freedom of birds essay

Essay on Birds

500 words essay on birds.

Birds are very special animals that have particular characteristics which are common amongst all of them. For instance, all of them have feathers, wings and two legs. Similarly, all birds lay eggs and are warm-blooded. They are very essential for our environment and exist in different breeds. Thus, an essay on birds will take us through their importance.

Importance of Birds

Birds have different sizes and can be as small as 2 inches and as big as 2.75 metres. For instance, bee hummingbird (smallest) and ostrich (largest). Bird’s existence dates back to 160 million years ago.

There are different types of birds that exist which vary in characteristics. For instance, there are penguins that cannot fly. Further, there are birds that are known for their intelligence like Parrots and Corvidae.

Moreover, we have peacocks which are beautiful and symbolize rain and good weather. Next, there are bats and vultures as well. Birds connect very closely to the environment and are quite intuitive.

They can predict the weather conditions and some are kept near coal mines for the prediction of a mine explosion. It is because they are sensitive to the release of high levels of carbon monoxide. They are quite social and enjoy singing as well. Birds enjoy the freedom of moving anywhere without boundaries.

My Favourite Bird

My favourite bird is the parrot. It is a colourful bird that is present in many parts of the world. It comes in many shapes, sizes and colours. Parrots are famous for having vivid colours.

Some have a single, bright colour while others have a rainbow of different colours. Parrots are usually small and medium in size that mostly eats seeds, nuts and fruits. The lifespan of a parrot depends on its species.

Larger ones like cockatoos and macaws live for 80 years while the smaller ones like lovebirds live for around 15 years. In fact, parrots are quite intelligent. They have the ability to imitate human speech which is why many people keep them as pets.

Consequently, they are also the most sought-after type of bird for commercial purposes. All over the world, people are taking measures to ensure parrots get nice treatment. Many cultures also consider them sacred.

Parrots are highly intelligent and thrive at their best when they are free and not captured in cages. I used to have a parrot when I was little and I never kept it in a cage. It used to sit on my shoulder wherever I went and never flew away. Parrots are my favourite bird.

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Conclusion of the Essay on Birds

Due to hunting, poaching and disruption of the ecological balance, many birds are getting extinct. As a result, birds living in water like swans, ducks and more are also falling drastically in number because of pollution. Thus, we all must take proper measures to help the birds live and save them from extinction. Birds are vital for our ecosystem and its balance, thus we must all keep them safe.

FAQ of Essay on Birds

Question 1: How can we save birds?

Answer 1: We can save birds by doing little things like providing a source of water for them to drink. Further, we can elevate bird feeders and plant native plants and trees for them. Similarly, we can put up birdhouses and garden organically so that birds can feed on insects and worms.

Question 2: Why birds are important in our life?

Answer 2 : Birds are significant for our environment as well as for human beings as they play an important role in every living thing present on earth. Birds are one of the seed dispersers for plants who deliver us food, shelter and medicines and more.

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The Freedom to Bird

I’ve always wanted to fly. I spent my earliest years climbing, leaping, running, and flapping my arms in vain attempts to become an airborne being. I made wings out of cardboard, and tried to float away on umbrellas. None of it worked.

I’m not sure of what my first bird was, but I do know that from a very early age I marveled at the avian ability to sail from place to place—unhindered by the earth’s invisible and imprisoning force. To me flight was magic, and I was entranced.

No one is born a birder. Although I count second grade as the genesis of my birding life, I didn’t “crack the shell” with a pair of binoculars slung around my neck. If we are in fact born with a bird-loving gene, then I think I received a double dose. Behaviorists often cite the influences of nature—what we’re born with—and nurture—what influences us in our environment—as the formative factors in who we become. For me, nature has been an innate love for the outdoors and wilderness. E.O. Wilson, the eminent biologist, has described this as “biophilia.” It is the innate bond or attraction between humans and other living beings—sometimes even entire ecosystems.

Nurture for me was growing up in the middle of a national forest on a family farm. That environment was the cauldron that nurtured my nature. My mother was a biology teacher, and my father taught earth science. They had their own biophilia: tending their own garden and raising our own beef. I spent my days playing outdoors and wishing that I could be like the feathered ones that sung from the trees.

Beyond home, there were other influences that cemented my fate. Up until second grade, my appreciation for birds had been a passive one. But when I reached Mrs. Beasley’s class everything changed. One day she distributed outlines of birds for us to color. The bird on the page was familiar to me. It was a mockingbird (Northern Mockingbird, for those of you with an ornithological bent). I’d seen them around the farm; they sang on moonlit nights outside my bedroom window. As my eight-year-old classmates proceeded to turn their mockingbirds into psychedelic hurricanes, I took out my giant pencil and carefully shaded in my mockingbird with subtle black and gray tones—proof that I was either a birder or terribly unimaginative. Mrs. Beasley began to foster my passion by showing me books in the library that were filled cover to cover with birds. The diversity of species seemed endless; there was always something new to learn and look for. I devoured every book I could get my hands on and read the “birds” section in the Compton’s encyclopedia at home over and over again.

Over the years the passion grew. My best friend through elementary, junior high, and high school was a birder, too. That gave me the confidence to keep going; it was positive peer pressure.

As I prepared for college I envisioned wildlife biology as a career. But others didn’t understand why a young black man would pursue such a “white” profession. After all, what would I do with a degree in zoology? Become a zookeeper? That’s not something WE do!

And so for the first half of my college career, I put my passion aside to pursue a degree in something sensible and more appropriately “black.” I studied mechanical engineering and made decent grades; but there was one problem. I was miserable. One day in my junior year of engineering, I was on my way to class, when I turned back. I never attended an engineering course again. I changed my major to zoology and let birds and other wild things became the driving force in my life again. Studying ornithology in grad school simply tattooed the love deeper on my heart. Now I’m a professor of wildlife ecology at Clemson University, an ornithologist, and, forevermore, a birder.  

We all have a bird story. Maybe it’s hearing a whip-poor-will sing in the dead of night and wondering how it makes its sounds. Perhaps it’s seeing a pigeon fly strong through a canyon of glass and steel and wondering where it’s going. Noticing birds is the essential first step to becoming a birder. That’s it. From there, the sky's the limit.

I am a rare bird: a black birder. Unfortunately there aren’t very many people of color who do what I do. I don’t think it’s because young black and brown people aren’t captivated by birds or nature. I don’t think it’s because folks who are white have a greater appreciation for those things. Like E.O. Wilson, I think it’s born in all of us. We simply need to nurture what’s inside.

I also think it’s a matter of redefining and expanding what a birder is. Color doesn’t limit birds; it simply enhances their lives and our enjoyment in seeing them. I think it should be the same with us.

Pledge to stand with Audubon to call on elected officials to listen to science and work towards climate solutions.

Friday essay: on birds — feathered messengers from deep time

Senior Lecturer, Creative Writing, UTS, University of Technology Sydney

Disclosure statement

Delia Falconer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Technology Sydney provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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When I experienced a great loss in in my early forties — almost a year to the day after another — I went to see my mother in the family home. She wasn’t a hugger or giver of advice, so instead we fed the birds. As she had when I was a child, she stood behind me in the kitchen with her shoulder propped against the back door, passing slices of apple and small balls of minced meat into my hand.

Each bird, apart from the snatching kookaburras, was touchingly gentle in the way it took food from my fingers. The white cockatoos ate daintily, one-legged. The lorikeets jumped onto the sloping ramp on both feet, like eager parachutists, to quarrel over the apple and press the juice from the pulp with stubby tongues.

Lined up on the veranda rail, the magpies cocked their heads to observe me before accepting meat precisely in their blue-white beaks. They had a beautiful, carolling song, with a chorded quality in the falling registers. But the bright-eyed butcher birds had the most lovely song of all: a full-throated piping, which I’ve heard compared to the Queen of the Night’s aria in Mozart’s Magic Flute.

Over decades, a family of these little blue-grey birds, had come to stack their hooked meat-eaters’ beaks with mince, which they flew to deliver to young somewhere in our neighbour’s garden, though we had never bothered to try to work out where they lived. This afternoon, when my mother and I opened the door, they landed by our side as they always had, having spotted us from their watching places. For a brief moment, surrounded by these vital creatures, I felt as if I might still want to be alive.

Small agents

Birds have always been small agents charged with carrying the burden of our feelings simply by following the logic of their own existence. The Irish imagined puffins as the souls of priests. The ancient Romans released an eagle when an emperor died in the belief it would “conduct his soul aloft”. In the Abrahamic religions, doves are given powers of revelation. We have even been inclined, right up until the present, to imagine birds as the souls of our recently departed returned to us, if only for a moment.

Even without being recruited into such labour, birds touch on our lives in small but significant ways. Once, in the botanical gardens of Melbourne, a boyfriend laughed until he almost cried at the mechanical, eager hopping of the tiny fairy wrens, a fact that only made me like him more. A friend tells the story of her uncle who ordered quail for the first time at a restaurant and cried when he saw it on his plate. “She had a raven’s heart, small and obdurate,” American author Don DeLillo writes of a nun in Underworld ; it is my favourite description in any novel.

In Japan, where my partner and I tried to ease our sadness, the calls of crows were ubiquitous in every town. Like the low sounds of its deer, they had a subdued, almost exhausted quality, as hollow as the bells that are rattled to call the oldest spirits to its Shinto temples.

In 1975, when his first wife left him, Masahise Fukase began to photograph these birds, which he had seen from the window of a train. He would keep taking their pictures – on a hilltop tori at dusk, grouped on the budding branches of a bare tree, in flying silhouette – for ten years. Ravens would become one of the most famous books of modern photography , hailed as a “masterpiece of mourning”. While some people see the birds in his photos as symbols of loneliness I see them as embodiments of pure intention. “I work and photograph to stop everything,” Fukase said. As if fulfilling a prophecy, he would spend the last two decades of his life in a coma, after falling down the stairs at his favourite bar.

