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01 / 05
The Rousseauian Myth of a Passenger Pigeon

Blog Post | Environment & Pollution

The Rousseauian Myth of a Passenger Pigeon

The tragic story of the Passenger Pigeon's extinction is mistaken – or at least incomplete.

On a cliff overlooking the upper Mississippi River in Wyalusing State Park, Wisconsin, stands a peculiar monument: a dedication to a pigeon.

The Passenger Pigeon was a once-plentiful bird that flew over the skies of North America. Surviving records show that billions of birds swarmed together during the breeding season, allegedly blackening out the sun for days on end and forcing people to take cover from the literal storm of excrement from the skies. The largest gathering ever recorded was in 1871 in Wisconsin, with hundreds of millions of birds nesting over an area the size of roughly thirty Manhattans.

Forty years later, the bird was extinct. The plaque on the Wyalusing monument comes with a particularly condemnatory line, penned by conservationist Aldo Leopold: This species became extinct through the avarice and the thoughtlessness of man.” On the centenary of the death of the last passenger pigeon, ornithologists and conservationists banded together in the Project Passenger Pigeon to lament the loss of the species and sound the alarm for other species facing extinction.

The tragedy of the Passenger Pigeon is an environmentalist staple. The pigeon was an emblem of bounty” provided by nature – but its downfall, alleges the science author and journalist Charles Mann, was the result of man’s “squandering of that bounty.” The Passenger Pigeon makes for a good story: a colorful bird, previously existing in unheard-of abundance, fell prey to profit-seeking colonialists, their dirty industries and disregard for nature.

This story is mistaken – or at least incomplete.

Most of the observations of the Passenger Pigeon go back no more than a few centuries. They were accompanied by the typical colonialist awe for the widespread virgin soil and the vast natural emptiness of the land that the latter felt destined to conquer. The colonialists’ mistake, repeated and multiplied by ecologists until this day, was to believe that the pre-Columbian North America was always like that: a place of pristine, uninhabited forests, filled to the brim with game and natural bounty.

As ignorance about native societies gives way to more sophisticated view of the past, many beliefs about pre-Columbian North America have to be updated – including, it seems, the story of the Passenger Pigeon. The extreme state of abundance, in which generations past encountered the pigeon, ought to have sounded alarm bells: How come that they did not have more predators? Could this abundance really be part of a natural ecosystem?

In fact, the peculiar wilderness that confronted colonialists shows all the hallmarks of an ecosystem in sudden disarray. The outbreak populations,” such as that of the passenger pigeon, is what happens when keystone species are abruptly removed from the environment. Contrary to what nineteenth century ornithologists thought, the Passenger Pigeon had not been swarming in the billions before the Europeans arrived. Its bones are almost entirely absent from the native peoples’ archaeological sites. The simplest explanation, argued the late geo-archeologist William Woods, is that Passenger Pigeons were actually quite rare in North America before Columbus.

Feeding on acorns, nuts and grains, the pigeons were ecological competitors of the human population, which survived by hunting, agriculture and forestry. When the native population succumbed to the European “germs and steel,” former’s “close, continual oversight” of the land disappeared. After “epidemics removed the boss,” writes Mann, “ecosystems shook and sloshed like a cup of tea in an earthquake.” The passenger pigeon “burst and blasted, freed from constraints by the disappearance of Native Americans.”

Rather than merely adapting to the environment around them, Native Americans of centuries past transformed nature to suit their needs. In contrast to the story of an industrial man recklessly hunting a species to extinction, the passenger pigeon is a lesson in the dynamics of ecological systems. When the apex predator, who burned the forest and consumed its food, suddenly disappeared, a previously peripheral species saw an initial and unsustainable boom in their numbers. The European writers mistook an ecosystem in disarray for an abundant natural treasure.

While it is true that nineteenth century Americans hunted the passenger pigeon, plowed the land where the bird flourished and deforested the woods where it lived, the natural abundance of North America for which the pigeon has become a synonym is a myth – a figment of rousseauian imagination. The pigeon was rare in pre-Columbian North America, because it competed with native tribes for food and space. While extinction of the Passenger Pigeon was a tragedy, it represented but a return of the land to human management.

Blog Post | Mental Health

The Kids Need Optimism, Not Doom and Degrowth

Not only is the embrace of degrowth misguided, but research suggests that this doomsday mindset is causing widespread anxiety in young people.

Summary: Degrowth solutions to climate problems are environmentally misguided, and also they foster anxiety and guilt in children, damaging the mental health of young people. Technological innovation is the best path to ecological protection and improved living standards. For these reasons, and also for the improvement of mental health, empowering pro-growth solutions to climate concerns are preferable to degrowth and pessimism.


My kids love nature and we go camping as a family frequently, but as a parent, I’m concerned about some of the messaging they receive on conservation. My husband and I talk about environmental stewardship with our children by emphasizing the eco-modernist approach: Human beings have the unique ability to innovate their way out of problems, creating technological solutions that benefit both people and the planet. Unfortunately, children today are often bombarded with messages of an impending apocalypse that can only be warded off by lowering living standards and embracing “degrowth.”

After a movie at her school about garbage in the oceans left her in tears as a teenager, Greta Thunberg came to believe that “technological solutions” and nondestructive economic growth are “fairytales.” But in the years following that formative experience, scientists have invented cleanup ships that consume ocean plastic as fuel and developed a type of plastic that harmlessly dissolves. Since the 1960s, global carbon dioxide emissions per dollar of gross domestic product have steadily declined, as technologies become greener and businesses cut energy costs. Yet Thunberg’s mindset still mirrors the messages she received growing up.

