Ecco (cover) /Jim Carrier (author)
Book cover with colorful drawings of birds, left; author photo of Trish O'Kane with green leaves in the background.
The last thing I expected when I picked up Trish O’Kane’s new memoir, Birding to Change the World, was that a good two-thirds of it is devoted to Warner Park. Yes, the one in Madison. With the Mallards Stadium.
I knew O’Kane had once lived near the park (Isthmus ran several stories about her efforts there more than a decade ago, including teaching kids about nature and leading efforts to ban fireworks displays due to their pollution of the lagoon) but I didn’t suspect that those actions would be part of a book with “change the world” in the title.
But yes, Birding to Change the World, officially published this week, is set in large part in Warner, a city park that becomes both O’Kane’s laboratory and spiritual home as she launches into a Ph.D. program in natural resources at UW-Madison in 2007. And begins, with the help of UW mentors and Warner neighbors, to become both a devoted birder and a crusader for local nature.
O’Kane, now a lecturer in environmental justice at the University of Vermont, will soon return to her old stomping grounds and read from and discuss the book in a Wisconsin Book Festival event at the Central Library on March 12 at 7 p.m.
The memoir begins as O’Kane moves to a new home in New Orleans — just days before Hurricane Katrina strikes. The storm wipes out everything she has. As she starts over it is with new attention to the natural world. She begins by watching the birds.
When she moved to Madison, she continued watching. “I was birding in the park for my mental health,” O’Kane remembers, in a phone conversation with Isthmus shortly before the book hit store shelves. That was the beginning of her full engagement with birding, her new neighbors, and the neighborhood.
Despite her enthusiasm for the topic, she was dreading writing an academic dissertation. Trained as a journalist, O’Kane says that kind of writing is “not my skill set.” Then her advisor, Jack Kloppenburg, “opened the door to my writing about helping the birds and the park — that I could write about that academically.”
In researching the environmental history of Warner Park, how it changed over time — “the geologic history and the farming history and the wetland history” — O’Kane came to feel that this was “ a story that deserves to be told beyond a dissertation, that this had to be a book for the public.”
O’Kane also felt she had “a moral debt to repay — that the birds in that park and the park itself had helped me so much that I owed it to that place to give that story to the world.”
She warmly credits her neighbors and mentors, who had fought many preservation battles before she arrived on the scene and whose stories she also tells in Birding. A book like this one, thought O’Kane, could “inspire other people to protect their places.”
Fast forward to 2019. Fortuitously, an agent, Barney Karpfinger, read an opinion piece O’Kane had written about birding and teaching, “Of Fledglings and Freshmen,” for the New York Times, and contacted her: “Any chance you’re doing a book? I’d love to talk to you about it.”
This was “a miracle that fell from the sky,” says O’Kane. “I’m still pinching myself. I never thought it would get the second largest publisher in the world (HarperCollins).”
As O’Kane completed the book and Karpfinger was taking it to publishers in 2020, birding was having a moment, as pandemic closures pushed people out into new natural hobbies — like birding. But still, a major publisher jumping at the story of various small environmental battles being fought in a small Midwestern park?
O’Kane thinks the book appealed to editors at HarperCollins because many of them live in New York City and “Warner Park is Madison's Central Park. They could relate to that.”
Plus, many urban parks experience issues of development, pitted against natural preservation. “Any urban area that’s green is going to be contested,” says O’Kane.
Moreover O’Kane discovered in her research that urban greenspaces like Warner act as “gas stations for birds migrating through or over. The Warner Parks of the world provide a vital network of feeding and resting stations for migrating birds facing an increasingly perilous journey."
So it’s not just birding that can change the world. It’s the Warner Parks of the world, and the people who love them. “That place gave me so much,” says O’Kane.
