| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.1

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

In the Absence of Predators: Conservation and Controversy on the Kaibab Plateau. By Christian C. Young. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. 269 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $49.95.

During the 1920s, the population of deer on the Kaibab Plateau, in northern Arizona, skyrocketed and then crashed just as abruptly. According to Aldo Leopold and generations of scientists and conservationists who followed him, these events were the result of misguided wildlife management policies that aimed to maintain artificially high numbers of deer for sport hunters and tourists by eliminating the herd's natural predators. What resulted was an overgrazed, denuded landscape in which thousands of animals perished as a result of their own "too-muchness." By the 1950s, the Kaibab case had become one of the best known parables in all of ecology. And the lessons gleaned from it—that predators play a crucial role in maintaining healthy ecosystems and that naive human tinkering can upset nature's balance with a host of unintended consequences—had risen to the level of scientific gospel.

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