Glenn Reynolds has an interesting TechCentral Station column on a book by David Baron called The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature. In the book Baron chronicles the re-introduction of the mountain lion in Colorado, how the mountain lion adapts to its surroundings and learns to see people as prey, and how people react to the threat in their neighborhood. As the lions take out housepets and later move on to joggers, some people nevertheless remain committed to protecting the mountain lion. As Reynolds notes, “So many were so invested in the notion that by thinking peaceful thoughts they could will into existence a state of peaceful affairs that they ignored the evidence right in front of them, which tended to suggest that cougars were quite happy to eat anything that was juicy, delicious, and unlikely to fight back.”

Reynolds goes on to expand this behavior to include anti-war/pro-Islamo-fascist thinking, recognizing that some people want to be prey. Reynolds wryly notes that this “isn’t a viable evolutionary strategy.”

As a life-long conservationist who has spent significant time in the wilds of California and Africa, I’d have to agree. In Nature, there is no morality or “greater-good”. There is simple “survival of the fittest.” Kipling wrote “Nature red in tooth and claw”, and one has to only witness a troop of wild chimpanzees ripping baby monkeys from their mother’s arms and slaughtering them, filling the air with the stench of blood and entrails- or meet up with a female leopard on a trail in the bush and feeling her growl resonate in ones bones - to recognize how true that is. Even Jane Goodall (St. Jane - patron saint of wildlife researchers) was realistic enough about chimps to place her son Grub in a cage when the chimps rolled through her camp in Gombe.

Nature includes human beings; we are not apart from it. For about six million years humans have been evolving, gradually becoming better at killing than being killed. Over the past 8,000 we have constructed civilization which has served to create a fiction of separation between humans and nature. Yet civilization itself is a product of evolution: through working together humans survived better.

At this point, it’s worth noting that civilization and the evolution of societies is fundamentally different from biological evolution. Whereas biological evolution is Darwinian - only those traits that are inherited and increase the survivability of an individual will be passed on - cultural evolution is Lamarckian - useful traits that a culture learns or develops itself can be passed along to other cultures or to future generations. If you remember the textbook analogy of the trees and giraffes, Darwinian evolution (the basis of biology) is the giraffe born with the longer neck by chance, and can get to the food high in the trees. Lamarkian evolution (the intellectual basis of culture) is the giraffe that reaches the fruit by stretching, then teaching its young to do the same.

The confusion comes about when people mix the two and either make society Darwinian (as some pure capitalists and eugenicists do) or biology Lamarckian (as taught in much of the Communist world to stress Nature’s preference for Marxism). Underlying the “fuzzy bunny doctrine” and “Nature at all cost” beliefs held by groups like Earth First! and Greenpeace is the failure to appreciate the basis of biological evolution: survival. It is possible that exposure to the Larmarckian aspects of culture instilled through education has blinded people to the fundamental truth when one is in the wilderness: either you are predator or you are prey. In culture it is possible for one’s ideas to survive even when one dies. Take for example, Jesus Christ. His belief system has lived on for 2000 years, yet he left no descendants. Without culture, and especially the development of writing 4,000 years ago, the teachings of Christ wouldn’t have lived far beyond his death.

When in a “wild place” and especially while handling wild animals one must make guaranteeing one’s own survival paramount. In the bush it means never traveling alone at night, and carrying a rifle along during the day. It also means keeping a safe distance from potentially dangerous animals (potentially dangerous being an animal that could theoretically severely injure you). This was a lesson that Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, failed to learn until it was too late and they were mauled to death by a brown bear in Alaska - their deaths being caught on audio tape. It is also a lesson that illusionist Roy Horn had forgotten after 30 years of working with tigers.

Tigers are not housecats, and bears are not beagles. In the same way, cougars and humans cannot live together - so either Coloradoans must abandon the range where the cougars roam or they must shoot them - either with tranquilizers to be moved or with bullets. Campers or hikers in areas known to have cougars should carry weapons and be trained in their use should they be attacked. Better yet, they should be fully aware of the danger that these animals pose - with photos of the attack victims at hand if anyone doubts what wild animals can do.

Wild animals deserve to be left alone. As a conservationist I want there to be tigers, chimpanzees and lions for posterity - but not at the expense of people here today. The challenge then becomes how do we save wilderness while helping people? Since most of the wild areas in the world are in poor nations, this has become quite a challenge. Eco-tourism has been encouraged as a way to square this circle, but that cannot work in all areas. Some regions are simply too remote to visit; others can easily become overrun by too many tourists, damaging the habitat that conservationists are seeking to protect. There has been great concern in the chimpanzee research community over transmission of disease from people to chimp; after all, Ms. Goodall’s community suffered a bout of polio that was most likely introduced from the human community outside Gombe Stream National Park.

My solution? A combination of zoos, camera crews, an aid. If we value wildlife habitats we should be willing to pay for them. That money could then be used to halt development in wildlife habitat and encourage development outside the habitat. Such measures would include an end to agricultural tariffs by the European Union on products from Africa, as well as the development of service industries such as outsourced call centers and programming to undercut and compete with India and China. Camera crews would continue to document Nature’s bounty in the wilderness. I spent a year in the Bush and rarely saw anything as close-up as you will in the average Animal Planet documentary. Finally, zoos would have the role of showing animals “in the flesh” - but only animals that are the offspring of other zoo-kept animals (no more zoological collecting expeditions).

Any animals leaving protected areas and entering villages or communities would be shot - tranquilized when possible but most likely killed. In Africa Leopards have been known to leap through windows and steal babies from their cribs - an event no village should tolerate.

Doing the above would help preserve wildlife while at the same time protecting the people who live near the wildlife - ones who are often forgotten in WWF and Greenpeace presentations.