A short memo to Mr. Pruitt

There were nine of ‘em, perched at the edge of the rotting ice in the middle of Lake Winona.

It was a feast day… some sort of ornithological Easterly brunch or raptor-ous family reunion. They were gorging themselves on the as yet unspoiled spoils of winter, a surfeit of winterkill bluegills bobbing at the surface; an all-you-can-eat post-Lenten fish feast served up by Mother Nature on a sun-drenched April afternoon.

I stood on the shore enraptured, amazed as they bobbed and tore at the bounty laid at their feet, occasionally spreading their great wings to loft their way to a more enticing tidbit. Nine of ‘em…

It could have been a scene straight out of Jurassic Park. With their massive wingspread, gleaming white head and tail feathers, even an ornithological illiterate such as myself can spot a bald eagle from a literal mile away. And there they were, nine of them, not resurrected from extinction in a cinematic fantasy, but in our own Lake Park, alive and free.

It didn’t have to be this way. It darn near wasn’t.

As a boy, I didn’t see eagles. Around here there weren’t any. In fact, in 1963 there were only 487 pairs of eagles counted across the entire continental United States and the consensus was that when those birds flew their last, they’d all be gone.

Unless somebody did something.

Or more precisely unless my parents, and their parents took time out from wiping out polio, going to the moon, and fighting off the international communist conspiracy to do what needed to be done.

The science said that DDT was concentrating in the environment and so weakening the shells on eagles’ eggs that they shattered under the weight of then nesting birds. But DDT is cheap to make, easy to apply, not immediately or apparently toxic to mammals like dogs, cats, cows or humans and deadly toward nasty insect pests like houseflies, body lice, mosquitoes, Colorado beetles, and gypsy moths.

The scientists said we could have DDT or we could have eagles. We couldn’t have both.

Our parents, our grandparents considered the science and pressured the politicians.  They chose the eagles, and in 1967 a Democratic president signed the first Endangered Species Act. In 1970 a Republican president oversaw the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and two years later approved a sweeping ban on the use of DDT.

It took more than 40 years, but yesterday, nine bald eagles were eating fish on the ice in the middle of Lake Winona … that would be fully one percent of all the eagles alive in the United States when I was in third grade.

Today there are more than 10,000 nesting pairs, more than 1,300 in Minnesota, more than 1,000 in Wisconsin. Bald eagles soar over every state in the union, including a pair that nest in the wilds of Washington D.C.

Not bad for a species that was supposed to be extinct years ago.

It wasn’t done easily. It took a willingness to understand and accept the science and the political will and courage to act on what science demonstrated to be reality. And it came at a cost, a cost our parents, our grandparents were willing to pay.

With every decision, there is always a cost. I suppose a dedicated bean counter armed with reams of government documents, budgets, contracts and receipts could put a fairly accurate dollar-cost on each of those eagles eating fish out on the lake; calculate how much it cost to replace a cheap and effective pesticide, and monetize the impact of the change in our habits, priorities and behavior. But at the end of it, we’d still have a question to answer for ourselves: What is a wild eagle worth? What is the value of an environment where eagles swoop and soar, inspiring Americans with their untrammeled freedom?

What would we have lost had our parents, our grandparents chosen to do nothing? Chosen the easy path? Declined to even try?

And what will we do, what will we choose,  to assure that eagles will still soar wild and free above our children, our grandchildren, and all of the children that follow?