Outage and extinction

It’s amazing what can captivate a person’s mind in the span of a week or even a day
just by following the news. 
Paint shortages, cryogenic zoos, emoji origin stories and an assortment of other news
stories caught my attention this past week. Friday’s news of the ivory-billed
woodpecker and another 20 species being declared officially extinct made me sad, but
renewed my fascination with the bird.
All the while I’ve been highly interested in a reporting series by the Wall Street
Journal titled “The Facebook Files.”
Print, web and audio stories on WSJ’s podcast “The Journal” revealed that—to sum it
up—Facebook paid a team of researchers to study its negative influences on society
and then proceeded to shut down the project and do nothing about the problems found
by its “civic integrity” team. 
Weirdly, Facebook and adjoined platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp had a
service outage for several hours on Monday, Oct. 4. 
Like I said—weird—or at the very least, bad timing. 
My relationship with Facebook is, well, it’s complicated. 
I’ve been on Facebook since I was a college freshman—back then it was only
available to those of us with university email addresses. My whole adult life is
archived there to some extent. But Facebook’s business ethics continuously strain my
participation in the platform. 
WSJ’s investigative journalism showed that Facebook acknowledged that its platform
was used openly for human trafficking, had special privileges for celebrities and
elites, had algorithms that furthered discord and division in society and contributed to
mental health problems, especially in teens. 
Despite all this, Facebook seemingly favored profits to reform and defunded its civic
integrity team. 
The whistleblower at the heart of this investigation, Frances Haugen—who also
talked to “60 Minutes” and Congress the week, said this might only get worse if not
corrected. She went on to say that Facebook can’t handle the problem on its own. 
This is understandable considering Facebook’s massive presence in our lives. 
More and more, I want to give up Facebook. But work obligations and the fact that
Facebook is a main way of connecting with people—especially during a pandemic—I
keep using it. If more of my family, friends, and acquaintances used Twitter, Discord
or even snail mail to keep it touch, I’d quickly migrate away from Facebook.
But I am a user, even if the most frequent content is a few niche groups that are good
for a laugh.
Monday I found myself repeatedly opening the app, without thinking, only to realize
again that it was still down. 
Checking Facebook is an entrenched habit, but I found a strange glee when I realized
it was still down after several hours. I may delete it yet. Regardless of whether I do or don’t use Facebook, I hope it cleans up its act and I hope lawmakers pressure the company to do so. 
By the way, you know what never has an outage? Your local newspaper. The Post
Office is pretty reliable, and even if it wasn’t, we’d make sure you got your News-
Shield every week. 

But, back to the ivory-billed for a few paragraphs. 
Even for those who knew the extinction designation was coming, the news was
disappointing. 
In my childhood home a painting of an ivory-billed woodpecker hung on the wall—I
think because my dad, like millions of other people, were fascinated with the
mysterious bird. 
It was huge news when it was reportedly spotted again in Arkansas in 2004 and
2005—for the first time in 60 years. 
Hundreds of people continued doggedly searching for the bird in the swamps of the
Southeast, though to no avail. 
Still, people haven’t given up. I heard a radio interview with Cornell ornithologist
John Fitzpatrick, who said there’s still a lot of ambiguity in whether it is or isn’t
extinct. 
He planned to oppose the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ruling during the 60-day
comment period at least to highlight the importance of managing the southeastern
pine forests and bottom lands as if the bird were still there.
The other day I watched a ghostly black and white video of the bird while listening to
a recording of its call and it brought tears to my eyes. 

The “Lord God Bird” has inspired wonderful songs and a lot of great writing. 
In the Nancy Lord essay, “I Met a Man Who Has Seen the Ivory-billed Woodpecker,
and This Is What He Told Me,” it is described beautifully:
“Eight Seconds. One for the bird flying toward him from deep forest. Two for the bird
landing 12 feet up a cypress trunk and clinging there in profile. Three for the bird
sliding around to the back of the tree, hiding itself. Two for the bird flashing back the
way it came, a single whomping wingbeat and all that white.
“Color. The colossal male crest, of course—the brilliant flame so inescapably,
unignorably red and pointedly tall. The white was more the surprise, down the neck
and across the shoulders like a saddle, and the two large wedges shaped by folded
wings. And the black, the black that was not charcoal, not ebony, only the absolutest
of all blacks, and blacker still beside white.”
Lord writes that the pileated woodpecker is “puny” compared to the ivory-billed. 
Whenever, I’m lucky enough to see a pileated, it’s quite a sight—such a striking bird.
I can only imagine how breathtaking the Lord God Bird was, or even perhaps in some
faraway bottomland, continues to be.

URColumn #27 100621

More news at www.news-shield.com. And have you checked out The News Bell podcast? In the latest episode—the last before taking a break—I interview none other than my co-host Carl Cooley.