Want to see my presentation at the Philosophy and Arts conference at Stony Brook? You can flip through the slides at the underlined words, or just flip through the slides and make up your own text!
The way we interact with the natural world is inherently irrational. Despite the best efforts of scientists and theorists, we are still essentially creatures of emotion, instinct and unconscious action. As David Brooks writes in his book, The Social Animal, “We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.” Our current environmental movement, the green movement, is no more rational than any that came before it. The name itself, green, implies that we are protecting plants, and perhaps lizards. The vast majority of natures biomass is more likely to be a less pleasant color, but does anyone want to be a part of the “brown” movement?
Because of this inherent irrationality, art can have a profound effect on how we view the environment and effort to protect it. Art can attach value to a thing, as the ready mades of Duchamp or the Brillo boxes of Warhol can attest.
In the mid 1800’s, North America was the home of the most numerous bird species on the entire planet. In 1866 a documented sighting in southern Ontario described a flock passing overhead that was 1 mile wide, 300 miles long and took 14 hours to pass a single spot. The estimated number of birds in the flock was 3.5 billion. In 1914, less than 50 years later, every single one of those birds were gone, and the Passenger Pigeon disappeared from the earth forever.
In 1857, a bill was brought forth to the Ohio State Legislature seeking protection for the Passenger Pigeon. A Select Committee of the Senate filed a report stating "The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here today and elsewhere tomorrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced."(Hornaday)
Out of the ashes of billions of dead birds rose the National Audobon Society, named for the artist who famously wished to document all of the avian species of the continent. In 1886 George Bird Grinnell founded the first Audubon society and within a year it had nearly 40,000 members. It is not insignificant that the society is associated so closely with an artist’s vision of the world. Art can illuminate what politicians declare and scientists hypothesize. Today I will expand on this idea with three histories. The first is a literary history, the second a natural history, and the last, a personal history.
A Literary History
The wolf has was long a symbol of fear and dread. This was still the case in the 1960’s in Canada, when Farley Mowat published his second book, Never Cry Wolf. The book tells of his time as a biologist for the Canadian government, sent into the arctic tundra to study “the wolf problem”. He expected to find a voracious killing machine, responsible for the rapid decline of caribou populations. What he found instead was a species living in balance with it’s harsh environment. He rarely saw them hunt, instead living through large portions of the year on small mammals. He watched them raise their young, work as a team, act intelligently, and communicate effectively. He concluded that the loss of caribou was due to serious over hunting; including legal and illegal trophy hunting.
The impact of Never Cry Wolf was significant. In a 2001 article in the Canadian Historical Review, Karen Jones lauded the work as "an important chapter in the history of Canadian environmentalism":
The deluge of letters received by the Canadian Wildlife Service from concerned citizens opposing the killing of wolves testifies to the growing significance of literature as a protest medium. Modern Canadians roused to defend a species that their predecessors sought to eradicate. By the 1960s the wolf had made the transition from the beast of waste and desolation (in the words of Theodore Roosevelt) to a conservationist cause celebre....Never Cry Wolf played a key role in fostering that change.
The response from the scientific community, however, was less than complementary. Frank Banfield, Mowat’s supervisor during his expedition compared the book to Little Red Riding Hood by stating, “I hope that readers of Never Cry Wolf will realize that both stories have about the same factual content.” L. David Mech, an internationally recognized wolf biologist wrote, “Whereas the other books and articles were based strictly on facts and the experiences of the author, Mowat’s seems to be basically fiction founded somewhat on facts. It appears to have been compounded by his own limited adventures with wild wolves plus a generous quantity of unacknowledged experiences of other authors; a certain amount of imagination and embellishment probably completed the formula for this book."
