Sublime

They were often planted in city parks by princes and politicians as exotic trophies. What is missing here, above all, is the forest, or—more specifically—relatives. At

Clark Barrett, a professor in the anthropology department at UCLA and an expert on predator-prey dynamics, describes the deer’s advantage as the anywhere but here principle: all a prey animal needs to do is be anywhere the predator isn’t—it doesn’t matter if it’s a foot away, or a hemisphere—and it will live another day. The predator, on the other

The experiment was elegant in its simplicity. Using a toy lion and a toy zebra, Barrett asked each child, “When the lion sees the zebra, what does the lion want to do?” The results were surprising: 75 percent of the three-year-olds in both groups answered with some variation of “The lion wants to chase/bite/kill the zebra.” (It must be remembered t

David Mattson, a grizzly bear expert, retired from the U.S. Geological Survey, wrote the following in response to outdated policies on game management, but it applies equally well to energy and climate policies: The problem with despotic institutions is that they rarely adapt constructively to changing environments. Instead, the pattern is one of e

A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf

Pavlovian—in

the Peregrine Fund,

the elk wrecked the ecosystem there. They ventured into places they hadn’t before, and they ate everything. Shrubs, saplings, everything. Soon, there was no ground cover, and the soil was eroding, and it was fucking up waterways, and all sorts of other species were thrown out of whack because of it. A huge mess. But if you think about it from the e