Yet for all our emotional investment in them, we’ve never treated birds particularly well. To train a falcon in Qatar, owners sew the young bird’s eyes shut, unstitching and then restitching them for longer intervals, until it is entirely dependent on its keeper. In Asia the appetite for caged songbirds is so great that their calls are disappearing from its forests. Our careless acceptance that these extraordinary creatures are subject to our will is perhaps as damning as any direct mistreatment of them. This is symbolised for me by that fact that, in North America, owners of long pipelines add a putrid odorant to the natural gas they carry so that turkey vultures, circling over the deathly smell, will alert them to methane leaks.

We are currently draining marshes globally three times faster than we are clearing forests. Migratory Red Knots fly 15,000 kilometres per year between Australia and their breeding grounds in the Arctic Tundra, but they’re declining because of the industrial development of the Yellow Sea’s tidal mudflats, where they stop to feed and rest. One of the details that most haunted me in the reports of Australia’s mega-fires was the fact that many birds that survived the radiant heat would die of smoke inhalation because the continuous one-way airflow of their breathing systems and air sacs meant they couldn’t cough to clear their lungs.

When we first moved into my childhood home, wattlebirds fed in the grevilleas, calling from the rockery with voices that sounded, as a poet once said to me, like the cork being pulled from a bottle of champagne. While their long forms ending in a slim, curved beak seemed the embodiment of alertness, they were the birds our cat caught most often. To see one, rescued but internally injured, vomit up its honey and grow limp was one of my first intimations as a child of the world’s evils. Unable to bear the thought of their sleek, streaky bodies in the bare earth, my mother would bury them wrapped in tea towels. But it was the 70s and no one thought to keep the cat inside.

As my mother entered her nineties, her life contracted around her birds. Although experts were now advising that the lack of calcium could soften chicks’ bones, I continued, against my conscience, to put through her weekly grocery order, which contained as much bird mince as food for herself. She had stopped feeding the cockatoos, which had chewed her windowsills and the struts of the back door, but when they heard us in the kitchen they would still plaster their chests like great white flowers against the window or poke their heads through the large holes they’d made over the years in the door’s wire fly screen.

But it was only the butcher birds that ever entered through these gaps to wait for her by the sink, feathers fluffed calmly. Once or twice, one would come and find her in the dining room and quietly walk back ahead of her to be fed. When I came with the children, she would press food into their hands as she stood behind them at the door, leaning against the kitchen counter for support. So she continued to be one of the estimated 30 to 60% of Australian households that fed wild birds, a statistic that suggests that we need them far more than they need us.

Scientists began to think in the 19th century that birds might have evolved from dinosaurs, when the 150-million- year-old fossil skeleton of Archaeopteryx — which we now know was capable of short bursts of active flight — turned up in a German quarry.

The Victorian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley observed the bony-tailed, feathered fossil’s striking resemblance to small dinosaurs like Compsognathus and proposed that it was a transitional form between flightless reptiles and birds. Huxley’s theory fell out of favour until the last decades of the 20th century, when a new generation of palaeontologists returned to the similarities between the metabolisms and bird-like structures of dinosaur fossils and birds, and there is now a consensus that birds are avian dinosaurs. That the birds with which we share our lives are the descendants of the hollow-tailed, meat-eating theropods is a true wonder that never fails to thrill me.

Birds, like us, are survivors. They escaped the Cretaceous-Paleogene (or K-Pg) mass extinction event 65 million years ago: the fifth and last great dying in the history of our planet, until the Sixth Extinction taking place around us now.

Scientists were able to work out, from unusually high deposits of rare iridium (which mostly comes from outer space) in the Earth’s crust that a ten-kilometre-wide asteroid hitting the area that is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula had killed off three quarters of the world’s living creatures by causing forest fires and then a freezing “nuclear winter,” which inhibited photosynthesis and rapidly acidified the oceans. Its blast was thousands of times more powerful than the combined force of all the nuclear weapons in the world today. The dust and debris it dispersed into the atmosphere eventually settled into a thin grey band of iridium-rich clay, which came to be called the K-Pg boundary and, above it, no trace of a non-avian dinosaur can be found.

In historical ironies whose obviousness would shame a novelist, it was geophysicists looking for petroleum in the 1970s who would discover the existence of the Chicxulub crater. Walter Alvarez, who discovered the “iridium anomaly”, was the son of physicist Luis Alvarez, a designer of America’s nuclear bombs, with whom he posited the asteroid strike theory; Alvarez senior had followed in a plane behind the Enola Gay to measure the blast effect as it dropped “Little Boy” on Hiroshima.

The ground-dwelling, beaked avian dinosaurs were able to scratch out a life for themselves in the ferny “disaster flora” that replaced the obliterated forests; their intelligence, their feathery insulation, their ability to feed on the destroyed forests’ seeds, and to digest the “hard, persistent little morsels” as one writer puts it, would help them to survive, and later flourish.

More incredibly, these dinosaurs were already recognisably bird-like, inside and out; capable of at least short horizontal flight like quails, the parts of their brains that controlled sight, flight and high-level memory as expanded as those of modern birds’, while our early mammal ancestors — small, nocturnal, insectivorous, shrew-like mammals — were hiding in clefts and caves.

It is now thought that the world’s oldest modern bird, Asteriornis maastrichtensis , could probably fly and was combing the shallow beaches of today’s Belgium, in the way of modern long-legged shore birds, 700,000 years before the K-Pg mass extinction.

Because of a wealth of new fossil evidence in China, we now also know that feathers are far more ancient than we once thought; they didn’t evolve with birds 150 million years ago but are instead probably as old as dinosaurs themselves. In fact, many of the dinosaurs that we have been trained to think of as scaly, were at least partially feathered, including the fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex , which may have used its primitive feathers, like a peacock, for display.

Powerful electron microscopes have allowed scientists to determine that the long filaments covering 150-million-year-old Sinosauropteryx , the first feathered non-avian dinosaur discovered, in China, in 1996, were “proto-feathers”; and even, looking at the melanosomes inside them, that they were ginger, running in a “Mohican” pattern down its back and ending in a stripey white-and-ginger tail. Similar examination of the melanosomes of another Jurassic-era theropod found that it had a grey-and-dark plumage on its body, long white and black-spangled forelimbs, and a reddish-brown, fluffy crown.

Scientists are puzzled about what dinosaurs’ feathers, which developed before the capacity of feathered flight, were “for”, but I don’t really care: the fact of them is startling enough, along with the imaginative readjustments we have to make in seeing the fearsome creatures of paleoart that we grew up with, locked in orgasmic conflict, as softly plumaged. Did their young call for them with the same open-mouthed yearning as baby birds, I wonder? Did they possess their own sense of beauty? If we imagine dinosaurs as being less alien and fluffier, does it make our own era’s potential annihilation seem more real?

Read more: Meet the prehistoric eagle that ruled Australian forests 25 million years ago

Over the last century folkorists and psychoanalysts have kept trying to account for birds’ deep hold over our imaginations; as agents of death, prophets, ferriers of souls, omens, and symbols of renewal and productivity. Some attribute it to the power of flight and their ability to inhabit the heavens, others to the way eggs embody transformation. But could it be that the vestigial shrew-like part of ourselves has always recognised them instinctively as the emissaries of a deep past, much older than we are? “We float on a bubble of space-time,” writes author Verlyn Klinkenberg , “on the surface of an ocean of deep time”.

Recently, this deep past has begun to reassert itself as, even during coronavirus lockdowns, burned fossil fuels continue to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, bringing its concentration in the air to levels not seen since the Pliocene three million years ago when the seas were 30 metres higher. To try to help us understand the literal profundity of this moment in the history of the earth, writers have been looking increasingly below its surface, far beyond the human realm, to its deepest, billions-of-years-old strata.

In his astonishing Underland , English writer Robert Macfarlane travels physically far underground into caves, mines, and nuclear waste bunkers, to revive our ancient sense of awe as forces and substances once thought safely confined there begin to exert themselves above ground, but also to convey the enormity of the long shadow we will cast into the future of a planet that has already seen periods of great transformation.

In Timefulness , geologist Marcia Bjornerud argues that understanding the Earth through her discipline’s vastly expanded time-scales can help us avoid the almost unthinkably grave consequences of our actions. We live in an era of time denial, she writes, while navigating towards the future with conceptions of the long patterns of planetary history as primitive as a 14th-century world map. And yet, she writes, “as a daughter, mother, and widow, I struggle like everyone else to look Time honestly in the face.”

Yet here, I think, all around us on the surface of the planet, are our vivacious and inscrutable companions, feathered messengers from deep time, who still tell their own story of complex change.

What lives and dies

At a writer’s festival in northern New South Wales, I remember, a magpie lark landed between the chair and speaker on stage to let forth a cascade of liquid notes, “as if, to say,” a droll friend sitting next to me said, “I too have something to contribute!” while I found myself wondering, yet again, how something with such a small heart could be so alive.

To think about dinosaurs, as evolutionary biologist Steven Brusatte writes , is to confront the question of what lives and what dies. To think that dinosaurs were far more complex than we imagined, Klinkenberg muses, interrupts the chain of consequence we’ve been carrying in our heads, which assumes that deep time’s purpose was to lead to us as the end point of evolution. The history of feathers and wings, in which the power of flight appears to have been discovered and lost at least three times, shows that evolution is not a tree, but a clumped bush. And yet, Klinkenberg writes, “Because we come after, it’s easy to suppose we must be the purpose of what came before.”

The same could be said of mothers. When the time came to choose the photographs for my mother’s funeral, the images of her as a child in Mexico and Canada seemed as unreal as dispatches from the moon. The photographs of our mothers as young girls are so affecting a friend wrote to me, because they show them living lives that were whole without us. Now my own children turn their heads away from pictures of me as a girl, because, they say, “You don’t look like you.” And yet, if our minds struggle to encompass the deep time of our mothers, I think, how can they hope to stretch across aeons?

