When the march of the penguins stops.

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Let me confess. When I received my friend Pata’s email about an emergency effort to clean & rehabilitate penguins affected by a recent oil spill off the coast of Uruguay, I volunteered imagining it would be something like a playdate. You know, the penguins and me doing something like a waltz—them in their tuxedos, me in my rubber boots. We’d practically be playing catch, maybe even share a yerba mate. And then I arrived to Punta del Este for a day of volunteering and immediately realized that oil spills aren’t cartoons, animals are sweeter and more endangered than I previously thought, and the smell of penguin feces is a smell every oil executive should catch a whiff of, as they mop layers of it off the floor where frightened, petroleum-covered animals are living. The volunteers who are working 10 hours a day, without pay, are commendable. But what they need more than accolades are donations.  And though it sounds funny (and maybe even trite to some) to seek aide for 100 penguins being nursed in a patio of a restaurant in Maldonado, Uruguay when there are humans in need of food and shelter right here in Montevideo, to me both needs of intertwined. As I learned last summer in Maine, where I worked at an ecology camp for adolescents, and as I am reading in Jeffery Sach’s The End of Poverty, ecology (or the interconnectedness of humans and the environment) is a vital crosscutting lens in which to look at critical social issues. When one limb is ill—whether it is our ecosystem or those who inhabit it (both animals and humans)—the whole ecological body feels it…somewhere at sometime. On Friday, as I administered vitamins to baby penguins from a tube I had inserted down their throat, it seemed very obvious that my ecological footprint (my gas and my plastic bags and my…) certainly had an impact on these birds as they migrated north from Patagonia.

I will post more pictures when the are available. This one is from the website of International Fund for Animal Welfare, who is helping Sociedad para la Conservación de la Biodiversidad de Maldonado, in the rehab effort.

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