| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.3 | 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. $49.95, cloth; 37.95, paper.)

The Kaibab deer disaster occupies a venerable place in American environmental writing. Rachel Carson referred to "the oft repeated story of the Kaibab deer in Arizona" in Silent Spring (Boston, 1962, p. 248). Aldo Leopold alluded to the incident in his celebrated essay "Thinking Like a Mountain" from A Sand County Almanac (New York, 1949). For such environmental thinkers, the lessons of the Kaibab, the plateau on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, could not have been more straightforward. First, the extermination by human beings of predators such as the mountain lion allowed the mule deer population on the plateau to soar to unsustainable levels in the early twentieth century. Then, after this surging population devoured all the available vegetation, it inevitably crashed in the mid-1920s, leaving in its wake a diminished deer population and a depleted ecosystem.

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