On my last visit to my mother, I left her on her front step throwing meat to the two magpies which had learned to come around from the backyard, away from the other birds, and would follow her on stilted legs around the garden. When she pressed her emergency pendant the next morning, I missed her call; it was my partner, hearing her faint answers, who called the ambulance. Unconscious in the hospital, she died having never known that she had left her home. When I stopped back at the house afterwards, one of the butcher birds, which I had never seen around the front, was on the windowsill of her dark bedroom, break pressed against the glass, looking for her.

This is an extract from Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss by Delia Falconer, published by Simon and Schuster.

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Birds as a Symbol of Freedom in "Tess The D'ubervilles"

• Categories: Tess of the D'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy

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• Symbols of Freedom: Sea and Birds in The Awakening

Symbols of Freedom: Sea and Birds in The Awakening - Essay Example

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Bird's Dream: Balancing Freedom and Human Companionship

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Birds of Prey: Freedom of the Will and the Value of Genealogy

This commentary is part of The Atlas Society's 2000 online "CyberSeminar" entitled " Nietzsche and Objectivism ."

Abstract: I will be addressing two issues in this review essay: freedom of the will and the value of genealogy.

FREEDOM OF THE WILL

In On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche explains the basic relationship between adherents of master and slave morality using an analogous relationship between birds of prey and tasty little lambs. What is so intriguing--and troubling--about this analogy is that it spotlights Nietzsche’s rejection of free will. How is any discussion of morality to proceed without that premise of freedom of will?

The analogy (found in Essay I, section 13) describes a predatory relationship between the birds of prey (the masters) and the lambs (the slaves). Acting in accordance with their natures, the birds of prey consume the terrified and tasty little lambs. The birds of prey are strong, exploiting the lambs as they see fit. The lambs, on the other hand, are weak and unable to physically defend themselves against the birds of prey in a contest of strength. And so the lambs use what power they have: they decry the birds of prey as evil, as capable of choosing to be lambs instead, and therefore as responsible for their plunder. But how ridiculous it is to demand that birds of prey be lambs! One animal cannot change to become another.

It is just as ridiculous, in Nietzsche’s view, to demand that masters ought to be slaves. Their nature is to be masters--to dominate, to exploit, to expand their power. If the slaves are unhappy being dominated and exploited, then tough luck, as such is their lot in life as the weaker beings.

The troubling part of this analogy is that it requires us to discard our common conceptions of freedom of will. Nietzsche argues in this section that the “seduction of language” has given rise to an inappropriate emphasis on *doers* rather than on the *deed*. The slaves “exploit this belief for their own ends” and thereby ardently hold that “the strong man is free to be weak and the bird of prey to be a lamb” (BGE I 13). As a result, the slaves “gain the right to make the bird of prey *accountable* for being a bird of prey” (BGE I.13).

How is any discussion of morality to proceed without that premise of freedom of will?

Despite this challenge to free will, it would be overly simplistic to call Nietzsche a determinist. He is just as opposed to the concept of an “unfree will” as he is to a “free will” (BGE 21). Rather, Nietzsche is opposed to free will in the “metaphysically superlative sense” in which one is “causa sui...[able] to pull oneself into existence out of the swamp of nothingness by one’s own hair” (BGE 21). According to Nietzsche, there are dark drives and unknown impulses that influence our actions, perhaps more than our own conscious purposes do. He writes:

“People are accustomed to consider the goal (purposes, volitions, etc.) as the *driving force*, in keeping with a very ancient error; but it is merely the *directing force*--one has mistaken the helmsman for the stream. And not even always the helmsman, the directing force” (GS 360).

The stream (our unconscious drives) takes us in one direction rather than another; it pulls us faster or slower. The helmsman (conscious purposes) merely guide us within the confines set by the stream. For Nietzsche, it is hubris for us to pretend that the stream does not exist or that the helmsman could go upriver if he wanted to.

There are two limited aspects of Nietzsche’s views here that I can support. First, the view of free will that Nietzsche is attacking is one unaffected by one’s past or outside forces. Second, the analogy of the helmsman on the stream fairly accurately describes someone who is choosing to keep the light in the consciousness dim.

First: Nietzsche seems to be attacking a Kantian notion of freedom of the will, one in which the “thing in itself,” unconnected to the world of experience, is doing the choosing. The Objectivist view of free will, on the other hand, recognizes that our choice to think is influenced by the incentives provided by our history and the external world. Ayn Rand argued:

“A social environment can neither force a man to think not prevent him from thinking. But a social environment can offer incentives or impediments; it can make the exercise of one’s rational faculty easier or harder; it can encourage thinking and penalize evasion or vice versa” (Rand, TO, Apr. 1966, 2).

In other words, although we are, in the end, making the choice to think or not ourselves, that choice is not occurring in some higher realm, insulated from the influences of experience.

Second: The Objectivist view of free will recognizes that when people choose not to think, when the light in their consciousness grows dim, their choices are then influenced by the “stream” of unconscious drives and external forces that Nietzsche described. A person choosing not to think is like a sleepy helmsman, barely able to keep the boat from crashing into the bank.

Additionally, I should mention that Nietzsche might not see the “stream” in this analogy as something we are placed upon without our consent. For Nietzsche, the instincts that unconsciously govern our actions are not necessarily biological ones; we can create our own instincts by forgetting the conscious purposes that drive our actions (GM II.2). In this sense, instincts for Nietzsche are similar to Aristotelian moral dispositions. Thus, the nature of the stream could be governed by the past choices we’ve made and the instincts we’ve developed.

Nietzsche’s views on free will and causality are extremely complex, perhaps somewhat unintelligible. Nevertheless, he ought not be dismissed as a determinist. Not only do his explicit writings on the subject disavow such a position, but also, in general, his writings on morality largely indicate some freedom of the will.

THE VALUE OF GENEALOGY

Nietzsche, particularly in Beyond Good and Evil , relies upon genealogy as a method of philosophical analysis in order to undercut the altruist ethic. In his Feb. 5th review essay , Jason summarized the value of genealogy as follows:

“Nietzsche’s genealogy serves, first, to separate the content of morality from the subject itself, by showing the actual, historical development of different and indeed opposite conceptions of morality in history. The second purpose is to show the historical contingency of ‘moral’ valuations altogether; that, is, Nietzsche hopes to dispel the aura of morality ‘in itself’ and any intuitive morality of altruism by showing the purposes for which morality has been used, and by showing that morality originated in pursuit on values.”

The method of genealogy, however, does not seem like the best tool with which to accomplish these two goals. Additionally, I have serious reservations about a philosophical method in which the truth is apparently irrelevant, as Jason indicated.

The connection between Nietzsche's and Ayn Rand's ethics is superficial at best.

The first goal, separating the content of morality from the subject, largely requires avoiding the most common method of moral theorizing: starting from presumptions about what constitutes moral behavior and then building a theory around those presumptions. As for what positive method should be used, we ought to start with fundamental questions, ones that do not presuppose moral content, namely “What are values? Why does man need them?” (Rand, VOS 15) Hoping to separate subject from content by historical investigation is much less likely to be fruitful. For example, just about every moral theory has presupposed fundamental conflicts of interests between individuals. A historical investigation will fail to reveal that this premise is questionable. The fact that Nietzsche’s own moral theorizing fails to uproot or even question this basic presupposition indicates a failure of the genealogical method.

The second goal, of dispelling the “aura of morality ‘in itself,’” could well be useful as a rhetorical tool, for those who believe in the holy sanctity of their moral principles. But given the lack of proof for the results of Nietzsche’s genealogical theorizing, probably mostly the young and naive would be seriously shaken by the arguments. Nevertheless, it is clear that Nietzsche views his genealogical method as more than mere rhetoric. He presents the “just-so” story of the origins of master and slave morality as an actual theory (although not necessarily fact), not mere supposing based on weak evidence. For Objectivists, this is fairly problematic; a philosophical method simply cannot be impervious to the truth.

The real question here for Objectivists is whether Nietzsche’s genealogical method into the master and slave moralities bears any resemblance to Ayn Rand’s investigation into the basic questions of ethics. As with Eyal Mozes , I think the connection is superficial at best. Rand’s questions were not designed, as were Nietzsche’s, to demystify altruistic ethics. Rather, the goal was to start at the beginning, to examine all premises, so that correct conclusions could be reached. Rand’s method was to use truth to dislodge false ideas about the bond between altruism and morality; Nietzsche’s method is essentially to use unproven (and perhaps unprovable) allegations to attempt to do the same.

Nietzsche has always been a great favorite of mine, but as the years go by, I find myself more and more disturbed by the incoherence of his philosophical writings. Nietzsche was obviously not interested in “system-building” in the ways that Aristotelians, Kantians, and Objectivists are. Nevertheless, even without a system, my brain craves some kind of consistency and regularity from his writings.   For your information, Richard Schacht’s book Nietzsche is an excellent and very comprehensible overview of Nietzsche’s thought, although perhaps too comprehensible of an overview. I worry that it tends to take the principle of charity too far; it makes Nietzsche out to be somewhat more reasonable and systematic than he is, in my view.    

Response by William Dale

Response by Christopher Robinson

Response by Thomas Gramstad

A Vitiated Jury

Tas vs. ari: a question of objectivity and independence.

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Essay on if i were a bird 3 Models

Essay on if I were a bird, an interesting topic that expresses our beautiful dreams, we present several models such as, a short essay on your dream of being a bird, a paragraph about the world of birds, why do you want to become free like birds, the beauty of birds and the diversity of their forms, the language of birds, essay on children’s imagination and their love for birds and when adults wish to be like a bird, all of which you will find in the essay on if I were a bird.

Many times we wish to fly away in the sky as birds fly, and that remains an impossible dream. But it is enough to fly with our imagination to the fullest extent, in fact, not everything we want is achieved. But many times we find happiness in dreaming about something that is impossible to achieve.

