Eagles United

Within a few kilometres of our home, there must be a dozen eagles’ nests, great tangles of sticks, often on platforms provided by the conservation authorities, but not uncommonly on high tension electrical transmission towers. The bald eagle, once nearly extinct, has made a remarkable comeback.

Eagles are lucky that two key dates in American history, 1972 and 2010, were not reversed. On the first date, DDT was banned. On the second, the US Supreme Court narrowly allowed the case of Citizens United. Here’s why those dates matter.

In Citizens United, the justices ruled that corporations and other non-individual bodies were entitled to all the free-speech rights of ordinary citizens. Most importantly, this allowed corporations unlimited spending on political advertising and influence. And nobody but the most terminally naive would not have guessed that the certain outcome of this would be that American politicians are now bought and sold on the open market. The bigger and wealthier the corporation, the more politicians they can own. And when you can effectively buy yourself a Supreme Court justice, life is good if you’ve got lots of money.

But back to the eagles. Shortly before 1972, Americans learned that there was a simple reason their national symbol was almost extinct, with fewer than four hundred breeding pairs of bald eagles remaining in the entire country.

The simple reason was dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, commonly known as DDT. Now, everybody had been in love with DDT, because it was such a powerful insecticide, widely applied to crops of all sorts. Modern chemistry led to fewer bugs and better crops. What wasn’t there to like?

What nobody had been paying attention to was that DDT leached its way into streams and rivers and lakes, and through the food chain, became concentrated in the flesh of fish. And fish make up nearly 100% of the diet of bald eagles.

Eagles, not being insects, weren’t particularly affected by DDT. But their eggs were. An unknown (but predictable) side effect of DDT was to cause eggshells to be thinner and softer, so much so that nearly all the eggs of eagles (and other species) were so fragile that most broke open long before the chick was viable. Eagles, quite simply, became unable to reproduce themselves.

The turnaround was very rapid. Just a few years after the US Government, notwithstanding shrieking corporate resistance, banned DDT, the eagle began its comeback, and within a few decades was being spotted again all over North America. Today, they’re everywhere you can find a body of water with fish in it.

One wonders, or perhaps not, what might be the case if Citizens United had been in 1972. Would corporate money have successfully resisted the DDT ban? One can almost hear the lines about “protecting America’s food”, and “standing up for hard-working American farmers”.

America’s national bird is trying to tell us something about money, politics, and unintended consequences.

Perspective.