that, as the geese’s migratory pattern demonstrate, nature’s rythmns are changing within our timescale, and are easy to recognize. As a result, Chakrabarty writes that it is now essential that we find ways to conjoin the facts of Natural History with those of Human History. Climate scientists are showing that we can no longer treat them as distinct domains: “In unwittingly destroying the artificial but time-honoured distinction between natural and human histories, climate scientists posit that the human being has become something much larger than the simple biological agent that he or she always has been. Humans now wield a geological force……. A fundamental assumption of Western (and now universal) political thought has come undone in this crisis.”

References:

https://jecoenv.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41610-018-0091-2

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is published by Chicago University Press.