Essay on if i were a bird

There is no doubt that our dreams when we were young were innocent and beautiful dreams, and in the essay on if I were a bird we will learn about these dreams.

Childhood is a stage in which we can imagine and dream of things that are impossible to achieve, such as being a bird, and the strangest thing is that we feel confident that we will achieve our dreams. Children live in a world of imagination that makes them happy, and when we grow up and realize what is around us, we give up those innocent dreams, live reality and search for real dreams related to our lives and our future.

But adults too often resort to fanciful dreams, and in the essay on if I were a bird I will explain the reasons for a reasonable adult to wish to be a bird. There are certainly many reasons, such as his desire to escape from problems and burdens, or the search for freedom, and others.

If I were a bird

In the early stages of my life, when I was six years old, I used to watch the birds in the early morning, as they stood on top of the tree, and moved from branch to branch while making beautiful sounds indicating that they were happy.

Their colors were beautiful, and it makes me happy when I look at them. Their voices indicate that they are happy, and their movements indicate that they are graceful.

The sound of the birds early in the morning was very beautiful, indicating their joy at welcoming a new day. The birds then set out to search for food. They fly in organized groups, and do some displays in flight. They fly in the form of a row at once, or in the form of the letter V, and sometimes they fly in several rows.

I look at birds and admire their shapes and colors, as well as their beautiful voices. All of this made me wish to be a bird, and in the essay on if i were a bird, I will imagine what would happen if I were a bird? And I imagined the following:

What would I do if I were a bird?

If I were a bird I would do all the beautiful things, I would fly from bough to bough, from tree to tree, and stand on a mulberry tree, and eat of it every day. Berries are my favorite fruit.

As I can fly to far places and see different cities, I will spend my whole day playing and having fun. I return to my nest as the sun sets, sleep through the night and wake up early in the morning.

The most beautiful thing about the life of birds is that they play for a long time, they do not have to come to school, and they do not have any homework.

I would sum up everything I like to do if I were a bird in the essay on if i were a bird:

• The first thing I would do if I were a bird was I would build my nest on a branch of a mulberry tree, for I love berries very much, and I would eat plenty of them. I could eat berries for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This is a fun thing.
• If I were a bird, I could fly between different fruit trees and eat fresh fruit in the morning, lunch and evening, and at each meal I would eat a different kind of delicious fruit.
• I imagined myself flying with a group of colorful birds, moving from tree to tree, and from branch to branch.
• I imagined my voice as sweet as birds, that I understood their language and talked with them, and told them where to eat, how far the wheat field was from us, and in what direction we should fly.
• I also imagined myself to be the leader of the group of birds, I would fly in front of them and they would fly behind me, and I would guide them to the place of water, where there is a freshwater lake 2 km away.
• If I were a bird, I would fly over gardens and places not for the public, and I would see things that most people cannot see.
• And I imagined that I was flying over my house, and I saw my mother, father, and brothers, and I was standing at the window of my room and making beautiful sounds so that my brothers would wake up and go to school.
• I can also fly over my school, to see my friends in class, and stand on the tree in the school yard to see my friends playing soccer.
• In fact, despite the beauty and happiness of the birds, I felt nostalgic for my family, my home, my friends, and my school. That’s when I realized that my life with my family is the most beautiful life I can live, and I can enjoy the beauty of birds without being a bird.

Escape from reality

I will talk about the dreams of adults. Did you know that adults also wish they were a bird that flies freely in the sky, moving from place to place, and from country to country without a passport, visa, ID or money. And in my essay on if i were a bird I will make this clear:

Often a person feels like a prisoner, unable to move from one place to another freely. There are many restrictions that countries have put in place to control the movement of individuals.

These measures may hinder the gathering of family members, or a person may not be able to take his wife or children with him except for a short period of time. Surely these people wish they were birds, flying in the sky and moving from one country to another without restrictions.

Likewise, people who feel injustice and are unable to obtain their rights would wish if they were a bird flapping its wings in the sky, and turning away from anyone who causes harm to it.

Likewise, when there are no political rights and no freedom of expression, a person feels that he is chained with iron chains, and he wishes to be a bird that flies freely from place to place. Thus, we find that the impossible dreams of adults are dreams of escaping from reality.

In fact, both young and old do not see in the life of birds anything but what they lack. Young people are looking for play, fun and joy, and adults are looking for freedom, safety and justice.

But the life of birds also has many dangers, and there is no place in it for laziness or indolence, and they are threatened by hunters, and also by the most powerful birds, which are called raptors such as eagles, falcons, and others.

At the end of the essay on if i were a bird, I have shown the dreams of young children, and why they wish they were a bird. They are beautiful dreams, all of which are innocent and optimistic, and look to the future with joy.

In many cases, the child wishes he was a bird in order to get rid of his homework, or because he wishes to play and have fun like a bird.

On the contrary, the unfulfilled wishes of adults indicate despair and depression, and sometimes indicate a sense of oppression and injustice. In both cases, both the young and the old aspire to be like the bird, because they see in the bird the qualities of beauty, fun and happiness. In addition, they feel that the bird enjoys great freedom, and does not have any duties or rights, as they imagine that the bird lives in absolute happiness, and does not have any responsibilities.

At the end I hope you have benefited from my essay on if i were a bird, and I would love to receive your comments.

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पक्षियों की स्वतंत्रता पर निबंध Essay on freedom of birds in hindi

Essay on birds freedom in hindi.

Freedom of birds – दोस्तों आज हम आपको इस आर्टिकल के माध्यम पक्षियों की स्वतंत्रता पर लिखे इस निबंध के बारे में बताने जा रहे है । चलिए अब हम आगे बढ़ते हैं और इस आर्टिकल को पढ़कर पक्षियों की स्वतंत्रता पर लिखे इस निबंध के बारे में जानते हैं ।

Image source –  https://joyalive.net/#/

पक्षियों की स्वतंत्रता के बारे में – पक्षी बहुत ही प्यारे और सुंदर लगते हैं । पक्षियों की सुंदरता से हमारा मन प्रसन्न हो जाता है । पक्षियों से प्रकृति वातावरण सुंदर एवं स्वच्छ दिखाई देती है । जब सुबह के समय पक्षी मीठी आवाज निकालते हुए एक पेड़ से दूसरे पेड़ पर जाते हैं तब सुबह का वातावरण बहुत ही अनुकूल लगता हैं । मानो ऐसा लगता हैं कि पृथ्वी पर स्वर्ग आ गया हो । जिस तरह से इंसानों में इंसानियत होती है उसी तरह से पक्षियों के अंदर भी एक दया भाव की भावना होती है ।

पक्षी हमेशा प्रकृति को स्वच्छ बनाएं रखने में अपना योगदान देते हैं । परंतु दुनिया में हर तरह के लोग रहते हैं । कुछ लोग पक्षियों को पकड़कर पिंजड़े में बंद कर देते हैं । जो लोग पक्षियों को बंद करके रखते हैं उनको यह एहसास नहीं होता है कि यदि इंसान को जेल में बंद कर दिया जाए तो वह किस तरह से घुट घुट के अपना जीवन व्यतीत करता है । उसी तरह से पक्षियों को भी घुटन होती है । पक्षी भी आजाद होना चाहते हैं । पक्षियों को भी अपना जीवन बड़ा प्यारा होता है ।

पक्षी भी यह चाहते हैं कि वह आजादी के साथ पंख फैलाकर उड़ते रहे और सुबह के समय शुद्ध वातावरण में चहकते हुए  एक पेड़ से दूसरे पेड़ पर जाकर बैठते रहे । जिस तरह से भगवान ने इंसानों को बनाया है इंसान में दया भाव की भावना दी है उसी तरह से पक्षियों को भी भगवान ने बनाया है । पक्षियों के अंदर भी एक जान होती है । भगवान ने इंसान को सोचने समझने के लिए दिमाग दिया है और दया भाव की भावना दी है । परंतु ना जाने इंसान की दया भाव की भावना कहां खो गई है ।

आज का मनुष्य पक्षियों पर अत्याचार करता जा रहा है । पक्षियों को इंसान के द्वारा प्यार करना चाहिए । पक्षियों  को भी  खुले आसमान में उड़ने की आजादी होती है । पक्षियों को पिंजड़े में बंद नहीं करना चाहिए । पक्षियों को पिंजरे में बंद करना एक अन्याय है । मनुष्य को ऐसा नहीं करना चाहिए । व्यक्ति जब तक सही इंसान  नहीं बनेगा तब तक वह पक्षियों के साथ , जानवरों के साथ प्रेम नहीं करेगा और पक्षियों को पिंजरे में बंद करना बंद नहीं करेगा ।

प्रकृति की सुंदरता पक्षियों के बिना अधूरी – जिस तरह से वातावरण को शुद्ध एवं स्वच्छ रखने के लिए पेड़ पौधों की आवश्यकता होती है उसी तरह से प्रकृति को सुंदर बनाने के लिए पक्षियों की आवश्यकता होती है । यदि पक्षी प्रकृति से नष्ट कर दिए जाएं तो प्रकृति की सुंदरता भी नष्ट हो जाएगी । जिस तरह से पक्षियों की प्रजातियां धीरे-धीरे विलुप्त होती जा रही हैं उस तरह से प्रकृति में पर्यावरण प्रदूषण और कई तरह के दुष्प्रभाव प्रकृति पर पड़ रहे हैं ।

मानव जीवन को शुद्ध हवा  की आवश्यकता होती है और पशु पक्षियों की सुंदरता भी मानव जीवन के लिए अति महत्वपूर्ण है   जब हम किसी सुंदर पक्षी को उड़ते हुए एक डाल से दूसरी डाल पर उड़ते हुए देखते हैं तब हमें आनंद की प्राप्ति होती है । पक्षियों को प्रकृति में बनाए रखने के लिए हम सभी लोगों को यह प्रण लेना चाहिए कि हम किसी भी पक्षी को पिंजरे में कैद करके ना रखें । यदि कोई व्यक्ति पिंजड़े में पक्षियों को बंद करके रखता है तो उसे भी हमें यह समझाना चाहिए कि यदि कोई हमें कमरे में बंद करके रखेगा तो हमें किस तरह से परेशानी होगी ।

