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Book Review
| The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature. By David Baron. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004. 277 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and bibliography. $24.95.
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| David Baron's The Beast in the Garden is both an interesting case study in human-wildlife relations and a good example of how environmental history is currently being used by journalists writing for popular audiences. The reappearance of Felis concolor—variously known as the mountain lion, puma, cougar, painter, or catamount—in much of its historic habitat in the American West is at the center of this very readable story. Baron, a science reporter for National Public Radio, presents a complex tale of people responding to the unexpected presence of predators in their midst as a parable about the unintended consequences of the human affinity for nature. |
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Much of the book is a straightforward narrative of the increasingly frequent human encounters with mountain lions in the area around Boulder, Colorado, in the early 1990s. Based on extensive interviews with witnesses, wildlife managers, and local residents, Baron adopts a personal tone in portraying communities torn between fear for their residents' safety and a collective desire to maintain the natural qualities that attract them to the surrounding landscapes. As the mountain lions grow increasingly bold—to the point of taking pets from front porches and roaming city streets—friction develops between those worried about potential attacks and those who welcome the cats' reappearance. "It's a privilege to share this habitat with mountain lions," one citizen states in a public meeting in 1990, just months before the first human victim would fall to a cougar attack (p. 157). |
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Baron's historical perspective provides the context for the titular parable: In coming to live near the wild, humans have made it less so. Here, following the near-extinction of the cats by the mid-twentieth century, post-war hunting restrictions, expanding human settlement into former cougar habitat, and local encouragement of prey species like deer combine to reduce mountain lions' fear of people just as the predator population begins to rebound, virtually ensuring trouble will arise. Baron periodically sets his story aside in favor of exploring the historical foundations of the conflict, tracing the evolution of American attitudes toward predators and discussing historical tensions between development and wilderness in the West as a means of turning the case study into a commentary on American environmental values. |
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Based on more limited research than the contemporary narrative, the historical overview relies on secondary sources to anchor the book within the familiar dichotomies of conservation vs. preservation, civilization vs. wilderness, and urban vs. rural that are common distillations of American environmental history. Though one could wish for a more complex reading of this literature, Baron successfully locates the Colorado experience in what he calls "a grand and largely unintentional experiment ... (that is) ... changing animal behavior in unexpected and sometimes troubling ways" (p. 233). The fact that similar experiments continue throughout the cougar's range, resulting in an average of five reported attacks on humans each year in the United States and Canada since 1991, lends his argument not only weight but currency as well. |
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Despite its non-standard notes, an incomplete bibliography, and the distracting practice of setting all quotations in boldface type, the engaging story and eyewitness accounts bring Baron's narrative alive. Historians may quibble with his selection or interpretation of secondary sources, but the book will be useful to anyone interested in predators, the urban/rural fringe, or conflicts between development and wildlife in the West in general. As a "modern parable of man and nature," it also serves as fair warning of the consequences of believing humans can live in nature without altering it in unpredictable ways, even with history as a guide. |
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Derek Larson is assistant professor of history and chair of the Environmental Studies Program at The College of St. Benedict/St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. An environmental historian, he is currently working on a book about environmental politics in Oregon in the 1960s. |
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