The Beast in the Garden: a modern parable of man and nature
by David Baron (W.W. Norton, $24.95 cloth)

A Book Review by Sue Leaf

How often have you heard a resident of our exurban counties say they just love living “out in the country” with all the opportunity to view wildlife like deer, black bears and even coyotes? How often have you uttered those words yourself?

In the 1980s, residents of Boulder, Colorado prided themselves on their expansive, wooded green spaces that attracted large numbers of deer. Boulder was environmentally-conscious. The city sought to right the wrongs the Wild West had wrought on nature. Allowing deer to flourish was one of them.

When a cougar appeared in a suburban neighborhood, people were thrilled and awed. Cougars had not been seen in the Front Range for nearly a hundred years.

Although wildlife specialists became alarmed, most residents did not. Even when family pets disappeared, residents were more concerned that the cougars be treated humanely—after all, wasn’t Boulder trespassing on the big cats’ native haunts? Boulder residents realized too late that an ambivalent relationship exists between humans and their erstwhile predators.

Author David Baron, a science reporter for National Public Radio, lays out this true-life drama as a detective story, building the suspense to its inevitable and yet unthinkable conclusion.

As the human population grows ever more possessive of earth’s land and resources, a central question to existence in the twenty-first century is: what is the proper relationship between humans and nature? With the environmental movement of the last few decades, it seemed we knew. However, as populations of large, predatory mammals like cougars, grizzly bear and wolves rebound, they are changing the terms of the question.

This was an uncomfortable book for me to read. I like to think that if people would just back off and let nature be, we’d all get along fine. Mr. Baron—hardly a gun-toting redneck—would disagree. Minnesotans recall that only a few years ago, we had cougars in the Minnesota River Valley along the southern suburbs, the first cougars seen in years. Are we in the initial stage of an evolving relationship, as Boulder was 20 years ago?