जिस तरह से जेल में बंद कैदी बाहर निकलने के लिए झटपटाता है उसी तरह से जब हम किसी पक्षी को पिंजरे में बंद करके रखते हैं तब वह आजाद होने के लिए झटपटाता है । एक कैदी को तो बुरे काम करने की सजा दी जाती है परंतु मनुष्य अपनी मानवता को भूलकर एक पक्षी को पिंजड़े में कैद करके बेजुबान पक्षियों के ऊपर अत्याचार करता हैं । हमारे तब तक अंदर मानवता नहीं जागेगी जब तक कि हम पक्षियों को प्रेम नहीं करते और यह नहीं सोचते कि जिस तरह से हमें यदि कोई मारता है तो हमें दर्द होता है उसी तरह से हम यदि पक्षी को मारते हैं या पक्षियों पर अत्याचार करते हैं तो उसे भी पीड़ा होती होगी । वह भी एक जीवित प्राणी हैं ।

उनको भी स्वतंत्रता के साथ अपना जीवन जीने का अधिकार होता  है । भगवान ने मनुष्य के साथ-साथ  पक्षियों को भी  स्वतंत्रता के साथ अपना जीवन  जीने का अधिकार दिया है । पक्षी भले ही जवान से कुछ कह नहीं पाते परंतु वह एक  मनुष्य की तरह ही अपना जीवन व्यतीत करते हैं । यदि कोई व्यक्ति उनके व्यवहार को ध्यान से देखें तो वह पक्षियों की पीड़ा समझ सकता है  ।  पक्षियों को कठिनाइयों से लड़ कर अपना जीवन व्यतीत करना पड़ता है ।

पक्षी अपने भोजन को एकत्रित करने के लिए दिनभर भटक कर , कठिनाइयों से लड़ कर अपना भोजन एकत्रित करता है । कठिन  समस्याओं से जूझ कर पक्षी  अपना जीवन  व्यतीत करता है । हम मनुष्यों को भगवान ने काम करने के लिए दो हाथ , चलने के लिए दो पैर , देखने के लिए दो आंखें , सोचने समझने के लिए दिमाग , सुनने के लिए कान , खाना खाने के लिए मुंह एवं दांत दिए हैं । भगवान के द्वारा एक विशाल शरीर मनुष्य का बनाया गया है ।भगवान ने सभी को इस धरती पर अच्छे कर्म करने के लिए भेजा है ।

कुछ लोग राक्षस प्रजाति के होते हैं जो पक्षियों, जानवरों को मारते हैं । ऐसे राक्षस प्रजाति के लोग पृथ्वी पर , धरती पर बोझ होते हैं । भगवान ने अनाज गेहूं तरह तरह के फल प्रकृति के माध्यम से हम सभी के लिए दिए हैं जिससे कि हम अपने पेट की भूख मिटा सकें । भगवान ने पीने के लिए , प्यास बुझाने के लिए पानी दिया है । परंतु कई लोग अपनी मानवता को भूल कर पक्षियों को नुकसान लगे हैं ।

कुछ लोग यह सोचते हैं कि पक्षियों को मारने से कुछ नहीं होता । परंतु जो सच्चे ह्रदय से पक्षियों से प्रेम करता है , प्रकृति से प्रेम करता है वह इस बात को समझता है कि पक्षियों में भी जीने की तमन्ना होती है । पक्षी भी स्वतंत्रता के साथ उड़ना चाहते हैं , स्वतंत्रता के साथ अपना जीवन व्यतीत करना चाहते हैं ।

तोता एवं कबूतर की स्वतंत्रता के बारे में – आज मनुष्य अपनी इच्छाओं की पूर्ति करने के लिए कुछ भी करने के लिए तैयार होता है । कुछ लोग अपने घर को सुंदर बनाने के लिए और अपने आसपास में पहचान बनाने के लिए कुछ भी कर सकता है । मनुष्य की मानसिकता बहुत ही दुष्कर्मी हो गई है । अपने घरों में तोता को पिंजरे में कैद करके रख लेते हैं और उन्हें बड़ा आनंद आता है । उनको यह पता नहीं होता है की पक्षियों को भी जीने का पूरा अधिकार होता है ।

पक्षियों को भगवान ने आसमान में उड़ने के लिए बनाया है । इसीलिए भगवान ने पक्षियों को उड़ने के लिए पंख दिए हैं । यदि पक्षियों को पिंजड़े में बंद करके रखा जाए तो पक्षी अपना जीवन बहुत ही कष्ट के साथ व्यतीत करते हैं , उनकी दुर्दशा बहुत ही खराब हो जाती है । तोता कभी अपनी दुर्दशा के बारे में हमसे नहीं कह सकता है क्योंकि वह आजाद होने के लिए निरंतर प्रयास करता रहता है ।

आप लोगों ने देखा होगा कि जब किसी तोते को पिंजरे में कैद करके रखा जाता है तब वह पिंजड़े कि जाली को अपने हाथों के माध्यम से खींचने की कोशिश करता है , आजाद होने की कोशिश करता है । यदि 1 मिनट के लिए तोते के पिंजड़े का दरवाजा खोल दिया जाए तो वह पिंजड़े से बाहर निकल जाता है और शुद्ध वातावरण में उड़कर भाग जाता है । उस समय तोते को बहुत अधिक खुशी होती होगी । यदि  जेल में बंद कैदी को रिहा कर दिया जाए तो उसे कितनी अधिक खुशी होती है ।

उसी तरह से तोते को भी अपनी आजादी की बहुत अधिक खुशी होती होगी । बहुत से व्यक्ति कबूतरों के पूरे झुंड को पिंजरे में बंद कर देते हैं और उन कबूतरों को सही समय पर खाना खाने के लिए भी नहीं देते हैं । उन कबूतरों को बड़ा दुख होता होगा । भगवान ने सभी पक्षियों को प्रकृति की सुंदरता बनाए रखने के लिए पृथ्वी पर भेजा था । इंसान को पक्षियों की रक्षा करने के लिए भगवान ने मानवता मनुष्य को दी थी । परंतु मनुष्य अपनी मानवता भूलता जा रहा है ।

निरंतर पक्षियों पर अत्याचार करता जा रहा है । बाजारों में पक्षियों को मारकर उनका गोश्त बेचा जा रहा है । बड़ा दुख होता है जब एक व्यक्ति किसी पक्षी को नुकसान पहुंचाता है । प्राचीन समय से ही पक्षियों पर अत्याचार किए जा रहे हैं । प्राचीन समय में राजा महाराजा पक्षियों का शिकार करने के लिए जंगलों में जाते थे और आसमान में उड़ते हुए पक्षी को मारकर शिकार करते थे । आज पक्षियों को पकड़ कर उनको मार कर भोजन में उपयोग किया जा रहा है । यह दुनिया बहुत ही दुष्कर्मी हो चुकी है ।

सभी अपनी मानवता को भूलते जा रहे हैं । परंतु सभी लोग यह नहीं जानते हैं कि यदि हम प्रकृति के साथ , प्रकृति की सुंदरता के साथ छेड़छाड़ करेंगे तो हम भी मुसीबतों में फंसते जाएंगे । भगवान ने पृथ्वी का संतुलन बिल्कुल बराबर बना करके रखा है । पृथ्वी को हवा , पानी, वायुमंडल , पेड़ पौधे , पशु पक्षियों की आवश्यकता होती है । यदि इन सभी चीजों में से एक को कम कर दिया जाए तो प्रकृति नष्ट होने के कगार पर आ जाएगी और हम मनुष्यों का जीवन खतरे में पड़ जाएगा ।

इस लेख के माध्यम से मैं आप लोगों को यह समझाना चाहता हूं कि हमें पक्षियों से प्रेम करना चाहिए ना कि उनको पिंजरे में बंद करना चाहिए । यदि हम पक्षियों की सुंदरता का आनंद लेना चाहते हैं तो हमें पक्षियों को खुले आसमान में आजादी के साथ उड़ने देना चाहिए और उड़ते हुए पक्षियों की सुंदरता से हमें आनंद लेना चाहिए । यदि कोई व्यक्ति किसी पक्षी को पकड़कर उसको मारने की कोशिश करें या फिर उसे पिंजरे में बंद करने की कोशिश करें तो हमें अपनी मानवता का अधिकार वहां पर निभाना चाहिए और हमें उस व्यक्ति को यह अहसास दिलाना चाहिए कि जिस तरह से इंसान के अंदर एक जान होती है और उस जान की बहुत फिक्र इंसान को होती है ।

उसी तरह से पक्षियों में भी जान होती है वह भी एक अच्छा जीवन व्यतीत करना चाहते हैं , खुली हवा में उड़ना चाहते हैं । पक्षियों को नष्ट करने का , मारने का , पिंजड़े में बंद करने का हमें कोई भी अधिकार नहीं है । यह दुनिया भगवान के द्वारा बनाई गई है । इसे नष्ट करने का अधिकार हम इंसानों को नहीं है । यदि हम प्रकृति को नष्ट करेंगे तो हमें इसका दुष्प्रभाव , दुष्परिणाम भुगतने पड़ेंगे क्योंकि  जिस जिस  व्यक्ति ने  प्रकृति को नष्ट करने की कोशिश की है  उस व्यक्ति को  दुष्परिणाम अवश्य मिले हैं ।

आज मैं आप लोगों को यह समझाने की कोशिश कर रहा हूं की हम लोगों को भगवान की तरह दया भावना रखनी चाहिए । जब भगवान इंसान के दुखों को सुख में परिवर्तित कर देता है उसी तरह से हमें भी पक्षियों के प्रति दया भाव की भावना रखनी चाहिए । हम भगवान से तब तक आशीर्वाद प्राप्त नहीं कर सकते जब तक कि हम भगवान के द्वारा बनाए गए पक्षियों को प्रेम नहीं करेंगे , उनकी आजादी उनको वापस नहीं लौटाएंगे ।