Nelson Goodman, in Fact, Fiction and Forecast, proposes the idea that our projections of the future represent possible worlds, each of which could be defined as the real world. In the case of wolves, evidence existed to suggest that wolves were dangerous, murderous beasts, as well as valuable, fascinating animals. Before Mowat’s book, the general public was more likely to claim that the former was “true”. Mowat simply presented the other side in moving, emotionally convincing terms, reframing the picture to include a space for the wolf in our culture, and people chose to accept it. Goodman says, “what we often mistake for the actual world is one particular description of it. And what we mistake for possible worlds are just equally true descriptions in other terms. We have come to think of the actual as one among many possible worlds. We need to repaint that picture. All possible worlds lie within the actual one.” Art is one of the things that can “repaint the picture”, and Never Cry Wolf, as a work of art, not a work of science, accomplished its goal. Whether the events within the book are factual or not is almost beside the point. The book did what Audubon’s paintings did for a generation of bird enthusiasts, helped reframe the perceptions of the public to such an extent that those who had been advocating for the improved treatment of wolves all along could be heard and gain momentum. The books status as a questionable work of science may have even enhanced this mission.
A Natural History
Today's common street pigeon,was domesticated around 3000 BC, making them the first bird to be domesticated. They lived wild in the caves along the Mediterranean. Pigeons do not lay just one clutch of eggs a year, they reproduce year round. This became a good source of protein for the humans who took care of them. Pigeons were easy to keep. They are docile, and tied to their home, returning daily to roost and feed their young.
Unlike many of the monogamous bird species, pigeons do not pick a new mate each year. When pigeons mate, they mate for life. Males and females split domestic duties in half, sharing the responsibilities of sitting on eggs and feeding and protecting the young. Squabs, the term for baby pigeons, do not leave the nest for the first six weeks of life, relying on their parents for food. Because of this nests are built in secure, tucked away areas.
Over several thousand years pigeon breeders have teased out hundreds of distinct breeds with an astounding array of qualities. There are pigeons whose chests puffed out like thanksgiving turkeys, pigeons with long necks and legs that look like the cartoon roadrunner, pigeons with beaks so short they cannot feed themselves and must be hand fed, pigeons with corkscrew feathers, or feathers that flip up around their heads, or tails that fan up like a peacocks, and many more. Charles Darwin himself bred pigeons and began On the Origin of Species with a discussion of so called “fancy pigeons”.
Not long after we started keeping pigeons as pets and protein, we started to utilize their natural tendency to return to their homes. A pigeon can fly at an average speed of sixty miles an hour without stopping for food or water and cover hundreds of miles in a day. The ancient Egyptians started using pigeons to carry messages down the nile to warn of floods. A pigeon delivered the results of the first Olympics in 776 BC. Isreal Beer Josaphat used pigeons in the mid 1850's to exploit a gap in the telegraph network to make a fortune on stock prices. He later took on the name Julius Reuters and the famous news organization was born.
Message pigeons have been used by the world’s militaries since the dawn of recorded history. Pigeons used on both sides in both World War's I and II were responsible for saving the lives of thousands of soldiers. One of the most famous, Cher Ami, was the last remaining pigeon of a unit of American soldiers who were trapped behind enemy lines and were being decimated by friendly artillery. The Germans knew they were there and were not about to let them get away. They had already shot down the first two pigeons attempting to deliver a plea for help. Cher Ami was shot shortly after being released, but somehow managed to regain altitude and fly the twenty minutes to headquarters. One eye was missing, part of her cranium was gone, and her breast was ripped open. The leg with the message tube had been blown off, and the message hung by only a few tendons. The guns stopped and two hundred soldiers escaped. Cher Ami was treated and eventually died of her wound less than a year later, and her stuffed remains can be seen at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC.
Scientists have been interested in pigeons for more than their navigational abilities. Pigeons have been proven to be excellent trainees and are capable of symbolic thinking. The psychologist B.F. Skinner used pigeons extensively with his Skinner Boxes, simple devices for training animals by means of positive reinforcement. Skinner's most amazing experiment was to design an early guided missile using pigeons as the guidance system. Pigeons would be trained to recognize a specific target and would continuously peck at the target on a video screen, reorienting the missile. Though the design worked well, the military decided not to fund the project, which was best for the pigeons, as they would have had to hitch a ride on the live warhead. Using Skinner boxes, scientists have trained birds to distinguish between artwork by Chagall and Picasso, with the birds continuing to identify more work by the two correctly after the training period.
