In September 2022 I was sat in a cafe surrounded by a family of sparrows. A lady nearby was reading her book while tucking into egg and avocado on toast. She was mildly irritated by the birds’ advances. I imagined this scene played out for thousands of years, in taverns and al fresco eating areas throughout the world. A year earlier Australian diplomat, author and songwriter Fred Smith was standing on the embassy roof watching the sparrows of Kabul. They were picking crumbs from among the razor-wire as Fred helped negotiate the mass evacuation of visa and passport holders after the US handed control back to the Taliban.
In Fred’s words:
I would pop up on the Embassy roof at about midday each day to catch some sun and exercise. It was a relatively mild winter in the city which portended ill as reduced snowmelt meant another drought was coming. By mid-March 2021, the buds were starting to pop out on the trees and the sparrows were flitting around gaily. I’d been reading the poetry of Mary Oliver whose reverence for nature is balanced with a clear-eyed view of its cruelty and complete indifference to human suffering. There’s something oddly comforting in that, and I wrote the line “the sparrows of Kabul don’t give a shit” in my notebook.
Fred Smith, quote from the book The Sparrows of Kabul, (2023)
The Sparrows of Kabul in concert
In May 2023 I attended one of Fred’s concerts to listen to his poems, songs and stories about the missions to Afghanistan.
That evening I found myself sitting with dozens of Afghanis that had worked for the Australian government for years. For Australia, the mission had not been one of nation-building (as has become misrepresented as such by both media and politicians). But instead, to support the newly elected, democratic government of Afghanistan. Afghans and Aussies did this alongside each other, building the kind of foreign relationship that transcends any thought of violence. It’s that respect and collaboration that, albeit at times on the fringe of history, is the way to survive. This is what nature teaches us.
For in evolution, either biologically or culturally, populations will always collapse if they exert only a single trait or dogma. Or try to force an outcome. Violence is not the natural order of things. Most people shy away from a fight. It is in those minority ways of doing things, if proffered peacefully, that the greatest progress is always made. Fred’s own style of peace is partly delivered through music.
Violence is inevitable, peace is the norm
Even though violent or forceful traits die out fast in nature, paradoxically they will be ever-present too.
In times past, tribes would have resolved conflict at their own borders, often defined by mountain ranges and rivers. Over thousands of years, cultural traditions were built that reduced conflict and created stability.
For individual villages surviving as they have always, there would be too much to lose in changing the status quo. For the same reason, retribution and revenge is not that common among animals. Only those that are overfed will try (is this where the expression ‘fed-up’ comes from?)
Nonetheless, behind all species evolution are the aggressive forces that drag everything forward in time. This pulls elements of the habitable world apart, leaving a variety of animals (people included) to pick up the pieces and rebuild as it moves along. Some forceful (and even violent) conduct will always happen to keep this chariot progressing. But the collaborative and innovative harmony that is concealed behind that, is what makes ours a truly magnificent and meaningful world.
Unfortunately aggression is visible. The sparrows of war – who get on with rebuilding – are inconspicuous. This is how our media becomes consumed by the fear, violence and conflict, often forgetting about the much larger, peaceful and respectful collaboration happening beneath.
In other words, conflict is inevitable and as long as some balance is maintained, it’s to be expected. The cruelty and indifference that Mary Oliver and Fred Smith observe among the sparrows is, therefore, a most fertile combination that is reflected in our own behaviour, if only occasionally out of balance.
Angry birds
The sparrows flitting among razor wire fences share more in common with us than we may think. They have long been a conspicuous part of our culture. They are considered the carriers or souls, and in different parts of the world, symbols of life or death.
House Sparrows live almost exclusively around humans, behave like us and share our fate. When we make our own lives more difficult, these birds also become angrier, and eventually disappear.
Scientists have shown, for example, that even increased urban noise breaks down the territorial patterns of birds, leading to more aggression. The sparrows of Kabul will begin to fight more for scraps if patterns of sustenance – were they to be connected to a stable, diverse and democratic human society – are interrupted. Sparrows, humans and indeed all wildlife, are part of the same ecosystem. War doesn’t alter that.
But these relationships we have with common birds and animals flow in all directions. Sparrows clean up after us, balancing the populations of rats and mice, reducing the risk of disease. Even providing some extra food for cats who infect us with parasites and control how we think and behave. All of which leads to diversifying our nature (including making some of us more extreme and aggressive), but ultimately making our species more resilient, and overall more adaptable and peaceful.
We know exactly how important sparrows are for our survival too. Chairman Mao in 1958 ordered the killing of millions. This contributed to one of the largest starvation events on Earth.
‘Throughout Beijing, loudspeakers told people that ‘fifty million sparrows will eat as much as will feed three million people for a year. Therefore, we must eliminate the sparrow.’
In the following two years, China was plagued by an unprecedented locust infestation, collapsing grain production and, according to Chinese officials, causing the starvation and deaths of 15 million people. (Unofficially, there may have been at least twice as many.) The largest human starvation event on Earth was a consequence of a number of failed agricultural policies, and the sparrow killings were a final affront.
