Now that my nervous system has quieted down some, I have some thoughts about Jason Ward and his role in both the birding movement and Black Birders Week, and what lessons we need to absorb, and what needs to happen next.

First: Accountability. We are seeing that. But erasing Jason Ward from our archives actually doesn’t help the problem. It doesn’t address root causes. It doesn’t examine the misogyny and the racism that led to this moment.

I don’t have answers to those questions. That will take a lot of people with ideas better than mine. But I do have experience about the need to not conflate Jason Ward—who used his movement power to get ad deals and rape women—with the movement he helped lead.

I was part of a similar moment in 2013 when the leader of a movement called Science Online was revealed to be a serial predator. He used his power to invite young women into science blogging and elevate their work. He also flirted with them, and sometimes more.

The harm he did came in a few flavors. First, many of women he cultivated were left with psychological trauma and pathological self-doubt. Second, his friends and allies had to face that they were used as cover for bad behavior.

We were bloggers so all the processing took place out on the open. The story was written about by Nat Geo and the New Yorker and Slate. He lost his job. He staged a comeback a year later. It was a whole thing.

My biggest regret is that the movement collapsed. Science Online is no more. Some of us still move in the same professional networks. (It’s my belief that our moment was a precursor to #MeToo .) But the joy was gone. Everyone felt alienated and sad and broken.

That breaks my heart. Because the movement was so much bigger than Bora. Sure, he was the ringleader, the Blogfather—but he didn’t define the movement. The rest of us were the heart and soul of it. And we let his fall destroy something beautiful.

I write all this because I would HATE to see this happen to the Black Birders Week movement, and to @BlackAFinSTEM. Jason must face accountability but that doesn’t mean everything he was involved with is toxic.

He centered himself as the face of movements with richer, deeper meanings and critical importance. Movements comprised of dozens and hundreds of brilliant people with work and ideas we need desperately.

I will let the leaders of those movements decide what to do next. But I beg you—don’t let happen to you what happened to Science Online. Don’t fizzle out.

All of us in birding have to face our roles in giving cover to Jason. But that doesn’t mean that those movements deserve erasure.

Let me know if I can be of any help to any of you, whether survivors experiencing retraumatization or friends processing your roles in Jason’s meteoric rise. I don’t know everything but I have lived through this before. <3

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