Pigeons are not always so loved by scientists. Courtney Humphries, in her book Superdove, talked to a biologist from Montreal named Louis Lefebvre. While studying innovation in birds he had tested street pigeons against two wild bird species. He created a Plexiglas box full of seed that the birds could only open by pulling drawers or removing lids, looking at how innovative they could be in finding food in new ways. He expected the pigeon to fail, but they were much faster than expected:
"the average bird of their family, pigeons and doves- is really really dumb at that. The only conclusion is there's something special about pigeons that is different from other Columbiforms, and the most plausible thing is that they're feral... Pigeons are good at innovation for the wrong reason, because of artificial selection. It's not interesting; they're a special case... (The pigeon) will be doing what it does partly because of that very specific regime of domestication that it went through for thousands of years... They're a unique case in nature."
A Personal History
The man who called himself Red Lahore was born in 1934 in Michigan and grew up in the town of Harbor Beach on the shores of Lake Huron. He enjoyed a small town, upper middle class childhood. He writes in his journal that his first exposure to the concept of pigeons was when they would drive across the thumb of Michigan to visit Flint or Detroit:
Lahore eventually pursued his PhD in Zoology at Duke University in Durham NC. He would have completed his PhD in 1965, and though there has been no evidence found of his doctoral dissertation (due to the fact that his real name is still unknown), he did possess in his notes, which were stored in his PODS unit, a copy of a paper titled, Sun Compass Orientation of Pigeons Upon Displacement North of the Arctic Circle, which was published in Biological Bulletin in August 1964. In this experiment, pigeons were taken by train to the west coast, then north to Barrow, Alaska. The birds were released at different times and studied. This was an early indication that pigeons rely on multiple forms of navigation depending on their circumstances. I like to think that Red Lahore was that intrepid doctoral student, carrying three trained pigeons by rail north of the Arctic Circle for the purposes of science.
What we do know about Lahore is that after his time at Duke he dropped out of the public realm. His secretive nature made it possible for the PODS employee to give me access to his possessions. He had paid for his PODS in advance, in cash. He had no known address or phone number. He had not been seen in years. What to do with his materials after his lease ran out had been a discussion among the facility for over a year, and suddenly here I was with similar interests and materials. They agreed to hand them over to me.
The PODS unit contained the weathered remnants of several projects. Four poster designs were laid out in his journal and were modeled on propaganda posters from World War II. They hyperbolically extol the virtues of pigeons and degrade the actions of people. For the piece titled Genocide he wrote the following note: “Dripping – bloody text. Red and black background. A picture of Martha, the last of the passenger pigeons. She is perched on her forever perch, a stuffed memory of a lost world”. Another group of work is a breed chart of eighteen fancy pigeons that Charles Darwin was known to have raised, painted delicately in casein. Along with the images of the breeds are hand-written notes about the care of these birds, as well as boxes of specimen jars containing various materials collected either from his own pigeons or wild ones. Finally, the entire PODS itself has been made into a functional pigeon coop, with nesting boxes and a chicken wire door.
Since the coincidental discovery of this amazing work, my role has now become that of a historian and a curator, preserving and interpreting the work of a man that, in another life, could have been me. I have made proposals to show his work in a variety of locations, all publicly accessible. I have displayed his collections, recreated his posters, and contributed to his paintings. If I did not already have plans for my future, a wife, a job and a sense in my head that keeping pigeons is just not something I can allow myself to become obsessed with, I might also have gone down the road that Red Lahore explored. The best I can do to honor this alter ego is to make sure his work lives on so it might perform the task he hoped it would; challenge our unexamined notions of the value of this species, so that we might challenge our notions of the value of all species.
Because of this inherent irrationality, art can have a profound effect on how we view the environment and effort to protect it. Art can attach value to a thing, as the ready mades of Duchamp or the Brillo boxes of Warhol can attest.