Simon Mustoe, Wildlife in the Balance, 2022
There is a good reason why Fred found the sparrows of interest. It’s hard-coded into our DNA … our psyche. Understanding birds is a survival instinct thousands of generations old.
A climate of instability
When ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More are in balance, wildlife forms invisible, interlocking and intensely nested territories of mammals (including people), birds, insects and even bacteria, uniformly covering landscapes. They recycle surplus energyEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More back into life-giving ecosystem structures and restore a sustainable level of harmony and diversity.
The antithesis of this is ecosystem instability, which results in a third of the impact of climate change. Climate change, the Australian Defence Force states, ‘will increase the challenges for Australia and Defence [and] could lead to … increased demands for peacekeeping and peace enforcement, and intrastate and interstate conflict.’
Climate change comes from a breakdown of the barriers between diverse cultures (tribes) or populations of animals. It leads to a disintegration of the structures that stopped animals from being aggressive to each other. It releases ‘energy’ that some populations can exploit to their advantage, when they become ‘fed up’ enough.
But a fair climate – a habitable planet – doesn’t just mean temperature. It’s also a way of life.
The climate for peace was changed in February 2020, following Donald Trump’s disastrous ‘peace deal’ with the Taliban (an oxy-‘moron’ if ever I could justify the pun). This put a swift end to the 20-year investment by 53 other nations, cutting the Afghan government from negotiations, and releasing 5,000 violent Taliban prisoners back into the streets of the Afghan regional capitals.
Australia was forced to intervene after nations more powerful and forcefully motivated (the Taliban and the US) dragged the chariot into new territory, ripping apart two decades of rebuild on top of thousands of year of tribal diversification.
The Sparrows of Kabul by Fred Smith is about those harrowing few days when Australian troops joined the Afghans and the sparrows to pick up the pieces.
The birds of Kabul
A well as the sparrows of Kabul, there are other birds living among the razor-wire fences. Here are some thumbnails from iNaturalist by alphaj16.
The carriers of souls
Through complicity in wars rather than peace, we risk, like the sparrows perhaps, becoming the carriers of souls: the souls of millions of Afghans who had not the money, status or simply the opportunity to escape, for example. The largely US-led failure to support Afghanistan for long-enough meant they were cast back among the sparrows. They now face a climate less certain than they did before. One where the dominant rhetoric is too much violence and control, and not enough compassion and cooperation.
It’s this compassion that Fred’s book honours. The commitment of Australians and Afghanis ‘the sparrows’ who worked relentlessly with each other through those final days. The events that led up to the awful situation in August 2021 were outside their control as they were behind the chariot.
As Fred says ‘It was what it was.’
Sure, not every soul can be saved and this makes for an unglamorous, inconclusive and unsatisfactory end to any Hollywood film. The public and national media seem to want a similar kind of closure.
But when you’re a sparrow picking up the pieces, all you can do is as much as possible for the people around you. There is a message in this for all of us. There is no end to conflict in nature. But this is also exactly why a relentless commitment to the people you care for is justified and purposeful.
We all live among the sparrows
My book Wildlife in the Balance is about our relationship with nature and our dependence on wildlife. I have been surprised at the parallels this has with Fred’s story and the plight of the people of Afghanistan.
While the relationship between sparrows and people might seem tenuous, it is not. People living harmoniously together, and alongside other animals just like us, have always been part of the symphony of life in all its forms. By 12,000 years ago we’d already altered 95% of the planet by making it habitable for ourselves and the wildlife we co-depend on.
There is a lot we can learn by watching sparrows. Simple truths that resurface from the depth of our soul that aren’t easy to explain but are there in the natural world. The kind of truths that farmers have long used to decide when to grow food for each other. This contemplation of nature has always been among the most cathartic of human past-times. However, it’s becoming lost as our lives are more complicated, uncertain and we disconnect from nature.
Art and music is one way to bring it back into focus.
Sparrows of Kabul: a poem
All last year we were living in fear of that which we thought soon might be
But those little brown birds though this was absurd and flittered around so free
For the sparrows of Kabul would not be too troubled if Taliban came into power
They’d eat their bread and shit on their heads much as they’d done here on ours.
Extract from The Sparrows of Kabul (a poem) by Fred Smith
Sparrows could not countenance interference in the lives of others. Or else, they wouldn’t be sparrows any more.
Most people in the world, like the sparrows, are also busy getting on with the daily hand-to-mouth rituals of survival. We are preoccupied with fixing up the mess we make for each other and ourselves. What we mustn’t do is lose sight of our collective responsibility as we have moved from a world of tribes to one where whole countries go to war.
It’s the scale of war that is the problem in the modern age. We need our governments to be cooperative and compassionate, not hostile. After all, we’re among the most powerful animals to have ever existed.
As Fred says, we:
‘… need to appreciate good government, boring and expensive though it is, since, in a chaotic world, it’s what saves our country from descending in to tragedy like Afghanistan.’
Fred Smith, quote from the book The Sparrows of Kabul, (2023)
For now, the background chatter of sparrows in the morning as the sun rises, serves as a constant and calming reminder of who we are, of nature’s diligence, and our place within it.
Buy Sparrows of Kabul
