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Editor's Notebook: It's summer reading time, naturally

Peggy Boyer Long
WUIS/Illinois Issues

We ignore at our peril the power and indifference of nature. 

This is worth considering as we head into the far side of summer. Before we hit that hiking trail or take to Lake Michigan in a canoe, we might want to stay indoors long enough to pick up a couple of books that render this essential point in hair-raising detail.

We would do well to read The Living Great Lakes by outdoors writer Jerry Dennis and The Beast in the Garden by longtime National Public Radio reporter David Baron. Each is part adventure and part morality tale. Each explores the individual and collective consequences of not paying attention, of misreading,  of not respecting the natural forces that make, then remake, our physical world and the creatures that share it.

The consequences for Illinoisans are more readily apparent in the book about the Great Lakes. Dennis, who also wrote for this issue of the magazine, seeks to understand and explain these inland seas. He uses his own experiences while growing up near Lake Michigan as the framework for a retrospective on how people have used and misused the lakes. We can learn much from these past abuses. And we have. 

If, in other decades, we denuded the lakes' shorelines, pumped chemicals into their waters, harvested their fish to extinction, we have now begun to make amends. Dennis believes this is because those of us who live in the region care about the lakes and have learned that what we do to them, we do to ourselves.

Still, the lakes have many lessons to teach. The most difficult may be that they care for us not at all. They aren't malevolent. Just indifferent.  

This might seem obvious enough in broad outline, from the mysterious 1679 disappearance of the Griffin, commanded by Réné-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, to the tragic 1975 sinking of the Edmund Fitzgeraldduring a stormy November night on Lake Superior. 

Civilization's drive for political and economic advantage can make such tragedies understandable. But lives are also lost on the lakes through ignorance or carelessness or willful disregard for the awesomely powerful moods of those five "sisters." It's all too easy to dismiss chances for disaster, to say these are not, after all, the open seas. 

But make no mistake. As beautiful as the Great Lakes seem, and are, from the porch of a beach house or the deck of a sailboat on a calm and sunny day, they are dangerous. Blink and they can become cold-blooded killers.

Dennis was a witness to that. In 1967, salmon imported from Oregon thrived in Lake Michigan. Throughout the summer of his 13th year, people traveled to the lake from across the country, in campers and in trucks, to fish for the coho. "A kind of gold rush mentality prevailed," he writes. Nothing, it seems, could deter the anglers, not even ominous weather reports one weekend in late September. 

"Thousands of them finished work Friday, loaded their boats, and drove north. But early Saturday, the weather took an unexpected turn." Later, Dennis writes, the Coast Guard estimated that "more than a thousand boats motored into the waves beneath that moiling black sky." He and his father watched as they went out, then watched as they tried to come back when the winds had reached 40 miles an hour and the waves crested 6 to 8 feet. 

And they watched, helpless, as two men drowned. "They were so close to shore we could see the hair plastered to their scalps and could see the expressions on their faces. They looked more surprised than frightened. Their eyes were big and they worked their mouths, as if apologizing. They bobbed low in the water in their orange life preservers."

On the lakes, nothing can guarantee our safety. "They died a hundred feet from shore." 

Baron also puts a memorable face on the ruthlessness of nature. His book is about the predatory cougar, which has re-established its range in states west of the Mississippi River. The Beast in the Garden explores that return and its relationship to changes in the nation's physical and cultural landscape. 

The book opens with the 1991 death of a Colorado high school student who was attacked while jogging and partially eaten by a cougar. Baron's story, too, is about people misreading nature, about their reluctance to come to terms with the impact they have on wildlife when they sprawl onto its turf. 

The residents of Boulder, who pride themselves on a liberal approach to nature, were slow to react as cougars began wandering through yards and stalking family pets. Officials with the Colorado Division of Wildlife were slow to react, too. They believed cougars are naturally afraid of people. Maybe they once were, but that had changed. As more people moved into the state's wilder regions, more wild creatures got used to interacting with them. The cougars had begun to see people as prey.  

This is a new reality Illinoisans might want to ponder. One wild cougar has been found here, and perhaps a second. Southern Illinois University biologist Clay Nielsen tells us in this issue: "If we have a cougar population in the Midwest, this will be a huge issue. We'll need research on how humans and cougars can get along, how these two conflicting species can coexist."

Baron's book is a good place to start. Though slow to react, the citizens of Colorado, along with state officials and naturalists, finally heeded the wake-up call and began planning for a future that includes cougars at close range.  

We might also weigh the advice one sailor offered Dennis about survival on the Great Lakes: Have respect. And stay alert. 

The Living Great Lakes:
Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas
 

by Jerry DennisThomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's Griffin, 2003 

The Beast in the Garden:  
A Modern Parable of Man and Nature
  
by David Baron W.W. Norton & Company, 2004

Also recommended

Ethics on the Ark: Zoos, Animal Welfare, and Wildlife Conservation
Edited by Bryan G. Norton, Michael Hutchins, Elizabeth F. Stevens, and Terry L. Maple, with assistance from John Wuichet Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995

However fluid the territorial boundaries of cougars, bears and wolves might prove to be, most Illinoisans will never come face-to-face with a four-legged predator in their backyard. That's not to say we'll never have to confront our relationship with wild beasts, or wrestle with our place in the natural order. For that, we need go no farther than the neighborhood zoo.

The deaths of nine animals that lived in Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo, for example, have renewed controversies over the role of zoos and, by extension, civilization's impact on other creatures. These aren't new issues. In recent decades, zoos shifted their focus from exhibition and entertainment to education and conservation. And they are likely to continue to change, along with our views of the natural world. Ethics on the Ark, published in cooperation with the American Zoo and Aquarium Association, tracks the transition. It dissects the evolving debate over whether zoos are captors or protectors.


Peggy Boyer Long can be reached at Peggyboy@aol.com.

Illinois Issues, July/August 2005

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