Book Journal 2016: 3
Engineering Eden: the true story of a violent death, a trial, and the fight over controlling nature, by Jordan Fisher Smith
Like many nonfiction narratives, Engineering Eden tries to focus on the humans involved in a single (usually tragic) event to create the emotional investment required to learn about the larger situation that the event was a part of. Here the subtitle summarizes the book neatly: your emotional connection is the victim of a tragic death, and the wrongful death suit on whether the National Park Service was legally responsible for that death is the introduction to the bigger issue of conflicting philosophies for managing bears and nature in general. This tried-and-true approach didn’t work terribly well for me, but I suspect the fault here is specific to me, and the majority of readers probably won’t react the same way. I have backgrounds in both ecology and law, and learning about those issues is why I picked up the book. Consequently, it’s not surprising that, to me, sections on the victim and his family felt tedious and disruptive of the actual story.
The overarching story behind the book is bear management at Yellowstone National Park. Tourists had for years been feeding the bears, causing them to lose a fear of humans, and further associate people with food. Also, the open dumps near the hotels were bear feeding grounds, even treated as their own attraction. The government concluded that this was bad: it causes bears to seek out humans for food, and also isn’t very “natural.” But there were different opinions about how to solve the problem, reflecting different concepts about how much of a role humans were to play in regulating the ecosystems of national parks, and the very concept of natural. Combine this with a political belief that giving the appearance that everything is under control is more important than actually getting things under control, and you have a perfect setup for some very bad decisions and a lot of finger pointing.
The issues at the root of this have impacts far beyond bear management, of course, but bears eating people is a good subject to get people reading the book.
Like many nonfiction narratives, Engineering Eden tries to focus on the humans involved in a single (usually tragic) event to create the emotional investment required to learn about the larger situation that the event was a part of. Here the subtitle summarizes the book neatly: your emotional connection is the victim of a tragic death, and the wrongful death suit on whether the National Park Service was legally responsible for that death is the introduction to the bigger issue of conflicting philosophies for managing bears and nature in general. This tried-and-true approach didn’t work terribly well for me, but I suspect the fault here is specific to me, and the majority of readers probably won’t react the same way. I have backgrounds in both ecology and law, and learning about those issues is why I picked up the book. Consequently, it’s not surprising that, to me, sections on the victim and his family felt tedious and disruptive of the actual story.
The overarching story behind the book is bear management at Yellowstone National Park. Tourists had for years been feeding the bears, causing them to lose a fear of humans, and further associate people with food. Also, the open dumps near the hotels were bear feeding grounds, even treated as their own attraction. The government concluded that this was bad: it causes bears to seek out humans for food, and also isn’t very “natural.” But there were different opinions about how to solve the problem, reflecting different concepts about how much of a role humans were to play in regulating the ecosystems of national parks, and the very concept of natural. Combine this with a political belief that giving the appearance that everything is under control is more important than actually getting things under control, and you have a perfect setup for some very bad decisions and a lot of finger pointing.
The issues at the root of this have impacts far beyond bear management, of course, but bears eating people is a good subject to get people reading the book.