(Reviews)

When Nature Bites Back

As people are moving farther into wilderness for pretty views, the wildlife is acting, well, wild.

By Keith Kloor

The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature
By David Baron
W. W. Norton & Company, 277 pages, $24.95

As I was reading The Beast in the Garden, an unnerving tale of mountain lions stalking the pets and people of Boulder, Colorado, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were moments when I thought Revenge of the Predators would have made a more fitting title. After all, a hundred years earlier the campaign to exterminate mountain lions (also known as cougars, pumas, and panthers) was zealously carried out by American sportsmen and trappers, including Boulder's frontier residents. Back then the wild cats, along with wolves, were despised for preying on deer and elk, prized game animals, and slaughtered mercilessly. Even famed conservationist William Temple Hornaday, an advocate for wildlife preserves and the protection of the buffalo and migratory birds, declared in a 1914 speech: "The eradication of the puma . . . is a task of immediate urgency. . . . [W]e consider firearms, dogs, traps, and strychnine thoroughly legitimate weapons of destruction. For such animals, no half-way measures will suffice."

Of course, times and attitudes change. In 1965 Colorado passed strict hunting laws, which helped the state's mountain lions rebound in the ensuing years. For a while, the recovering animals stayed high in the state's rugged mountains, away from civilization. Meanwhile, by the mid-1980s, old ranches and pockets of forest in and around Boulder had been set aside as open space and parklands. Wild creatures flourished: Elk set up shop in the foothills and sometimes strayed down into people's yards; an urban herd of mule deer, estimated at more than a thousand, proliferated and wandered freely through city streets. Boulderites loved it. "The friendly merger of wildlife and humankind was not a liability," David Baron writes in his stage-setting opening chapter. "It was, rather, what attracted many residents in the first place—the chance to bask in nature's glory from one's very own back porch."

On a winter day in 1988 this idyllic pact got its first test, though no one, not even state wildlife officials, realized it at the time. Four mountain lions, including two cubs and a wounded female adult with one of her paws caught in an animal trap, were spotted in a front yard at the city's rural edges, where homes had started sprouting in the Rocky Mountain foothills. Boulder's nature-loving citizens reacted with a mix of sympathy, outrage, and excitement. To many, the injured lioness represented a cruel past they no longer associated with. The incident served as "an official coming out," reports Baron, "a sort of puma cotillion . . . announcing the return of cougars to the area." What's more, the circumstances "reinforced the new, prevailing view of mountain lions—as victims, not villains."

The tragic chain of events that unfolded over the next few years is well chronicled by Baron, a former correspondent for National Public Radio. It also helps that he has all the ingredients for a good story: the return of the prodigal predator that has "come to reclaim its ancestral home" and the welcome mat rolled out by residents, who then have no clue the animal is stalking them; the two anguished biologists whose warnings go unheeded; the meta-theme of human communities on a collision course with wild animals in newly suburbanized (and formerly rural) areas across America. Fortunately, Baron is up to the task of weaving a coherent narrative out of all this, and even crafts a real page-turner. He effectively paces the increasingly frequent and ultimately violent encounters between humans and mountain lions, while also throwing in a healthy dose of animal biology and cultural history to put it all in context.

A warning to the squeamish: Parts of this book will make you wince. Dogs are devoured; one high school student goes jogging—at midday, a mere few hundred yards behind his school—and is mauled to death and disemboweled. The incidents (and, in particular, one autopsy) are re-created and described in graphic detail. At times Baron drives his point home a bit too much by cataloguing yet another bloody pet attack. And while some may blanch at the Technicolor rendering, I think he does a public service by presenting the harsh reality of what happens when wild creatures become habituated to humans.

Clearly, such violent encounters are increasing nationwide, as humans continue to build homes farther out in wild areas, thus putting themselves in closer and more dangerous proximity to bears, coyotes, and mountain lions. Eventually these predators lose their instinctual fear of us, though the author duly notes that "dogs, bees, and snakes kill many more humans each year than mountain lions."

Still, the consequences of Boulder's hands-off attitude seem obvious. As Baron reports, "Boulderites wanted their wildlife wild: unmanaged, unmanipulated, unhunted." And as he points out in one section of the book on cougar feeding habits: "Where deer thrive, lions prosper."

