Like, I suppose, most of The Drift's readers, I stand ever at the ready to believe that whatever Obama's been up to recently is an expression of Pure Ideology. When you've got an easy target, though, your work has to be correspondingly more rigorous; if you're criticizing as wrong someone your audience is already apt to think is wrong, you risk appearing self-satisfied or ungenerous. If you yield to the temptation of being breezy, pointing out this or that (and merely pointing it out) as if as a reminder to a reader who's already in the swim, you risk appearing supercilious where you should be incisive.
[Kristine McDvitt Tompkins and Douglas Tompkins]'s donation vastly expanded Chile’s national parklands, according to The New York Times, “enlarging the area of protection for pumas, condors, flamingos, and endangered deer species.” But nearby farmers have organized a resistance to the rewilding project. They complain that the rise in puma populations is threatening their herds, which they depend upon for their livelihood. Our Great National Parks has a short attention span, however: there’s no time to provide this context before moving on to glamor shots of an Andean condor chick.
Alas, "The Audacity of Nature Docs" has an even shorter attention span, not even pausing the explain how this is context. I am in no position to dispute that it's a fact, and even a fact that has something to do with the park in Chile. But a fact is not an analysis; an accumulation of facts is not context. The fact is presented as if its significance is obvious on its face (it's bad, I guess; a strike against the park), so that we, the knowing ones, have only to be told that the documentary doesn't include it to tell that we've got one up on it, but what is its significance? Who are the nearby farmers? What should we make of their claims? And why weren't there enough pumas around to trouble them before?
When Yellowstone was created, when, as Adams reminds us, it was inhabited by "several indigenous tribes that served as … effective caretakers of the land", wolves lived there too. Then for a while they didn't, or at least did only in negligible numbers: settlers—farmers who complained that the wolves were threatening their herds—were among those whose influence led to a pretty successful program of extermination. They're back now, though, and get this: farmers ("ranchers" might be more apt, but I'm following Adams's usage) complain about them. What should we make of their complaints?* (To what extent does their existence in their present form depend on the absence of wolves in the intervening years?) I personally do not think that it's a mark against the wolf programs; I am rather inclined to see them as an obstacle. Should I think the same of the Chilean farmers/ranchers? (It's also not clear that wolves were reintroduced with the aim of restoring Yellowstone to a "mythical wilderness [from] a time when humans did not exist", an image that may well be the documentary's ideal of a national park but is not exactly current in conservation, rather than restoring an endangered predator to an ecosystem from which it had been removed, which is not quite the same thing.)
I have no idea how far an analogy between the complainants about wolves and the complainants about pumas can be carried; I haven't got the context. But the outlines seem suggestive. We might ask what the wolf population in the American West would have been like if the indigenous peoples living in Yellowstone hadn't had the treaties they violated. (It's quite possible that that wouldn't have been enough, but who knows.) We do know that Native Americans participated in the reintroduction of wolves and have the authority to manage wolf populations on the lands they currently occupy. Adams closes by asking, "what would happen if, rather than kicking people off their land to convert it into more tourist destinations and reserves for future land exploitation, the conservation industry followed the lead of people who are already practicing preservation?" Well might one ask! Would there be pumas?
*What, for that matter, should we make of their occupation? These are cattlemen, after all.
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