In the mid 1800’s, North America was the home of the most numerous bird species on the entire planet. In 1866 a documented sighting in southern Ontario described a flock passing overhead that was 1 mile wide, 300 miles long and took 14 hours to pass a single spot. The estimated number of birds in the flock was 3.5 billion. In 1914, less than 50 years later, every single one of those birds were gone, and the Passenger Pigeon disappeared from the earth forever.
In 1857, a bill was brought forth to the Ohio State Legislature seeking protection for the Passenger Pigeon. A Select Committee of the Senate filed a report stating "The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here today and elsewhere tomorrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced."(Hornaday)
Out of the ashes of billions of dead birds rose the National Audobon Society, named for the artist who famously wished to document all of the avian species of the continent. In 1886 George Bird Grinnell founded the first Audubon society and within a year it had nearly 40,000 members. It is not insignificant that the society is associated so closely with an artist’s vision of the world. Art can illuminate what politicians declare and scientists hypothesize. Today I will expand on this idea with three histories. The first is a literary history, the second a natural history, and the last, a personal history.
A Literary History
The wolf has was long a symbol of fear and dread. This was still the case in the 1960’s in Canada, when Farley Mowat published his second book, Never Cry Wolf. The book tells of his time as a biologist for the Canadian government, sent into the arctic tundra to study “the wolf problem”. He expected to find a voracious killing machine, responsible for the rapid decline of caribou populations. What he found instead was a species living in balance with it’s harsh environment. He rarely saw them hunt, instead living through large portions of the year on small mammals. He watched them raise their young, work as a team, act intelligently, and communicate effectively. He concluded that the loss of caribou was due to serious over hunting; including legal and illegal trophy hunting.
The impact of Never Cry Wolf was significant. In a 2001 article in the Canadian Historical Review, Karen Jones lauded the work as "an important chapter in the history of Canadian environmentalism":
The deluge of letters received by the Canadian Wildlife Service from concerned citizens opposing the killing of wolves testifies to the growing significance of literature as a protest medium. Modern Canadians roused to defend a species that their predecessors sought to eradicate. By the 1960s the wolf had made the transition from the beast of waste and desolation (in the words of Theodore Roosevelt) to a conservationist cause celebre....Never Cry Wolf played a key role in fostering that change.
– Karen Jones, Never Cry Wolf: Science, Sentiment, and the Literary Rehabilitation of Canis Lupus, The Canadian Historical Review vol.84 (2001)
The response from the scientific community, however, was less than complementary. Frank Banfield, Mowat’s supervisor during his expedition compared the book to Little Red Riding Hood by stating, “I hope that readers of Never Cry Wolf will realize that both stories have about the same factual content.” L. David Mech, an internationally recognized wolf biologist wrote, “Whereas the other books and articles were based strictly on facts and the experiences of the author, Mowat’s seems to be basically fiction founded somewhat on facts. It appears to have been compounded by his own limited adventures with wild wolves plus a generous quantity of unacknowledged experiences of other authors; a certain amount of imagination and embellishment probably completed the formula for this book."
Nelson Goodman, in Fact, Fiction and Forecast, proposes the idea that our projections of the future represent possible worlds, each of which could be defined as the real world. In the case of wolves, evidence existed to suggest that wolves were dangerous, murderous beasts, as well as valuable, fascinating animals. Before Mowat’s book, the general public was more likely to claim that the former was “true”. Mowat simply presented the other side in moving, emotionally convincing terms, reframing the picture to include a space for the wolf in our culture, and people chose to accept it. Goodman says, “what we often mistake for the actual world is one particular description of it. And what we mistake for possible worlds are just equally true descriptions in other terms. We have come to think of the actual as one among many possible worlds. We need to repaint that picture. All possible worlds lie within the actual one.” Art is one of the things that can “repaint the picture”, and Never Cry Wolf, as a work of art, not a work of science, accomplished its goal. Whether the events within the book are factual or not is almost beside the point. The book did what Audubon’s paintings did for a generation of bird enthusiasts, helped reframe the perceptions of the public to such an extent that those who had been advocating for the improved treatment of wolves all along could be heard and gain momentum. The books status as a questionable work of science may have even enhanced this mission.
