Cost Benefit Analysis For the Birds

So sad, now even the birders have assimilated the values and parrot the language of money, the marketplace, and the corporate state:

“The cost/benefit ratio of a highly educated, interested citizenry is huge,” said Michael Anderson, director of the Audubon Society’s Scherman Hoffman Wildlife Sanctuary in Bernardsville. “Our citizen scientists have given us hundreds of millions of dollars of research observations we never could have gotten without them.

We can rest assured that Cornell did not create this program based on cost benefit ratio’s.

And we’re even more certain that Thomas Jefferson wasn’t calculating net present values and internal rates of return when he wrote this about the relationship between an educated citizenry, democracy, and freedom:

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” -Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816.   

(complete Star Ledger story, see: N.J. birdfeeders help scientists monitor, count birds during  annual FeederWatch season