In the United States, many public elementary schools now devote one day during Earth Week to “zero waste” through the reduction of consumption. But it’s also possible to reduce waste through dematerialization: doing more with less via technology. Just think of all the devices a single smartphone replaces.

Even popular culture sometimes promotes this apocalyptic degrowth mindset to children. In a recent animated Disney movie called Strange World, the characters must give up electricity and drink cold coffee to protect a giant turtle-like creature and save their planet. In reality, protecting wildlife and rising living standards go hand in hand: Beloved species such as the loggerhead turtle are rebounding in wealthy parts of the world, which have far more resources to devote to environmental protection than poor areas. Richer countries usually score higher on Yale’s Environmental Performance Index.

Not only is the embrace of degrowth misguided, but research suggests that this doomsday mindset is causing widespread anxiety in young people. More than half of US youths aged 15–29 report experiencing “eco-anxiety,” a level of psychological distress that affects daily life, according to a 2024 poll. Another 2024 poll found that American middle and high school students’ most commonly reported emotional reactions to the thought of climate change were sadness, discouragement, helplessness, and uneasiness. A peer-reviewed paper explains how “climate anxiety can lead to symptoms such as panic attacks, loss of appetite, irritability, weakness and sleeplessness.” And that anxiety is international: A study from 2021, surveying 10,000 children and young people aged 16–25 in 10 countries, found that 59 percent of respondents were very or extremely worried about climate change, and more than 45 percent of respondents said those feelings negatively affected daily life and basic functioning.

On Earth Day, my kindergartner came home from school having been told a familiar message: Riding a bike is better for the planet than driving a car. Her preschool had emphasized the same idea the year before. Many people love bicycles, but as the economist Tyler Cowen has pointed out, outside of poor countries, most people prefer cars to biking—and for good reason. For instance, without our minivan, it would be nearly impossible for my family to get around with three young kids, along with their snacks, spare clothes, and everything else.

Rather than romanticizing bicycling, what if we focused more on technological solutions that make driving cleaner or reduce commutes? That could mean greater freedom to innovate in fuel efficiency, easing regulations that limit electric cars’ potential to compete with traditional cars in the market, or removing outdated government barriers to remote work—such as telemedicine restrictions—to cut commutes. Zoning reform allowing more housing near workplaces could also reduce commutes and the associated pollution.

Instead of rushing to solutions that require lowering living standards via coercive government mandates or expensive taxpayer-funded subsidies, we should focus on the freedom to make technological advances that raise our standard of living while also mitigating environmental harm. An advantage of that approach is that it may also improve the mental health of young people—which would set this mom’s mind at ease.

This article was originally published in the summer 2025 issue of FreeSociety.

CNN | Conservation & Biodiversity

Colossal Biosciences to De-extinct Giant Flightless Bird

“Genetic engineering startup Colossal Biosciences has added the South Island giant moa — a powerful, long-necked species that stood 10 feet (3 meters) tall and may have kicked in self-defense — to a fast-expanding list of animals it wants to resurrect by genetically modifying their closest living relatives.

The company stirred widespread excitement, as well as controversy, when it announced the birth of what it described as three dire wolf pups in April. Colossal scientists said they had resurrected the canine predator last seen 10,000 years ago by using ancient DNA, cloning and gene-editing technology to alter the genetic make-up of the gray wolf, in a process the company calls de-extinction. Similar efforts to bring back the woolly mammoth, the dodo and the thylacine, better known as the Tasmanian tiger, are also underway. 

To restore the moa, Colossal Biosciences announced Tuesday it would collaborate with New Zealand’s Ngāi Tahu Research Centre, an institution based at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, that was founded to support the Ngāi Tahu, the main Māori tribe of the southern region of New Zealand.

The project would initially involve recovering and analyzing ancient DNA from nine moa species to understand how the giant moa (Dinornis robustus) differed from living and extinct relatives in order to decode its unique genetic makeup, according to a company statement.”

From CNN.

Oceanographic Magazine | Conservation & Biodiversity

Maldives Coral Reef Restoration Takes Pioneering Step Forwards

“Coral reef restoration in the Maldives is taking a pioneering step forwards thanks to a cross-collaborative effort between local marine biologists and scientists from the Australian Institute of Marine Science that has engaged groundbreaking new technology to enable reef restoration in some of the world’s most remote underwater locations.

Using this pioneering new, portable reef aquaculture system – one known as ReefSeed – researchers from the Maldives Marine Research Initiative (MMRI) have now successfully reared more than three million larvae and deployed more than 10,000 juvenile corals on 720 seeding devices at nine different reef locations.”

From Oceanographic Magazine.

European Environment Agency | Pollution

European Union Reports Pollution Lower in 2023 than in 2005

“In 2023, emissions of all pollutants were lower than in 2005 (or in 2000 for PM) (Table 3.1).Emission trends for NOX, NMVOCs, SOX, NH3 and PM 2.5 are presented in Figure 3.1. For the main pollutants, the largest reductions, in percent, across the EU were for SOX emissions. SOX reduced by 95% since 1990 and by 14% since the previous reporting cycle. This was followed by NOX,which reduced by 66% since 1990 and by 3% since the previous reporting cycle. NMVOCs reduced by 63% since 1990 and by 4% since the previous reporting cycle. NH3 reduced by 36%since 1990, while the emissions did not reduce since the previous reporting cycle. PM 2.5 reduced by 41% since 2000 and by 6% since the previous reporting cycle.”

From European Environment Agency.