'Beast' a riveting tale of predators, people
The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature
By David Baron Norton, 288 pp., $24.95
Americans love nature but are remarkably inept at living with it. We harm it, of course. But we also misunderstand it, wanting it to be as cuddly as a Walt Disney film when it is actually quite wild.
Even when nature's true face emerges -- shark attacks in North Carolina, raptor attacks in New Hampshire -- we look away, taking refuge in the pastoral illusion that draws us, say, to build luxury homes in the forests of California and the rest of the West, only to be shocked when wildfire comes knocking at the door.
Such reveries would suggest that when a mountain lion killed a student running one afternoon in 1991 behind his Colorado high school, it was a tragic but aberrant event. Or perhaps it was "natural," as a few of 18-year-old Scott Lancaster's friends said at his memorial service, a death the "real outdoorsy guy" would have liked, knowing we all have to die anyway. Or maybe it was a single, gruesome act of vengeance by a once pervasive species hunted to near oblivion.
To David Baron, an NPR science and environmental reporter who has produced an elegant work of narrative journalism in "The Beast in the Garden," the event reflected a more sober reality: the emerging ecological problem in America of predators and people growing in number and seeking the same space.
More unsettling, Baron says, is that Lancaster's death signified the rising cultural problem in the last few decades of a society that has come to see nature as wild yet tame, a landscape physically and philosophically distorted by good intent, bad judgment, and relentless arrogance to accommodate, complement, even enrich our conspicuously consumptive ways, a postmodern Eden where bears, birds, and BMWs live in bliss.
We imperil ourselves as well as nature, and we must change. "Whether guided by a divine hand or biological imperative, the mountain lions are sending a message; they are signaling a change of era, not just to those few who have had direct encounters with them but to America as a whole," Baron writes. "The cats, emboldened and proliferating, are heralds of a new stage in the nation's evolution, a changed relationship between man and nature that will require an attendant adjustment in cultural attitudes."
Baron calls for a new environmentalism that would meld the conservation and preservation schools that have been at odds in America for more than a century. His argument is indebted to the work of William Cronon, whom Baron briefly notes, the environmental historian who has long asserted that environmentalism has perpetuated a fallacious divide between people and nature. But Baron's eloquence lies not as much in his argument as in the riveting story through which it is made.
Weaving together deep research, meticulous reporting, vivid characterization, disciplined prose, informative political and historical asides, lucid science, incisive wit, and narrative pacing as smooth and suspenseful as a stalking mountain lion, Baron has created a wily page-turner out of an arcane concept -- "habituation," or the behavioral adaptation of predators to people -- that, frankly, does not excite many environmentalists, much less anyone else.
Much of Baron's success results from using Lancaster's death to explore a deeper story of human folly and from telling that story through impeccably executed narrative journalism. Baron traces a series of lion sightings and focuses on the tireless crusade of Boulder, Colo., researchers Michael Sanders and Jim Halfpenny to persuade the city, county, and state that Colorado has a lion problem.
As America's new age capital, there could be no better place than Boulder to showcase the irony that over decades created the lion problem and symbolizes what is wrong with environmentalism -- the city's effort to preserve surrounding land and shun hunting, combined with its desire for lifestyles incompatible with the result. Hordes of deer turned up in the greenbelt, drawing mountain lions that dine on deer. Through the habituating efforts of people seeking to save a nature that was consequently anything but natural, and through their failure to adapt to the nature they created, these newly fearless "urban lions" sought to dine on them, too.
"We wanted everything," said Ponce Gebhardt, a Boulder resident, recalling a 1988 incident in which a mountain lion killed her favorite doe, one that roamed her yard. "We wanted the lion to be okay, and we wanted us to be okay, too." The message in this well-wrought book is that when it comes to nature, be careful what you wish for.
Robert Braile is a former Globe environment correspondent.