A Natural History
Today's common street pigeon,was domesticated around 3000 BC, making them the first bird to be domesticated. They lived wild in the caves along the Mediterranean. Pigeons do not lay just one clutch of eggs a year, they reproduce year round. This became a good source of protein for the humans who took care of them. Pigeons were easy to keep. They are docile, and tied to their home, returning daily to roost and feed their young.
Unlike many of the monogamous bird species, pigeons do not pick a new mate each year. When pigeons mate, they mate for life. Males and females split domestic duties in half, sharing the responsibilities of sitting on eggs and feeding and protecting the young. Squabs, the term for baby pigeons, do not leave the nest for the first six weeks of life, relying on their parents for food. Because of this nests are built in secure, tucked away areas.
Over several thousand years pigeon breeders have teased out hundreds of distinct breeds with an astounding array of qualities. There are pigeons whose chests puffed out like thanksgiving turkeys, pigeons with long necks and legs that look like the cartoon roadrunner, pigeons with beaks so short they cannot feed themselves and must be hand fed, pigeons with corkscrew feathers, or feathers that flip up around their heads, or tails that fan up like a peacocks, and many more. Charles Darwin himself bred pigeons and began On the Origin of Species with a discussion of so called “fancy pigeons”.
Not long after we started keeping pigeons as pets and protein, we started to utilize their natural tendency to return to their homes. A pigeon can fly at an average speed of sixty miles an hour without stopping for food or water and cover hundreds of miles in a day. The ancient Egyptians started using pigeons to carry messages down the nile to warn of floods. A pigeon delivered the results of the first Olympics in 776 BC. Isreal Beer Josaphat used pigeons in the mid 1850's to exploit a gap in the telegraph network to make a fortune on stock prices. He later took on the name Julius Reuters and the famous news organization was born.
Message pigeons have been used by the world’s militaries since the dawn of recorded history. Pigeons used on both sides in both World War's I and II were responsible for saving the lives of thousands of soldiers. One of the most famous, Cher Ami, was the last remaining pigeon of a unit of American soldiers who were trapped behind enemy lines and were being decimated by friendly artillery. The Germans knew they were there and were not about to let them get away. They had already shot down the first two pigeons attempting to deliver a plea for help. Cher Ami was shot shortly after being released, but somehow managed to regain altitude and fly the twenty minutes to headquarters. One eye was missing, part of her cranium was gone, and her breast was ripped open. The leg with the message tube had been blown off, and the message hung by only a few tendons. The guns stopped and two hundred soldiers escaped. Cher Ami was treated and eventually died of her wound less than a year later, and her stuffed remains can be seen at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC.
Scientists have been interested in pigeons for more than their navigational abilities. Pigeons have been proven to be excellent trainees and are capable of symbolic thinking. The psychologist B.F. Skinner used pigeons extensively with his Skinner Boxes, simple devices for training animals by means of positive reinforcement. Skinner's most amazing experiment was to design an early guided missile using pigeons as the guidance system. Pigeons would be trained to recognize a specific target and would continuously peck at the target on a video screen, reorienting the missile. Though the design worked well, the military decided not to fund the project, which was best for the pigeons, as they would have had to hitch a ride on the live warhead. Using Skinner boxes, scientists have trained birds to distinguish between artwork by Chagall and Picasso, with the birds continuing to identify more work by the two correctly after the training period.
Pigeons are not always so loved by scientists. Courtney Humphries, in her book Superdove, talked to a biologist from Montreal named Louis Lefebvre. While studying innovation in birds he had tested street pigeons against two wild bird species. He created a Plexiglas box full of seed that the birds could only open by pulling drawers or removing lids, looking at how innovative they could be in finding food in new ways. He expected the pigeon to fail, but they were much faster than expected:
"the average bird of their family, pigeons and doves- is really really dumb at that. The only conclusion is there's something special about pigeons that is different from other Columbiforms, and the most plausible thing is that they're feral... Pigeons are good at innovation for the wrong reason, because of artificial selection. It's not interesting; they're a special case... (The pigeon) will be doing what it does partly because of that very specific regime of domestication that it went through for thousands of years... They're a unique case in nature."
