![Flaco the owl is on the lawn next to the trap.](https://sotp.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Flaco_with_trap-650x366.jpeg)
On April 9, the first bright spring day of the year, more than 70 New Yorkers, students, faculty and staff gathered for some fresh air at Columbia University's Butler Library. why? To learn about owls, of course.
The event „What Flaco Taught Us: Thoughts on the Connection between Urban Wildlife and Humans'' was organized by ecologist Karl Safina and science journalist. claudia dreyfuss.
Safina, who holds a PhD in ecology, is a MacArthur Fellow, founder of a nonprofit organization, and author of 10 books examining the relationship between humans and the living world.
Dreyfuss, who teaches a popular class at Columbia University, „Writing about World Science for the International Media,'' opened his weekly lecture to the public last Tuesday. The invitation drew an audience of several dozen people, many of whom were familiar with Safina's book and Dreyfuss's contributions to the New York Times.
Their conversation, which spanned a wide range of topics from philosophy to pigeons, captivated the audience for nearly two hours and demonstrated how many city dwellers have a deep fascination with the natural world.
The discussion centered around Safina's latest book, „Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe'', in which Safina is involved in the rehabilitation of injured and orphaned scops owls. He detailed his family's efforts. But in telling the story of her relationship with Alfie the owl, Safina explores much broader ideas about humanity's relationship with nature. In particular, he seeks to unravel and resolve our deep disconnect with the world of life.
![Carl Safina and Claudia Dreyfus talk about owls at Columbia's Butler Library.](https://sotp.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Carl-Safina-and-Claudia-Dreyfuss-owls-650x413.png)
![Carl Safina and Claudia Dreyfus talk about owls at Columbia's Butler Library.](https://sotp.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Carl-Safina-and-Claudia-Dreyfuss-owls-650x413.png)
“I have spent all my life with animals,” Safina said. “Still, I was surprised by Alfie's level of empathy and his breadth of understanding of individuals.”
This made Safina think: Why are we so disconnected from the living world? In her latest book, Safina comes to her two possible conclusions. Either human intelligence is limited, or humans are taught to be separate from nature.
Safina began investigating how environmental values differ from culture to culture, and the teachings rooted in comparative religion and philosophy. Of the four major cultural areas he identified: indigenous peoples living on the land, Dharma and peoples of South Asia, peoples of East Asia, and the West, the West's neglect of the physical world was a major Safina found it to be a „total outlier“ when compared to the cultural realm. philosophy and religion. And this devaluation, he argues, is „not an automatic response of the human mind to the natural world and to what lives with us on this planet.“
Instead, Safina tells the audience: length For nature. This is exactly why owls become important.
This phenomenon of yearning for nature was demonstrated by Flaco, the famous Eurasian eagle owl that escaped from the Central Park Zoo last year. Flaco, who charmed New Yorkers by landing on water towers and skyscrapers, was found dead in late February. In the wake of his death, Safina published an essay in the New York Times asking her readers to consider what his death really meant.
“For many of us, Flaco was a person we could relate to,” Safina tells the audience. „He was an alien in New York with an uncertain future and a need for help.'' The room fell silent. „From a human perspective, I think the Flaco legend reflects a kind of hidden yearning for the natural world among New Yorkers,“ he continued. Because there was hope that if Flaco could survive in the city, we too could somehow coexist with the environment. ”
The air became heavy as the audience absorbed Flaco's death, perhaps causing them to reflect on their own relationship with nature. Next, two New York Times photographers, Jacqueline Emery and David Ray, appeared on stage. Claudia Dreyfuss thanked the duo for their work in capturing Flaco's triumphant story on camera.
„The 13 months he spent outside the zoo were a gift to him and a gift to us,“ Jacqueline said with tears in her eyes. At that moment, Flaco's meaning and metaphor became clear. Nature touches us all, even from a distance.
As the night drew to a close, the question-filled audience scrambled for the microphone. My question to Safina was: What advice would you give to fostering the next generation of New Yorkers to connect with nature?
His advice began with a story that recalls a woman who decided to take her children to Botswana for a summer to teach them a love of nature. To this, Safina replied, “Do you have a bird feeder?”
What he meant was that nature is everywhere. And often the most meaningful interactions are those that exist in a person's everyday reality and can be observed and learned from. It's true that big cities have less wildlife than rural areas, but they still have „enough to survive.“
For Safina, who grew up in Brooklyn, it was the pigeons and the dioramas at the Natural History Museum…those meant the world to me. ” Her connection to nature is something she learns from an early age through her parents, environment, and culture, not necessarily from extravagant summer trips.
“We just need to teach our kids in some way,” Safina said. “If you raise your children to enjoy nature, not be afraid of nature, and see nature as part of the family, they will learn that.”
If we learn anything from Flaco's life, and Alfie's, it's that nature influences us all. The plight of these two owls is a reminder that, at the end of the day, our built environment is only a small part of a larger, thriving ecosystem. Something that is both precious and fragile at the same time.