Blue Nest Beef High Quality Meat

Spring is Still Silent

More than 50 years, Rachel Carson put environmental issues on the map with her book “Silent Spring.”  As a result, DDT was banned, the EPA was formed, and Earth Day was born.

Given the magnitude of that “Carson Shock,” here’s a hard to swallow truth – our spring is still silent.

Since the first Earth Day in 1970, 3 billion more birds have been lost. Grassland birds leading the way with just over 50% loss in populations and just over 76% of species in decline. And looking forward we can see that they face even more grave threats.

Blue Nest Beef Audubon Society BoboLinks

I humbly suggest that we still have the problem because we never fixed the actual problem which in my view is that we confused the nouns for the verbs.  

Life isn’t a thing, it’s a process.  It’s a process that begins when some plant somewhere catches energy from the sun, and then the rest of life cycles that captured energy in more life.  Life, the verb, might be defined as the process by which energy from the sun cycles through living beings both flora and fauna at many scales.

So although DDT was a proximate problem, we failed to recognize that the real underlying problem was the many ways we humans interrupt the process of life.  As a result, we failed to change the ways we more fundamentally interact with our planet.  In reality, we just replaced a few forbidden nouns with new ones that did the same bad things.

In the case of grassland birds, we now understand that drivers of their continued decline include not only pesticides (yes, still), but habitat loss from large scale farming, and direct mortality from farm machinery.

Some people want more rules, but we’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion humans are too good at breaking them.  We think it’s time to let life itself be the judge.

Birds can be both treasure and measure of how good we humans are doing at enabling or impairing life.  Birds are a legitimate conservation goal on their own, and a strong indicator of overall ecosystem health.  If there is no bird food, we have no birds.  If the bird food is poisoned, we get dead birds.  And if we destroy their homes, the birds are just gone.  

Due to both their documented decline and their potential reach, grassland birds make the perfect barometer for how we’re doing on the environment in America.  Importantly, the people who actually touch, by far, the largest fraction of America’s grasslands are ranchers.  How they manage those lands can have a very big impact on birds.  Although it’s complicated, the essence is that when America’s ranchers graze in ways that mimic the behaviors of dense herds of roaming bison, grassland birds come back. 

The National Audubon Society has launched its Conservation Ranching Initiative to promote grazing in a way that brings back grassland birds.  Beef produced with these methods now carries the Audubon “green seal” to let you, the consumer, know that this beef is different.  

But this only works if people like you care enough to buy this better beef.  

Our aim here at Blue Nest Beef is to help make the right thing the easy thing by delivering this 100% grass fed beef direct to your door.  For as little as $2 per day, you can both feed nourishing food to your family and help bring back grassland birds.  So, come on in, look around, and learn more about this better beef with a bigger purpose.  

On the inside, we hope you’ll find our amazingly rich, flavorful and nourishing 100% grass fed beef.   But it what’s the outside the box that really makes us different.  When you buy Blue Nest Beef from Audubon-certified bird-friendly land right here in America, you can make a bigger difference by helping spring to explode with the sounds of life again.

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