Over fifty-one days, Johannes Fritz leads a flock of these unique birds on a migration from Germany to Spain, employing a microlight aircraft and a dedicated team of volunteers. Nick Paumgarten writes about these efforts that he describes as “quixotic.”
Our devastation of nature is so deep and vast that to reverse its effects, on any front, often entails efforts that are so painstaking and quixotic as to border on the ridiculous.
I had an uncommonly intense sense of our implacable need to bend nature to our will, for both good and ill. The air stank of fertilizer, of the excrement we spread to grow food for ourselves. The miracle of flight, the cycle of poop and protein, our elaborate efforts to undo harm: what creatures we are.