जब हम अपनी मानवता को जागृत करेंगे , प्रकृति से , पेड़ पौधों से , पशुओं से , पक्षियों से प्रेम करेंगे तब हमारा सीधा संपर्क भगवान से होगा और हमें सद्बुद्धि प्राप्त होगी । भगवान हमें सुख शांति एवं समृद्धि देगा । दुनिया में जो व्यक्ति दूसरे व्यक्ति , पशु पक्षियों के प्रति दया भाव प्रेम की भावना रखता है वह एक सफल इंसान होता है । वह व्यक्ति इस जीवन में बहुत ही सफल व्यक्ति कहलाता है ।

15 अगस्त के दिन भारत सरकार के द्वारा पक्षियों को पिंजड़े से उड़ा कर स्वतंत्र किया जाता है – 15 अगस्त को हमारा देश आजाद हुआ था । प्रतिवर्ष 15 अगस्त को स्वतंत्रता दिवस पूरे देश में बड़े धूमधाम से मनाया जाता है । 15 अगस्त के दिन सभी जिलों में झंडा वंदन किया जाता है और झंडा वंदन करने के बाद पक्षियों को पिंजड़े से बाहर निकाल कर आसमान में उड़ाया जाता है । 15 अगस्त के दिन उन सभी पक्षियों को रिहा करके आसमान में छोड़ दिया जाता है जो कई दिनों से , कई सालों से पिंजडो़ में बंद थे ।

15 अगस्त के दिन भारत देश के प्रधानमंत्री के द्वारा झंडा वंदन करने के बाद पक्षियों को पिंजड़े से रिहा करके आसमान में छोड़ दिया जाता है क्योंकि सुंदर सुंदर पक्षियों को कैद करने से प्राकृति की सुंदरता नष्ट होती जाती है । यदि हमें प्रकृति की सुंदरता को बनाए रखना है तो हमें पक्षियों को स्वतंत्र रूप से उड़ने देने की आवश्यकता है । 15 अगस्त के दिन जेल से उन कैदियों को रिहा किया जाता है जो अपनी सजा काटते समय अपने आप को सुधारने की कोशिश करते हैं ।

प्रतिवर्ष कैदियों के साथ साथ पक्षियों को भी पिंजड़े से रिहा किया जाता है और आसमान में छोड़ दिया जाता है ।हमें जीव-जंतु , पेड़-पौधे , पशु पक्षियों को प्रकृति से विलुप्त होने से रोकने की आवश्यकता है । नहीं तो आने वाले समय में प्रकृति से पशु-पक्षी , पेड़-पौधे पूरी तरह से लुप्त हो जाएंगे । फिर हमें सिर्फ पक्षी टीवी , वॉलपेपर में ही दिखाई देंगे । आने वाले समय में हमारी आने वाली पीढ़ी को पक्षी सिर्फ वॉलपेपर में या फिर टीवी पर ही दिखाई देंगे । यदि हमने पक्षियों की प्रजाति को विलुप्त होने से नहीं रोका तो पक्षियों की सभी प्रजाति धीरे-धीरे नष्ट हो जाएंगी ।

जब कोई पक्षी अपने बच्चे को जन्म देता है तब वह बड़ी कठिनाइयों से उस बच्चे को पालता है । दूर-दूर से घोंसला एकत्रित करके पेड़ पर लगाता है जिससे कि उसके बच्चे पर धूप पानी या किसी तरह की कोई परेशानी ना आए । पक्षियों को बड़ी कठिनाइयों से गुजरना पड़ता है । धीरे धीरे जब उसका बच्चा बड़ा होता है तब पक्षी उसे उड़ना सिखाता है । पक्षी अपने बच्चे का पेट भरने के लिए दूर-दूर तक सुबह निकल कर शाम को दाना एकत्रित करके अपने बच्चे को खिलाने के लिए लाता है ।

पक्षियों के अंदर भी दया भाव की भावना होती है । पक्षी भी अपने बच्चों से बहुत प्रेम करते हैं । जिस तरह से इंसान अपने बच्चों से प्रेम करता है उसी तरह से पक्षी भी अपने बच्चों से प्रेम करते हैं । यदि हमें पक्षियों की सुंदरता उनकी खूबसूरती उनकी आवाज से आनंद की अनुभूति करना है तो आज हम सभी को यह प्रण लेना चाहिए कि हम कभी भी पक्षियों पर अत्याचार नहीं करेंगे । हम कभी भी पक्षियों को पकड़ कर उन्हें पिंजड़े में बंद नहीं करेंगे और जो व्यक्ति पक्षियों को मारकर उनका गोश्त खाते हैं उनको हमें जागरूक करके यह बताना है कि इंसान की तरह ही पक्षियों में जान होती है ।

वह भी स्वतंत्रता के साथ जीने के हकदार होते हैं । भगवान ने उनको भी स्वतंत्रता के साथ जीने का अधिकार दिया है । यदि हम अपनी ताकत के बल पर उन पक्षियों पर अत्याचार करेंगे तो भगवान हमें कभी भी माफ नहीं करेगा । क्योंकि भगवान ने हमें अच्छे कर्म करने के लिए भेजा है ना कि पक्षियों पर अत्याचार करने के लिए । दोस्तों  मैं आशा करता हूं आप सभी लोग इस लेख को पढ़ने के बाद  पक्षियों से प्रेम करोगे , पक्षियों पर अत्याचार नहीं करोगे , पक्षियों को कभी भी पिंजड़े में बंद करके नहीं रखोगे ।

क्योंकि हम सभी का यह दायित्व है कि हम सभी इस प्रकृति को बनाए रखें , प्रकृति को हरी-भरी बनाए रखें और पशु पक्षियों को विलुप्त होने से रोकें । जब हम कोयल की मीठी कुक सुनते हैं तब हमें अपने जीवन पर एक आनंद की अनुभूति होती है । जब हम तोते की मीठी वाणी सुनते हैं तब हमें आनंद आता है । जब हम चिड़िया की चहक सुनते हैं तब हमें आनंद आता है । हम यदि यह चाहते हैं कि हमारी आने वाली पीढ़ी भी पक्षियों की सुंदरता , पक्षियों की भाषा , पक्षियों की मीठी वाणी सुने तो हमें इनको विलुप्त होने से रोकना पड़ेगा ।

भारत सरकार के द्वारा भी पक्षियों  की सुरक्षा के लिए नियम कानून बनाए हैं । भारत देश में बहुत से ऐसे पक्षी हैं जिन्हें मारने पर भारतीय कानून के हिसाब से सजा दी जाती है ।यदि कोई व्यक्ति मोर को मारता है तब उसे सजा का प्रावधान भारत सरकार के द्वारा किया गया है । उस व्यक्ति को जेल में बंद कर दिया जाएगा और जुर्माना भी उस व्यक्ति को भरना पड़ेगा । क्योंकि सरकार भी जानती है कि प्रकृति की सुंदरता मानव जीवन के लिए कितनी आवश्यक है ।

सरकार भी यह जानती है की वातावरण स्वच्छ रखने के लिए की कितनी आवश्यकता होती है ।

• किंगफिशर पक्षी पर निबंध kingfisher bird essay in hindi
• राष्ट्रीय पक्षी मोर पर कविता National bird peacock poem in hindi

दोस्तों हमारे द्वारा लिखा गया यह जबरदस्त आर्टिकल पक्षियों की स्वतंत्रता पर निबंध Essay on birds freedom in hindi यदि आपको पसंद आए तो सबसे पहले आप सब्सक्राइब करें इसके बाद अपने रिश्तेदारों एवं दोस्तों को शेयर करना ना भूले धन्यवाद ।

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Very nice fredom essay

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Mark Kelly and Gabby Giffords on Their IVF Journey: 'Freedom to Start a Family Is Under Threat' (Exclusive)

In an exclusive essay for PEOPLE, the married Arizona lawmakers share how a gunman stole their dreams of having a child together — and why they fear politicians will do the same to other families

Our lives changed forever on January 8th, 2011, when a gunman opened fire at a "Congress on Your Corner" event in Tucson. Six lives were lost , many more were injured, and Gabby was shot in the head . Of everything that changed that day — both of us halting our careers, the beginning of a long, difficult road to recovery — we also lost something we wanted very much: the opportunity to have a child together.

The shooting happened on a Saturday morning. Two days later, we were supposed to have an appointment at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington, where Gabby had been receiving fertility treatments, to have our embryos implanted to try to begin a pregnancy. Like a lot of folks, we got married a little later in our lives. One of us had two beautiful daughters from a previous marriage; one of us had never had kids. We wanted to grow our family together and were fortunate enough to be able to pursue the only option for us: in vitro fertilization, or IVF. Gabby never made it to that appointment.

Office of Senator Mark Kelly

These past few months, as we’ve seen reproductive freedoms increasingly under attack in the absence of the protections of  Roe v. Wade ,  our hearts break for the couples who, all of a sudden, can’t decide for themselves how and when to start their family.

The IVF process is extensive and expensive. In order to create a viable embryo, women must inject hormonal medication to increase egg production and then have those eggs retrieved. It’s invasive, and many women experience pain and uncomfortable changes in their bodies. Still, for many couples who struggle to become parents, IVF is the safest — or in some cases only — option to achieve their hope of becoming pregnant.

Kevin Dietsch/Getty

With everything the shooting forced us to leave behind, we weren’t ready to let go of our dream of having a child together. But eventually, we had to. That loss was its own agony.

We don’t dwell on what could have been. Gabby’s philosophy is “Move ahead,” and that’s what we did to rebuild our lives and find our purpose after what happened to our family. We have a vibrant family we love, including a granddaughter who brings us so much joy.

