OPINION/COMMENTARY

Loving Monsters

NPR science reporter David Baron has a new book out, called The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature. Baron's book is about the return of cougars to the Boulder, Colorado area after decades of hunting-induced absence, and their eventual taste for eating human beings -- along with the various fantasy ideologies regarding wildlife and nature that this chain of events revealed..

Cougars were once regarded as timid, fearful of humans, and far more likely to flee at the sight of
people than to regard us as food. Of course, there was a reason for that: for millennia, humans had attacked Cougars whenever possible, regarding them as a menace to safety and as competitors for valuable game. Showing one's face around Indians produced arrows, spears, and torches; later on, appearing around European settlers produced a faceful of lead. Aggressive cougars tended to die young, or to receive sufficient aversive conditioning to learn to leave humans alone.

Later on, a generalized revulsion against predators set in. As Baron notes (it's the source of his title, in fact), meat-eating was supposed by some to have begun with Original Sin -- "carnivores" in the Garden of Eden were said to have eaten fruits. In the post-lapsarian world, however, hunting was long seen as something manly, championed by those, like Teddy Roosevelt, who feared that excessive urbanization and industrialization would cause Americans to become too distanced from the reality of nature. But as that distancing took place in spite of Roosevelt's efforts, what is now called "fluffy bunny" syndrome appeared, and predators were regarded as inherently evil. Coupled with stockmen's continuing aversion to having their cattle and sheep eaten by predators, this produced programs of predator eradication that led to the near-extinction of cougars' only natural enemy, the gray wolf, and the removal of cougars from all but the most remote areas...

Conservative Spotlight: Partnership for the West

Somehow, the "rights" of endangered insects and weeds have become more important in the minds of our cultural elites than the rights and livelihoods of American workers and property owners, not to mention the rational use of natural resources for the long-term economic health of the country. The Endangered Species Act and other extreme environmentalist measures have been putting the squeeze on property owners and business for decades, particularly in the Western states—far from the big metropolitan areas in which most of our cultural elites live free from worry that they could be displaced by rodents with more civil rights than American citizens.

The new Partnership for the West has been formed to try to halt this erosion of Western Americans' property rights and prosperity, and is an umbrella group for industry and activists working to hold back the Green Tide. "Already, it has linked leaders from an extraordinarily wide range of Western interests," boasts the non-profit 501(c)4 group, "including: farm/ranching, coal, financial services, hard rock mining, timber/wood products, small businesses, utilities, oil & gas, construction, renewable energy advocates, manufacturers, property rights advocates, higher education, recreational access proponents, county government advocates, local, state and federal elected officials, grassroots groups and many others." Partnership for the West's members range from the American Gas Association, Coldwell Banker Commercial, the Colorado Farm Bureau, and the Western Mining Council to the American Land Rights Association, Citizens Advocating Local Control of Our Forests, and the Warrior's Society Mountain Bike Club...Their website is here.

Hillary's New Hysteria: 9/11 Air

Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York is falsely claiming the White House "deliberately misled" New Yorkers about air quality immediately after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.

Even the New York Times doesn't buy it.

In a September 8 editorial, the Times, while not naming Clinton, ridiculed the attacks on the White House—fueled by radical environmental groups and Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.)—as "retrospective nitpicking." "The broader public faced little or no risk from breathing the outdoor air once the initial cloud settled," the Times correctly reported...