Should We Control Nature to Make It Nicer? Death by grizzly, a trial, and the fight over controlling nature
By Michael Engelhard | Jan 20 2017
Former California park ranger Jordan Fisher Smith knows the dark side of the outdoors. He wrote Nature Noir–an account of crazed miners, violent drug users, and other backcountry dangers–and suffered for years from undiagnosed Lyme disease, which he contracted while on patrol. His new book, Engineering Eden: The True Story of a Violent Death, a Trial, and the Fight Over Controlling Nature (Crown, 2016), tackles the issue of managing wildness.
At dawn on Sunday, September 18th, a blanket of clouds hung over the tawny grass mountainsides around Missoula, Montana. The cottonwoods had begun to turn yellow. On the south edge of town, in the home that the retired wildlife biologist John Craighead had occupied with his wife, Margaret, for six decades, the couple’s daughter, Karen, had been sleeping only intermittently…
“I think the questions I’ve raised in this book have never been conclusively answered. Nor should they be. They are more useful as questions we should always ask ourselves when we undertake these kinds of interventions.”
With the growing reliance on potent tech devices, not just in the applied sciences in national parks, but in research, something big has happened to the old-time naturalist with her binoculars, notebook and broad-based knowledge of the names and habits of plants and animals: she’s all but extinct.