Save the ABA! Save the ABA?

Was it Henry Kissinger who coined the bon mot about the battles being fiercest in the academy because the stakes are so low? Whoever is responsible for that little bit of clever, I’m forced to recall it more often than I’d like whenever I ponder the politics of birding. Imagined slights, hurt feelings and trivial jealousies, fears of intellectual and other inferiority: the birding world is immune to none of it, and sometimes I think the slings are slung and the arrows arrowed with such ferocity precisely because birding, really, truly, deep down, doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter, and it’s not supposed to matter: It’s a hobby, for crying out loud, and hobbies (like much of what passes for the academic enterprise nowadays) are per definitionem based solely on the pursuit of expertise for no practical reason. Who really cares–taking the view not just from eternity but from tomorrow afternoon–whether you’re better than anybody else at distinguishing the subspecies of wintering Grasshopper Sparrows, or know more than anybody else about the life and career of Adolphe Delattre, or have a bathroom window list of 500? All that self-stroking feels pretty good while you’re doing it, I suppose, but it makes not an empid’s whit of difference to the course of the world.

But unlike some–most–hobbies, birding (and butterflying and herping and botanizing), pointless as it is per se, can, sometimes even does, lead to a practical and political engagement: by making their practitioners aware of the beauty and the diversity and the enormousness of the physical landscape, natural history pastimes sometimes lead us to open our billfolds and sharpen our spades in an effort to save those landscapes. Observation, in other words, can lead to conservation, and by encouraging new birders, young birders, and beginning birders, we may, just may, be adding to the ranks of those who will fight the next generation’s environmental battles.

And how do we encourage those new birders, young birders, beginning birders? How do we make this and other observational hobbies more appealing to segments of the population who have historically been shut out from an activity so classically male, white, and middle class? It’s an important question, and answers are being worked out quietly, effectively, and locally from Ohio to Arizona. But is there an organization or institution that can bring a national and international view to bear on the promotion of birding and bird conservation in the Americas?

The answer should be obvious, and it isn’t. The American Birding Association should be the hemisphere’s leader in encouraging birders and birding, and it isn’t. With the number of birders in the US estimated to be in the millions–and accurately estimated, I suspect, in the low hundred thousands–ABA membership is well below 15,000 and declining. There are lots of reasons, from cultural and technological circumstances discouraging a “joining” mentality to a general (and unjustified) fear that ABA members must somehow be “elite” birders. But none of those factors should be insuperable to an ABA board aware of them and willing to do something about it.

There is no point in rehearsing the ABA’s regular and repeated cycle of crisis and catastrophe over the decades; many of the episodes are well known, and none of them can be made good now. And as others have pointed out, identifying those who are to blame for this latest and direst approach to the edge will have no effect at all until they themselves develop a sense of responsibility: we need a series of heartfelt mea culpa’s more than any passionate j’accuse here. But I’m afraid we’re going to wait a long time for that.

A word in the interest of disclosure, lest anyone accuse me of hiding my own history with the organization. Like most of the ABA’s “second generation,” I was introduced to the still young group as a high school student in the late 1970s, and immediately became a rabid reader of Birding, which opened my eyes and my mind to a birding world beyond the field guides. By the mid-1980s, I could afford to join, and with a few years off while I was living abroad, have been a member nearly ever since. I’ve published a few articles in Birding and in Winging It over the years, and served as a department editor at the former and as editor of the latter in the middle of (what is now already) the decade just past. I’ve led and tagged along ABA field trips, delivered lectures and talks at conventions, and run the field program at the recent Veracruz conference. And I had a short series of interviews for the position of president this last time around–interviews that resulted in the board of directors’ hiring of someone who has now been let go for what the rumor mill identifies as shockingly good cause. Not the first time, that, in the recent history of the ABA.

Now that the ABA is once again searching for a president, two things, closely connected, need to happen. First, the ABA needs to decide whether the organization is worth saving. And second, the ABA membership needs to be restored to a central position of authority and importance.

Second things first. In 2003, the organization’s bylaws were radically altered to concentrate power (“power”!) in the hands of the board of directors and to largely silence the voice of the membership. I will offer no speculation as to why those proposing the changes did so; what matters is that those changes created an organizational structure that made membership significantly less appealing than it had been when the members actually had some say in what their ABA did. The result has been a radical loss of members and a board that, with very few exceptions, feels no obligation to answer to the membership or to treat the professional staff with anything like respect.

The bylaws, as amended in 2003 and as in effect today,

- allow the board to give as little as ten days’ notice of membership meetings, effectively excluding the vast majority of members from attending (I understand that three members made it to the latest meeting called by the board)

- allow the board to force an individual member submitting proposals to pay for the mailing of proxy materials

- make it procedurally impossible for a member or group of members to call a special meeting

- allow the board to terminate the membership of any member without cause

- allow only the current board to determine who will be nominated for board membership; members of the organization are not permitted to place nominations

- allow the board to notify the members of those nominations as late as 10 days before the election

- allow the board to fill a vacated seat without notice to the membership

- allow the board to call board meetings without notice to the membership, and do not require that those meetings be open to members or to professional staff members of the organization

- allow the board to adjourn a called meeting to another time or place without notice to the membership or to any absent board members

- do not require the Board Governance Committee to report on its evaluations of the board’s fulfilling its responsibilities

- allow only directors to remove directors from the board, making them unanswerable to the membership of the organization

- do not allow the membership to vote to remove officers, who are appointed by the board

This, to put it bluntly, is crazy stuff, and I can assume only that whoever drafted the 2003 amendments did so in utter disdain for the ABA membership and in an inscrutable thirst for what she or he somehow mistook for “power.” It is little wonder that membership in an organization so intentionally top-heavy and so resolutely undemocratic has lost its appeal.

Reversing these changes and restoring the ABA’s focus on its members would go a long ways towards restoring the attractiveness of the organization to potential members. But then the ABA needs to answer an important question: Cui bono?

At the moment, the ABA has two considerable strengths, two aspects of its program that should impress every birder who looks at them. The organization’s publications, under signally able leadership, have maintained their high standard, and their range–a technical journal on distribution and status, an informal and informative newsletter, and the organization’s flagship Birding–guarantees that every member can find something to match her or his level of interest and sophistication. And Birders’ Exchange, with its focus on education and conservation hand-delivered to the areas that need it most, is one of the best-conceived and most successful projects out there–all by itself nearly reason enough to keep the ABA afloat.

Nearly enough. Unfortunately, nothing that the ABA offers the birding community today is “uniquely ABA,” there are no benefits of membership that can’t be got from another source. Whoever takes on the burden of leading the ABA through this next–let’s not say “this last”–phase of its history must identify something that the organization can offer its members that no other group or source can. At a minimum that will mean keeping the publications to their current high standard (and restoring Birding to its full page count) and devoting more resources, more conspicuously, to Birders’ Exchange. But there must also be programming that sets the ABA apart from such fine conservation organizations as American Bird Conservancy, from such wonderful (and ever more national) publications as the WFO’s Western Birds, and from the many local and regional events that offered ultimately fatal competition for the ABA’s conference calendar. Just what those new programs and projects should be I can’t say: but once the ABA has its structural house in order, the new president must be given the board’s full support as she or he works to set the ABA on a new path.

If the board cannot offer that support, or if the board cannot appoint a president with the necessary insight into the American birding community and its needs, then the ABA will be on an old path. And a very, very short one.