William Stolzenburg

Truth is stranger than fiction.

Here's the basics slightly edited: Late one June night in 2011, a large animal collides with an SUV cruising down Connecticut's scenic Merritt Parkway. The creature appears as something out of New England's forgotten past. Beside the road lay a 140-pound mountain lion.

Stolzenburg traces the mountain lion's 1,000 trek from the Black Hills of South Dakota along with the history of hunting/protecting this majestic creature, that seems to have a history of avoiding humans, not killing them.

Made me think of two Disney classics: The Incredible Journey, where two dogs and a cat get separated from their family and find their way home, and Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar. Sad ending.… (más)

Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators by William Stolzenburg

This book expands on a passage from another of William Stolzenburg's books, Heart of a Lion: A Lone Cat's Walk Across America which reads:

"The murmur had been gathering from field sites and conference halls, formally surfacing in academic journals and publicized in mainstream media. Researchers from around the world were returning with disquieting reports of forests dying, coral reefs collapsing, pests and plagues irrupting. Beyond the bulldozers and the polluters and the usual cast of suspects, a more insidious factor had entered the equation. It was becoming ever more apparent that the extermination of the earth’s apex predators— the lions and wolves of the land, the great sharks and big fish of the sea, all so vehemently swept aside in humanity’s global swarming— had triggered a cascade of ecological consequences. Where the predators no longer hunted, their prey had run amok, amassing at freakish densities, crowding out competing species, denuding landscapes and seascapes as they went."

What this thorough, sound, and articulate book convincingly conveys to me with its extensive hard science is:

The food web that sustains physical life can be seen as a pyramid. This pyramid "is a narrowing progression in this community of life, founded on a broad, numerous base of plants and photosynthetic plankton—harvesters of the sun’s energy, primary producers of food. From there it steps up to a substantially more narrow layer of herbivorous animals cropping their share from below, and so on up to yet a smaller tier of carnivores feeding on the plant-eaters. Perched loftily at the apex are the biggest, rarest, topmost predators, those capable of eating all, and typically eaten by none."** A tenet of ecology, the fragile balances among the diversity of life forms are the adaptive niches each evolved in, with natural restraints such as trophic levels, habitat, and reproduction rates, with keystone species/predators being the glue. As the author succinctly put it, "the finely and tenuously balanced skills of predator and prey, teetering so delicately on environmental fulcrums."**

The term 'keystone' species originated from ecological studies that "Pisaster had proved that certain predators, by their mere presence, could bolster the diversity of life. But just as easily, once removed, that benevolent hand could be replaced by a phantom fist, knocking species off the planetary rock, as it were, overhauling the living landscape to simpler, cruder states."**

In the detail of this book you will hopefully gain a better understanding of the extent of the current human effect in trophic cascades. In our progress to becoming a figurative alpha being, decimating keystone species/predators, our species is destabilizing the tenuously balanced biodiversity of the natural world web of life. In constructing a food web to our narrow-minded convenience and liking, not taking into account the necessary abundance of biodiversity and keystone species/predators of the natural world we evolved with, we are accelerating ecosystem collapses and in turn evolutionary adaptive processes to our peril. In thus we are inadvertently promoting populations of ecosystem crippling, disease spreading vermin by decimating the trophic levels of predators that kept them in check, and are setting the stage for our own diminishment. Reading this book can help you understand how and how quickly we are altering the environment essential to our being. We've fallen into one of the natural world traps that deals with the excesses of weedy species.

"The most dangerous experiment is already underway. The future most to be feared is the one now dictated by the status quo. In vanquishing our most fearsome beasts from the modern world, we have released worse monsters from the compound. They come in disarmingly meek and insidious forms, in chewing plagues of hoofed beasts and sweeping hordes of rats and cats and second-order predators. They come in the form of denuded seascapes and barren forests, ruled by jellyfish and urchins, killer deer and sociopathic monkeys. They come as haunting demons of the human mind. In conquering the fearsome beasts, the conquerors had unwittingly orphaned themselves." **

Sadly, what comes to mind is Aldo Leopold's oft quoted remark, "An ecologist is the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise." Yet, with our evolved genetic makeup and subjective umwelt, how can we on the whole be any wiser than our cousins?

Like humans, "A bird never doubts its place at the center of the universe."***



** Quoted from the book "Where the Wild Things Were"
*** Quoted from the book "Prodigal Summer"… (más)

I'm from the East Coast where we don't have big cats, at least not for 100s of years. Heart of a Lion upturned everything I knew about mountain lions (cougars). I thought they were a deadly menace. They are not. More people are killed by porcupines. They have been persecuted nearly to the point of extinction based on primal fears. Like other top predators they have an important place, culling herds of deer and allowing forests and wetlands to reach full potential. The book does not sugar coat the occasional attack, they have happened, but it is rare and with special circumstances. Such is life alongside wild animals, given the alternative I'll take it.

The book is particularly brutal on those western states that have no-tolerance laws seeking to eliminate the cougar entirely. Stunning that what identifies the west, bravery and fortitude, like in South Dakota which is a sort of nursing ground for cougars, elected officials have become ignorant pansies, ignoring experts, ignoring science, appealing to the worst and darkest fears. The cougar is struggling to survive, but the laws around this amazing animal need to change. May it one day find a foothold in the East again, if the South Dakotans and every mid-west state in between would stop shooting for a bit, they will migrate across. But the shooting gallery won't let them through, trapping them in trees with dogs, running them aground with officials unloading 100s of rounds in a spasm of fear and excitement. In California they get by just fine, they are protected with very few problems. Treat them well and amazingly they do the same in return.… (más)

I probably refer to, and recommend this book more, than any other I have ever read, I think. It is that powerful and moving. Essentially it makes the case, using case studies of otters in the Pacific Northwest, wolves in Yellowstone National Park, and orcas in oceans around the world, for why ecosystems need apex predators to not only thrive, but to even survive. That is such a simplified, watered-down summary for what is really an elegant and, to me, quite moving treatise....some might think a tome on ecology would be a dry and slow-moving work, but this book is anything but! There are enough real-world examples to keep it interesting, and the author draws parallels with our human world in such a way that kept me turning the pages well past my bedtime. It is an almost heart-breakingly elegant outcry to support all of our large predators, wherever we may find them - before it becomes too late, and we suffer the impact of their loss in ways we didn't even know were possible.… (más)