As for lessons learned, Baron believes that exploding animal populations near human ones will be the critical wildlife- management issue of the 21st century. "Reducing conflicts between people and wild animals will require controls on human actions," he concludes—"where we build our homes, how we landscape our yards, the way we dispose of our trash and house our pets. People, especially those who live along the new frontier between civilization and wildland, must accept that they are participants in the natural world, not mere observers." In other words, it's time Americans realized that Wild Kingdom has been recast as a new nature show they are now starring in.

Natural History Museum/London

ART OF THE WILD

Page after page of stunning, beautiful, and intricate illustrations of plants unfold in Plant Discoveries: A Botanist’s Voyage Through Plant Exploration (Firefly Books, 355 pages, $60). For this book, botanist Sandra Knapp—who calls botanical art “a way of depicting things that were too difficult to describe in words” —has culled artwork from the collection at the Natural History Museum in London. To complement the illustrations, Knapp includes some amusing stories of the discoveries of these plants and their evolution to common modern-day specimens. From delicate, fragile poppies to sturdy, remarkable cacti, Plant Discoveries offers a delightful glimpse of the history of plant taxonomy, plus a tasteful blend of art and science.

—Prachi Patel

Editors' Choice

Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast
By Mike Tidwell,
Pantheon Books, 348 pages, $23

"If a foreign enemy were taking away twenty-five square miles of American soil from us every year . . . just taking it away from this nation and not giving it back, we would certainly go to war to stop it, wouldn't we?" So asks Kerry St. Pé, a 50-year-old Cajun marine biologist who has dedicated his career to trying to save the vanishing landscape of his youth. The answer seems obvious, yet the 50-acre-a-day loss of Louisiana's coastal wetlands—no longer renewed by Mississippi River flooding and torn apart by oil and gas development—is perhaps the most ignored environmental catastrophe now unfolding in the United States.

When travel writer Mike Tidwell set out to explore Louisiana's bayous by hitching rides with Cajun shrimpers, he was looking for little more than some authentic gumbo and zydeco. But it wasn't long before Tidwell's eyes and heart were opened to a larger story. Bayou Farewell is both a lamentation for a drowning land of immense biological and cultural richness and an eloquent call to arms to save it.

—Frances Backhouse

Death in the Everglades: The Murder of Guy Bradley, America's First Martyr to Environmentalism
By Stuart B. McIver
University Press of Florida, 208 pages, $24.95

Guy Bradley's colorful life and violent death have always seemed the stuff of myth. He spent most of his short life in the swamps and marshes of Florida's Everglades. As a youngster he consorted with rough, backcountry characters, shooting egrets and other magnificent birds for the plume trade. As a man he jumped to the other side, serving as an Audubon warden in the early 1900s, defending the "plume birds" against men he had once hunted with. Confronted by their threats, Bradley staked his life on his wits and outdoor skills. He lost.

In his new book, journalist Stuart B. McIver fleshes out Bradley, his circle of family and friends, and his antagonists as he traces the course of a curiously intertwined tragedy. Death in the Everglades is both compelling history and a heart-tugging drama.

—Frank Graham Jr.

Seed of Hope: Farming with the Wild
By Daniel Imhoff
Watershed Media, 184 pages, $29.95

For the past 60 years or so, the U.S. agricultural landscape has been a battleground: Every day the forces of highly mechanized, chemical-intensive agribusiness tear up wild ecosystems and manipulate nature in an effort to boost crop yields. But if our agricultural establishment is capable of growing massive amounts of corn, soybeans, and other crops, this productivity has come at a terrible cost, including water pollution, large-scale soil erosion, habitat destruction, and the loss of plant and animal diversity.

In Farming With the Wild, Daniel Imhoff describes a future in which farmers and ranchers work with nature, not against it. What makes his vision so compelling is that he roots it in dozens of case studies from across the United States—from the Land Institute's pioneering work in Kansas on perennial grains, to a predator-friendly sheep ranch in Montana, to Hedgerow Farm, in California's Sacramento Valley, owned by National Audubon board member John Anderson and his wife, Marsha. For nearly 30 years the Andersons have been creating wildlife habitat by restoring native vegetation.

To anyone concerned about both the future of American agriculture and the preservation of wildlife, this book shows how nature and farming can peaceably and productively coexist. Its final chapter, a primer on wild farming, includes an extensive directory of organizations that can support and inform those looking to turn inspiration into action.

—Jerry Goodbody

© 2004  NASI

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