Author’s Note:

Common Ground

One of my favorite classes, in my entire (now twenty-two) years of schooling, was A.P. Environmental Science during my junior year of high school. It was also one of the most traumatizing. I learned, among other more benign topics, that all those granola-bar wrappers and potato-chip bags don’t actually vanish when they disappear into the trash can, and in fact, will outlive me by centuries, tangling in tree branches, choking waterways, and confusing hungry worms that bump their blind heads into them while burrowing through the soil; that, by growing up eating hamburgers and steaks, I’d been inadvertently mashing my carbon footprint deeply into the face of the planet (straight in the Amazon rainforest, no less); and that all the fresh water I used actually came from a limited aquifer, and one that was rapidly vanishing while I luxuriated in my post-workout shower.

In general, I learned that my typical American lifestyle consumed so many resources that it necessitated that others face the consequences that I’d likely never feel the full effects of. (At this age, not yet having mastered the utter nihilism required to keep living in the status quo after having recognized these uncomfortable data points (all of them pointing at humanity with a blaming finger), it gave me something of a guilt complex. I’m still working on that one in therapy. But that’s another story.)

Of all the things that I learned, though–all the unfortunate realities that I saw–one remains burnt into my mind’s eye just as brightly as ever: a freezeframe from a documentary about chicken egg farming, about what happens to the baby chicks after they’ve hatched.

We all know that the baby hens are kept to lay more eggs.

But what happens to all the baby roosters?