In Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel Freedom, lauded for its biting critique of the US environmental movement, a conservationist enters a Faustian pact with a coal miner. He cuts a deal in which a community of 200 families are to be relocated and a mountain denuded in return for the creation of a sanctuary for warblers.

In this week’s New Yorker, Franzen flirts with his own protagonist’s folly by proposing to protect birds by giving up on the fight to slow down climate change. A suggestion that has angered and confused bird conservationists across the world.

Franzen begins his essay with an expression of deep and admirable love for birds, for which he has been a long-time advocate. He “cares more about birds than the next man”, he says. His typically brilliant opening double entendre works as an ode to birds, but also reveals an apathy for his fellow humans. They are beyond help from climate change and thus beyond caring about it. Birds on the other hand have a future. It’s a modern, nihilistic rendition of Byron’s declaration: “I love not man the less, but Nature more.”

“The Earth as we now know it resembles a patient whose terminal cancer we can choose to treat either with disfiguring aggression or with palliation and sympathy. We can dam every river and blight every landscape with biofuel agriculture, solar farms, and wind turbines, to buy some extra years of moderated warming. Or we can settle for a shorter life of higher quality, protecting the areas where wild animals and plants are hanging on, at the cost of slightly hastening the human catastrophe,” says Franzen.

Climate change has the conservation movement in a vampiric embrace, argues Franzen. Renewable energy systems are not only futile, they actively destroy habitat and birds. The world is going to warm and humans should focus on bolstering the species that might survive the cataclysm.

“As long as mitigating climate change trumps all other environmental concerns, no landscape on earth is safe,” he writes. “To prevent extinctions in the future. It’s not enough to curb our carbon emissions. We also have to keep a whole lot of wild birds alive right now.”

Franzen takes particular aim at bird conservation group Audubon. In particular a 2014 report that found half of North America’s bird species are threatened by climate change. Their modelling, he says, is flawed. In fact, under climate change “North America’s avifauna may well become more diverse”. But worse, he says, by campaigning on climate change Audubon have subjugated the immediate conservation interests of birds.

Audubon’s CEO David Yarnold said Franzen’s essay “read like some angst-ridden, Woody Allen-esque lament”.

“The whole piece is a pretty confused piece of thinking. He seems to be saying that people aren’t capable of holding two ideas in their heads at once. That they’re not capable of preserving the places that birds need now, while mitigating the threat of climate change in the future. And there’s absolutely nothing in our experience at Audubon that would lead us to believe that’s true,” he said.

Yarnold said the climate change report had been a rallying cry for their supporters. “It energised them in unprecedented ways,” he said.

Ariel Brunner, head of EU policy at BirdLife, says the Franzen’s demonisation of renewable energy infrastructure does not bear scrutiny.



“Comparing the impact of climate change and the effect of renewable infrastructure on birds is like comparing a tornado to a hairdryer. Renewables are not counterproductive to bird conservation if done properly. The bulk of the mortality is due to windows, buildings and power lines. Climate action and nature conservation must go hand in hand.”

“I think he’s talking nonsense,” says former director of conservation at the RSPB Mark Avery. “All the evidence suggests that climate change will be very harmful to birds.”

A spokesman for the RSPB says enthusiasm for bird conservation and membership was at an all time high. He says the organisation wants “massive growth in renewables”, to counteract the effects of climate change and the majority of projects, if well planned, do not threaten birds.

Birds killed annually by different fuel sources. Photograph: US News and World Report and Thinkprogress

Despite his premise that climate change is foregone, Franzen toys with the language of climate denial more than once in his essay. He refers to the response to the climate crisis as “climatism”, in other words a belief system rather than a rational response to a problem. In calling renewable energy plants a “blight” on the landscape he echoes right wing politicians from England and Australia.



“It was so stupid,” said John Gummer, chairman of the UK government’s Committee on Climate Change. “Down the ages people who’ve said ‘eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die’ have always been wrong and this is another example of it. It’s straightforward hedonism actually. It is the most immoral approach. We are perfectly able to stop the growth in climate change by sensible measures that won’t in any way disfigure the world. The picture he draws is entirely wrong.”

Franzen also echoes climate deniers by refuting scientific modelling. It can be useful for predicting what will happen to bird species under climate change, he says, “but it’s fraught with uncertainties”.

Despite his suspicion of modelling and his employment of denialist tropes, Franzen seems convinced by climate science. “We’re taking carbon that used to be sequestered and putting it in the atmosphere, and unless we stop we’re fucked,” he says.

And yet we’ve done little. “Even in the nations most threatened by flooding or drought, even in the countries most virtuously committed to alternative energy sources, no head of state has ever made a commitment to leaving any carbon in the ground.”

Frantzen writes that climate change has achieved what none of the madnesses of the 20th century could, the final defeat of human reason.

“The great hope of the Enlightenment – that human rationality would enable us to transcend our evolutionary limitations – has taken a beating from wars and genocides, but only now, on the problem of climate change, has it foundered altogether,” he says.

But to give up, as Franzen has, is to truly abdicate sanity, says Bob Ward, policy and communications director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. Franzen’s justice for birds dooms other members of his own species. It also fails to recognise that climate change happens by gradations, each level of which is increasingly bad for humans and birds alike.

“Mr Frantzen is entitled to his point of view but I think few thoughtful people will share it,” says Ward. “As a 55-year-old writer, he may feel he can live out the remaining years of his life in comfort, while ignoring the risks that climate change will pose to those who are poorer or younger than him.

“But sane people will disagree with him because they will be aware of the evidence that the risks of climate change can be managed through the creation of a cleaner and more energy efficient world powered by alternatives to dirty fossil fuel plants.”

There is relief in giving up. “I’d expected to be depressed,” says Franzen after reading Dale Jamieson’s Reason in a Dark Time, in which he finds the justification for his belief that humans are incapable of a response to climate change. “But I wasn’t.”