Make no mistake: The freedom to start a family with IVF is under threat. In Alabama, a decision from the state Supreme Court made IVF virtually impossible for a period of time. In Arizona, the state legislature passed a law that would have threatened access to IVF in our state if it hadn’t been for a veto by Gov. Katie Hobbs . In Washington, the majority of House Republicans are cosponsors of a fetal personhood bill that, if signed into law, would endanger access to IVF for every American.

Our dream of having a child together was taken away by a gunman. The dreams of Americans to have a child together could be taken away by politicians.

This isn’t happening by chance. It’s the result of years of anti-choice efforts and the appointment of judges by governors and presidents like Donald Trump who are hostile to reproductive rights. Donald Trump said himself that he “broke”  Roe v. Wade ,  which set off a series of attacks on reproductive freedoms.

Twenty states now have abortion bans, including Arizona , where our state has been in turmoil between two abortion bans, both of which endanger women’s health and threaten doctors with jail time.

And it doesn’t stop there. Last week, the Supreme Court threw out a case attempting to rein in approval of abortion medication also used to treat miscarriages. But this won’t be the end. Other states could and will again challenge mifepristone, just as state abortion bans are threatening to undo a federal law that requires emergency care for pregnant women when their lives are in danger, including abortion care if necessary. The right to birth control could very well be the next target.

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Despite this real threat, Republicans in Congress have multiple times in recent weeks blocked legislation that would protect access to IVF and contraception for all Americans. The truth is there is a real danger of our country moving backwards — even further than we already have.

Growing a family is never simple, even in the best of circumstances. We know that. When and how to do it is among the most personal decisions anyone makes. We know that, too. The government, whether its politicians or judges, has no business making those decisions for you. They should be yours alone.

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Mexico was a destination for escaped slaves — one woman risked everything to get them there

ALAMO, Texas — Along the winding Rio Grande in South Texas lies a history many have never heard, of a southern route to freedom for enslaved people on the Underground Railroad into Mexico. 

“It’s so close, but yet it was so far for so many people,” O.J. Trevino said, peering across the river at the Mexican side of the border from his family’s property. “Knowing that they just had to get there.”

Trevino, who grew up just 5 miles from the border, was shocked to learn that his fifth-great-grandmother helped ferry escapees across that river to freedom. 

“I come from a Mexican family, but then to understand, she was formerly enslaved. They helped other people that were enslaved into freedom,” he said. “It’s a sense of pride knowing that you had family that did that.” 

Dubbed the “Harriet Tubman of Texas,” her name was Silvia Hector Webber. 

Now, new research by María Esther Hammack, an assistant professor of African American history at Ohio State University, is shining a light on how Webber obtained freedom and her pivotal role in the Underground Railroad to the southern border. As the country marks Juneteenth — the moment on June 19, 1865, that the Union Army reached Galveston, Texas, to announce that slavery had been illegal — Webber’s life is at the center of an exhibit, “ Freedom Papers: Evidence of Emancipation ,” at the University of Texas at Austin’s Briscoe Center for American History. 

Sofia Bravo, Webber’s sixth-generation great-grandchild and caretaker of the family’s land in Alamo, Texas, said this family history had largely been a secret until now. The discrimination both Latinos and Black residents faced kept that secret alive, she said. 

“It wasn’t allowed for you to know that you were part of a Black family,” Bravo said. “Barely they accepted you as Hispanic; can you imagine if they found out that you were Black?”

That fear has been replaced by pride after researchers discovered Webber’s “freedom papers” from the 1830s. The rare document, on display at the Briscoe Center, provides new insight about Webber and her husband, John, who was white. 

“Silvia Hector Webber was a remarkable person,” exhibit curator Sarah Sonner said. “We know that her home offered a place of refuge on the path to freedom via Mexico for the Underground Railroad. We also know the steep price that she and John were asked to pay to achieve the freedom for Silvia and their three children.”

According to the document, Webber’s enslavers requested payment in the form of two children — not Webber’s own — “a negro girl three years of age … and a negro boy to be two years old.”

“In paying that they would have perpetuated the very system that they were attempting to escape,” Sonner said.

The Webbers never paid their bond, and instead, forfeited more than 800 acres of land near present-day Austin that they’d put up as collateral for the freedom of Webber and her three children.

In the decades that followed, they operated ranches along the Colorado River and the Rio Grande, researchers say, building ferry landings and offering safe passage to those moving toward freedom in Mexico.

“It shows just the fight that she had in her, just the not being satisfied in seeing the injustice that was going on and saying, ‘OK, we have to do something,’” Trevino said.

Webber’s descendants have since started the Webber Family Preservation Project to protect her legacy and help other descendants of enslaved people discover their history. The family’s uncovered history has also given them a newfound appreciation for Juneteenth. 

“There was so much more than just physical harm that was done,” Trevino said. “The emotional damage that was done, the generational damage that was done, so having that understanding and learning the significance of what Juneteenth is and what it took to get there, for people to get there and have that appreciation.”

“It’s taken a whole new meaning and concept for me,” he said.

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Priscilla Thompson is an NBC News Now Correspondent.

Who Knew? The Bald Eagle, Symbol Of Freedom, Isn’t The Official National Bird

You may not know that while the bald eagle has been adopted as America’s symbol of liberty and freedom since the 1780s, it’s not the official national bird. Cynthia Lummis introduced a bill Thursday to finally make it official.

June 20, 2024 3 min read

For many, the majestic sight of a bald eagle soaring overhead evokes a sense of patriotism and freedom that’s at the heart of being an American.

What most of those people probably don’t know is that while the bald eagle has widely been adopted as the symbol of America going back to the 1780s, it’s not the official national bird.

U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis wants to change that with new legislation she introduced Thursday designating the bald eagle as the official bird of the United States. There now is no national bird — officially.

“There is nothing more American than a bald eagle soaring across the Wyoming sky,” Lummis said in a Thursday press release. “These majestic creatures have long been viewed as the official bird of this country and it is past time we made it official without costing taxpayers a single cent.”

Lummis is co-sponsoring the bill with one Republican and two Democrats.

Taking Flight

Although there is a national mammal, flower and tree, there is no national bird for the United States.

In 1782, the Continental Congress installed the bald eagle on the front of the Great Seal of the United States. Since then, it has been the second most used representation of the United States behind the American flag.

According to the History Channel, since ancient times the eagle has been considered a sign of strength, and Roman legions used the animal as a standard or symbol.

Could’ve Been A Turkey

Although the story that Benjamin Franklin wanted America’s symbol to be the turkey is a myth, he did write a letter to his daughter criticizing the original eagle design for the Great Seal, saying the eagle on it looked more like a turkey. He also described the bald eagle as “a Bird of bad moral Character.”

“He does not get his Living honestly …[he] is too lazy to fish for himself,” Franklin wrote.

In comparison, Franklin wrote that the turkey is “a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America.”

“He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage,” Franklin added.

The Comeback Bird

Bald eagles are often seen flying majestically over Wyoming’s scenic backdrop, most commonly in the northwest and east central regions of the state, according to Wyoming Game and Fish.

The most significant concentrations of bald eagles can be found in Teton, Sublette and Carbon counties, including a substantial number of nesting pairs in Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks.

Bird Conservancy of the Rockies estimates that 0.5% of the world’s population of bald eagles breed in Wyoming, which is about 1,250 birds.

The population of the species has completely recovered since the 1960s, when there were only around 400 breeding pairs left in the continental U.S. In 1978, the bald eagle was put on the Endangered Species List.

Thanks to federal protections as well as regulations involving the use of the pesticide DDT, by 1995, the bald eagle population had recovered enough for the bird’s status to be changed from endangered to threatened, and in 2007 it was removed completely from the list.

Leo Wolfson can be reached at [email protected] .

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It’s been 60 years since Freedom Summer, yet the fight for affordable, compassionate, and equitable health care is still going on

By Cheryl R. Clark June 19, 2024

S ixty years ago this month, a courageous initiative created by civil rights activists and physicians aimed to transform the social and medical landscape of the United States by challenging segregation in the South. Called Freedom Summer, the work it began is still going on today.

In 1964, Dr. Robert Smith , an architect of the U.S. community health center model, called activist Dr. Tom Levin for help. Smith wanted Levin — and physicians across the country — to travel to Mississippi and set up medical field stations to support the segregation-defying project that would become known as Freedom Summer . Volunteers from across the nation streamed into Mississippi to set up schools, register Black voters, and fight for meaningful social and political representation in the face of violent opposition from segregationist organizations and members of local and state law enforcement. Health care workers came to provide first aid and medical care in case they were needed by the volunteers. Sadly, they were needed.

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The horrors these physicians and activists confronted were systemic, sanctioned, and codified in contemporary laws and customs that were considered “normal” until they were challenged by grassroots opposition. Separate and unequal facilities for everything from educational venues to health care clinics enforced the dehumanization of Black lives in society.

At the time, the American Medical Association took an official position that accommodated local policies prohibiting Black physicians from joining regional medical associations or obtaining hospital privileges. By 1960, only 50 Black physicians were practicing in the state of Mississippi. The state’s Department of Public Health made it clear that individuals who traveled to the state to deliver first aid to civil rights activists would be prosecuted rather than licensed to provide services.

Related: Triple-negative breast cancer highlights the need to act against health inequities

Before June 1964, Smith and colleagues like Dr. James Anderson and Dr. Aaron Shirley were among the few physicians willing to treat the injuries and illnesses of Black Mississippians and civil rights workers. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Digital Gateway project estimates that at least 80 volunteers were beaten, 35 shot, four were critically wounded, and six were murdered.

The bravery of more than 100 medical volunteers helped sustain the Freedom movement that summer. From a health care perspective, the change that followed was unprecedented. Their advocacy helped create the political foundation to secure new and inclusive health policies, including establishing Medicare , the Head Start program, and other health-promoting care models that improved access for everyone.