A Personal History
As part of my graduate studies, I had been making artwork about pigeons for about 2 years when a chance encounter led me to an amazing project that eventually became my master’s thesis work. The accumulated stuff I had been collecting and making in grad school needed a place to go, and I decided to check out getting a small Portable On Demand Storage unit, or PODS.
During my visit to the warehouse I got into a discussion with a surprisingly chatty employee. I described what I was wanting to store and, responding to his questions, described my artwork. He became very excited when I told him about the fancy pigeon paintings and asked me, “Have you ever heard of Red Lahore?”
The man who called himself Red Lahore was born in 1934 in Michigan and grew up in the town of Harbor Beach on the shores of Lake Huron. He enjoyed a small town, upper middle class childhood. He writes in his journal that his first exposure to the concept of pigeons was when they would drive across the thumb of Michigan to visit Flint or Detroit:
We would pass through the town of Pigeon sometimes. It was probably the name that struck me as funny at first. It is a funny sounding word after all. But eventually it became interesting because I never saw a pigeon in Pigeon. I would ask my father about it, but he didn’t have an answer except that “there must have been pigeons there once!” He would say that they were lucky they were gone. I didn’t really understand why he thought that. The few pigeons I had seen in Harbor Beach hadn’t seemed very bad. It wasn’t until years later when I was at Duke that I realized that the name must have come from the Passenger Pigeon, hunted to extinction in Michigan and Wisconsin.
Lahore eventually pursued his PhD in Zoology at Duke University in Durham NC. He would have completed his PhD in 1965, and though there has been no evidence found of his doctoral dissertation (due to the fact that his real name is still unknown), he did possess in his notes, which were stored in his PODS unit, a copy of a paper titled, Sun Compass Orientation of Pigeons Upon Displacement North of the Arctic Circle, which was published in Biological Bulletin in August 1964. In this experiment, pigeons were taken by train to the west coast, then north to Barrow, Alaska. The birds were released at different times and studied. This was an early indication that pigeons rely on multiple forms of navigation depending on their circumstances. I like to think that Red Lahore was that intrepid doctoral student, carrying three trained pigeons by rail north of the Arctic Circle for the purposes of science.
What we do know about Lahore is that after his time at Duke he dropped out of the public realm. His secretive nature made it possible for the PODS employee to give me access to his possessions. He had paid for his PODS in advance, in cash. He had no known address or phone number. He had not been seen in years. What to do with his materials after his lease ran out had been a discussion among the facility for over a year, and suddenly here I was with similar interests and materials. They agreed to hand them over to me.
The PODS unit contained the weathered remnants of several projects. Four poster designs were laid out in his journal and were modeled on propaganda posters from World War II. They hyperbolically extol the virtues of pigeons and degrade the actions of people. For the piece titled Genocide he wrote the following note: “Dripping – bloody text. Red and black background. A picture of Martha, the last of the passenger pigeons. She is perched on her forever perch, a stuffed memory of a lost world”. Another group of work is a breed chart of eighteen fancy pigeons that Charles Darwin was known to have raised, painted delicately in casein. Along with the images of the breeds are hand-written notes about the care of these birds, as well as boxes of specimen jars containing various materials collected either from his own pigeons or wild ones. Finally, the entire PODS itself has been made into a functional pigeon coop, with nesting boxes and a chicken wire door.
Since the coincidental discovery of this amazing work, my role has now become that of a historian and a curator, preserving and interpreting the work of a man that, in another life, could have been me. I have made proposals to show his work in a variety of locations, all publicly accessible. I have displayed his collections, recreated his posters, and contributed to his paintings. If I did not already have plans for my future, a wife, a job and a sense in my head that keeping pigeons is just not something I can allow myself to become obsessed with, I might also have gone down the road that Red Lahore explored. The best I can do to honor this alter ego is to make sure his work lives on so it might perform the task he hoped it would; challenge our unexamined notions of the value of this species, so that we might challenge our notions of the value of all species.
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