As a physician and researcher, I have spent much of my career examining how social environments influence health. As I reflect on the history of Freedom Summer, I am mindful of the eloquent words of Medgar Evers, “Freedom has never been free.” These motivational words are still painfully true in the struggle for fair and quality health care. Clinicians still confront health crises stemming from delayed or forgone care that everyday people face. Because of actions before and during Freedom Summer, physical signs no longer hang at hospital entrances to turn people away from care. Instead, it’s contemporary pricing practices that turn many Americans away from receiving the health care they need.

Six decades after Freedom Summer, the fight is still on to increase access to affordable health care for millions of Americans. Twenty years after the National Academy of Medicine published “Unequal Treatment” to expose widespread disrespectful treatment and uneven quality in health care delivery, clinicians are still confronting ubiquitous disparities in deaths and disease. More than a decade after the passage of the Affordable Care Act , access to respectful, compassionate, and affordable care remains elusive for far too many people.

Related: Health disparities and premature deaths run deep, even in best-performing states

States that have not expanded Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act, including Mississippi, have unequivocally higher percentages of uninsured people than states that have expanded coverage. Mississippi has made progress toward extending coverage, though efforts to pass Medicaid expansion failed this past month. A work requirement provision added to the bill is cause for concern. Research shows that such requirements have the potential to lower insurance coverage rates without much impact on employment rates.

During the summer of 2024, there may not be field stations or grassroots groups amplifying the desperate health care crises many Americans face. As a society, Americans have often viewed the experiences of individuals suffering from shuttered hospitals and unmanageable health care costs as private indignities that are just a part of life that people must navigate alone. Today’s injustices in health care stem from society’s failure to view inequities in health care delivery as this era’s pressing civil rights issue.

As the country commemorates the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer, Americans must continue challenging today’s “normal” practices that prohibit people from accessing affordable, trustworthy, and compassionate care. It is not acceptable for states to accommodate high rates of deaths and hospital closures when policy solutions, such as Medicaid expansion and investing in community health centers are feasible to implement. More people need to have the courage to advocate for models of care that foster equal opportunity to achieve optimal health.

Cheryl R. Clark, M.D., Sc.D., is a physician and researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and executive director and senior vice president of the Institute for Health Equity Research Evaluation and Policy for the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers. She is also a collaborator on the Our Health Stories project.

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Washington, D.C., June 10, 2024 – Today, an eight-member jury in West Palm Beach, Florida, found Chiquita Brands International liable for funding a violent Colombian paramilitary organization, the United Self-defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), that was responsible for major human rights atrocities during the 1990s and 2000s. The weeks-long trial featured testimony from the families of the nine victims in the case, the recollections of Colombian military officials and Chiquita executives, expert reports, and a summary of key documentary evidence produced by Michael Evans, director of the National Security Archive’s Colombia documentation project.

“This historic ruling marks the first time that an American jury has held a major U.S. corporation liable for complicity in serious human rights abuses in another country,” according to a press release from EarthRights International , which represents victims in the case.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro reacted to the news on X (formerly Twitter) by asking why Colombian justice could not do what had been done in a U.S. court.

¿Por qué la justicia de EEUU pudo determinar en verdad judicial que Chiquita Brands financió el paramilitarismo en Urabá?. ¿Por qué no pudo la justicia colombiana? Si el acuerdo de paz del 2016, que ya sabemos es una declaración unilateral de estado que nos compromete ante el… https://t.co/pT2l86cuyH — Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) June 11, 2024

In 2007, Chiquita reached a sentencing agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in which it admitted to $1.7 million in payments to the AUC, which was designated a terrorist organization by the United States in 2001. Chiquita paid a $25 million fine for violating a U.S. anti-terrorism statute but has never before had to answer to victims of the paramilitary group it financed. In 2018, Chiquita settled separate claims brought by the families of six victims of the FARC insurgent group, which was also paid by Chiquita for many years.

This trial focused on nine bellwether cases among hundreds of claims that have been brought against Chiquita by victims of AUC violence. The nine plaintiffs were represented by EarthRights, International Rights Advocates, and other attorneys who years ago agreed to consolidate their claims against Chiquita and collaborate in multidistrict litigation (MDL) in the U.S. District Court for Southern Florida. Today, the jury found Chiquita liable in eight of the nine cases presented to them.

Plaintiffs contended that Chiquita willingly entered into “an unholy alliance with the AUC,” a group responsible for horrible atrocities and grave human rights abuses, at a time when the banana company was buying land and expanding its presence in Colombia’s violent banana-growing region. Attorneys for Chiquita argued that the company was “clearly extorted” by the AUC and had no choice but to make the payments. [1]

Jurors found that the AUC was responsible for eight of the nine murders at issue in the case; that Chiquita had “failed to act as a reasonable businessperson”; that “Chiquita knowingly provided substantial assistance to the AUC” that created “a foreseeable risk of harm to others”; and that Chiquita had failed to prove either that the AUC actually threatened them or that there was “no reasonable alternative” to paying them.

Testifying on May 14, Evans described the “1006 summary” he created for the plaintiffs tracking ten years of Chiquita’s paramilitary payments and based exclusively on thousands of internal records produced by Chiquita in the case. Evans explained how he sorted through thousands of payment request forms, security situation reports, spreadsheets, auditing documents, depositions, legal memoranda, and other documents from Chiquita’s own internal records to create the summary, which tracks over one hundred payments to the AUC, most of them funneled through “Convivir” self-defense groups that acted as legal fronts for the paramilitaries.

Importantly, Evans found Chiquita payments to Convivir groups beginning in 1995, two years earlier than Chiquita had previously admitted, and several other Convivir payments not included on the list proffered by Chiquita in the case that resulted in the 2007 sentencing agreement. Other notable items in the schedule include payments that were funneled through an armored vehicle service run by Darío Laíno Scopetta, a top leader of the AUC’s Northern Bloc who is now serving a 32-year sentence in Colombia for financing paramilitary operations.

Since 2007, the National Security Archive has obtained thousands of internal records on Chiquita’s “sensitive payments” in Colombia through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and through FOIA litigation, even overcoming Chiquita’s “reverse FOIA” attempt to block the release of records by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Key revelations from these FOIA releases are featured in numerous publications from the Archive’s Chiquita Papers collection. Since most of these records and many related documents were also produced during the discovery phase of this case, plaintiffs asked Evans to summarize them in the schedule that was presented at trial.

The schedule of paramilitary payments was also one of the last images left in the minds of jurors as plaintiffs closed their case-in-chief several weeks ago. After discussing the details of some of Chiquita’s more unusual paramilitary transactions, lead counsel Marco Simons of EarthRights walked the jury through the text of a document that was featured in the Archive’s first-ever Chiquita Papers posting in 2011 . Written by Chiquita in-house counsel Robert Thomas, the handwritten memo described assurances from Chiquita staff in Colombia that payments to a paramilitary front company were necessary because Chiquita “can’t get the same level of support from the military.”

Plaintiffs also relied on the Chiquita Papers records during the cross examination of key defense witnesses who were involved in making the illicit payments. In one example, plaintiffs drew from an internal report on the conflict situation in Colombia in 1992 ( originally published here ) to help elicit important admissions about the origins of the paramilitary payments from Charles “Buck” Keiser, the longtime general manager of Chiquita operations in Colombia. The report from Chiquita’s Colombia-based security staff said that among the armed groups then getting payments from Chiquita was one, the Popular Commands, that was considered a “paramilitary” group. Prompted by documents and other evidence, Keiser steered the jury through the process by which voluntary payments to the Popular Commands became payments to the AUC. (See our previous posting featuring key documents about Keiser and 12 other Chiquita officials accused of crimes against humanity in Colombia.)

Crucially, Keiser also admitted that a supposedly pivotal meeting with top AUC leader Carlos Castaño that has long been one of the pillars of Chiquita’s duress defense had virtually no bearing on the company’s decision to pay paramilitary groups and that, in fact, the company had already begun to pay paramilitary-linked Convivir self-defense groups long before the Castaño meeting. Several witnesses, including Keiser, also admitted that the company had never actually been threatened by the AUC or been the victim of AUC violence, according to trial transcripts.

A future Electronic Briefing Book will focus on some of the key evidence that was brought forward in this case. In the meantime, those interested in reading more about the case and the entire episode can start at our Chiquita Papers page.

[1] David Minsky, “Chiquita Capitalized on Colombia’s War. Victims’ Families Say,” Law360 , April 30, 2024.

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Charles M. Blow

On Juneteenth, Freedom Came With Strings Attached

By Charles M. Blow

Opinion Columnist

Last week at a Juneteenth concert on the South Lawn of the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris said that on June 19, 1865, after Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, “The enslaved people of Texas learned they were free.” On that day, she said, “they claimed their freedom.”

With those words, Harris, who stood alongside President Biden when he admirably signed the legislation that made Juneteenth a federal holiday, expressed a common oversimplification, one born of our tendency to conjugate history’s complexities: Although it’s a mark of progress to commemorate the end of American slavery, it’s imperative that we continue to underscore the myriad ways in which Black freedom was restricted long after that first Juneteenth.

To start, there is some debate over whether most of the estimated 250,000 enslaved people in Texas at the time didn’t know about the Emancipation Proclamation. As the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. told me recently, “I have never met a scholar who believes that’s true.”

But more important, emancipation was not true freedom — not in Texas and not in most of the American South, where a vast majority of Black people lived. It was quasi freedom. It was an ostensible freedom. It was freedom with more strings attached than a marionette.

Most Black people couldn’t claim their freedom on June 19, 1865, because their bodies (and their free will) were still being policed to nearly the same degree and with the same inveterate racism that Southern whites had aimed at them during slavery.

The laws governing the formerly enslaved “were very restrictive in terms of where they could go, what kind of jobs they could have, where they could live in certain communities,” said Daina Ramey Berry, the dean of humanities and fine arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of “The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, From Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation.”

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