| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Reviews Seldom SeenShadow Cat: Encountering the American Mountain Lion, edited by Susan Ewing and Elizabeth Grossman. Sasquatch Books, Seattle, 1999, 225 pp., $15.95 paper. Mountain Lion, by Rebecca L. Grambo, photos by Daniel J. Cox. Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1999, 119 pp., $18.95 paper. Television has radically changed our relationship with the rest of creation. By bringing us tightly framed close-ups of elephants and eagles, and by compressing the essential events of an animal’s life into a few minutes, television gives us a false sense of communion. Edited out are the photographer’s weeks of sitting in the cold waiting for Bambi to step out of her dressing room, and the fact that he shivered behind a 1,000-millimeter lens in an army-camouflage blind a quarter of a mile away. Ignorant of the artifice, viewers have come to expect a kind of drop-in informality with wild creatures. That becomes an issue when we consider the mountain lion, a species just about unmatched in its desire for privacy. People live all their lives in cougar country and never see one. Those who do, report a tawny blur, a tail disappearing into the brush, a mere fragment of encounter. At least 39 books about mountain lions have come out in the last decade, triple the output of the 1980s. The increased number is doubtless due in part to heightened concern for both humans and lions as urban expansion devours lion habitat, and in part to the migration of nature publishing from New York City, where lions are extinct, to new regional publishers in the West, where lions survive. All of these books have to deal with the problem that few people ever see a wild lion. Two recent arrivals take opposite approaches to the problem. Shadow Cat: Encountering the American Mountain Lion, edited by Susan Ewing and Elizabeth Grossman, is an anthology of 20 short pieces. Recognizing that different people see lions in different ways, Shadow Cat is immensely fair and encompassing. Included are biologists, hunters, animal protectionists, a journalist, a rancher, and a handful of our best literary naturalists. There is a full range of discussion, from natural history to politics. Park ranger Jordan Fisher-Smith recalls recovering the body of Barbara Schoener, killed by a lion in Placer County in 1994. Biologist Harley Shaw reflects on the quality of the science used to investigate mountain lion populations. Writer David Quammen dines on lion steaks. It is wonderfully honest: While all 20 contributors in some way connect with mountain lions, only seven of them actually encounter the shadow cat in the flesh. Two of them do it with the aid of trained hunting dogs, two with radio collars, and one has a neighboring cowboy show up at her door with a lion on a chain, hoping his manly show of dominion will lead to a bedroom conquest. Only two of these witnesses actually encounter lions the way you or I or other mere mortals are likely to. Barbara Dean sees one lope across the meadow 20 feet from her door in rural northern California. Rick Bass has one nearly run over the toes of his boots as it chases his terrified dog. All 20 find that separating human and lion is a deep chasm of silence. Some of the most provocative thinking and delicious writing falls into this silence. Verlyn Klinkenberg discovers he’s out in Arizona looking for "something not entirely phenomenal, something that could not be grasped with the senses." Bass catches his breath after his stunning encounter and sighs, "We have no sure ways, really, of knowing anything. Our hearts, and the blood of the millennia that those hearts pump, know so much more than we can read or experience in a lifetime." And Jeffrey Smith says, "Between us and the rest of creation is a veil of incomprehensibility. That mystery is all we know of divinity." Shadow Cat offers fine examples of the ways we use other creatures to consider complex human things. Ellen Meloy’s lion is a prism through which a man’s violence is refracted. Barbara Dean’s focuses the pain she feels when a nearby hillside is logged. Annick Smith’s unseen lion whispers of the vividness and intensity of the life she has been wise enough to choose. Terry Tempest Williams’ rekindles the healing power of native tradition. Mountain Lion, a book of photographs by Daniel Cox, takes a different approach. An excellent short overview of natural history and conservation issues by Rebecca L. Grambo is tucked into the front of the book. It’s the docent tour—nice to take if you have time—but the main event is the pictures, crisp and lingering, intimate and confiding. The light is clear and limpid, the outlines of the cats so laser sharp they seem to leap off the page. Cox worked "mainly with captive bred animals under controlled conditions" because that "permitted us to see and photograph behavior and physical details nearly impossible to capture in the wild." A menagerie of captive lions is taken out to romp in natural settings. One poses majestically below a natural bridge in Utah; another leaps death-defyingly from cliff to sandstone needle. We tend to let the tracings of the eye become the knowledge of the heart. Seeing, we say, is believing. But, to my mind, there’s something manipulative going on here. It’s a little like the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, in which famous models are taken to some South Sea island to justify shooting pictures of them in very skimpy bathing suits. Yes, South Sea islands are the natural habitat of epidermis, and this is pretty glorious epidermis, ennobled all the more against a backdrop that implies that God is just as pleased as you at the happy coincidence. But you know life isn’t really like that. You could walk beaches till you’re 90 and never encounter Cindy Crawford, sprawled in the surf, smiling up at you as if you were the sparkplug of her life. It’s just as unlikely you’ll ever entertain a long, lingering view of a wild lion. A picture can show you everything and tell you nothing. One marvels at Cox’s lions, but is apt to wonder, "Whose dreams are these?" Posed pictures raise such questions. Shadow Cat’s contributors tell us what they’re looking for. They show just how hard it is to find real understanding, but they encourage us to try. ––Peter Steinhart Recommended Reading from the Editors' Desk Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction? by Michael Ruse, Harvard University Press, Cambridge/London, 1999, 296 pp., $27.50 cloth. Critics of evolutionary biol-ogy have always claimed that it is motivated more by philosophical commitment than by scientific evidence. One hundred and forty years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, it is a lot harder to find sympathy for that claim, although some post-modern academics try to maintain that no science, let alone evolutionary science, is more than culturally constructed convention. In Mystery of Mysteries, philosopher Michael Ruse agrees, to a small degree, with the post-modernists; he acknowledges that there has always been a strong cultural component motivating and, to some extent, directing evolutionary theory. On the other hand, he is a strong believer that science, and evolutionary biology in particular, says something objective about the way the world is, something that is not just "constructed" by observers and not dependent on them. Ruse concludes that the ratio of culture to "epistemic science," as he calls the hard, objective stuff of proper research, has gradually reversed in favor of science, as molecular biology and other experiment-based methods of testing evolutionary theory’s predictions have developed. What may seem a fairly obvious argument is enlivened by Ruse’s historical profiles of ten leading evolutionists, from Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather) through Charles Darwin, Julian Huxley, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, E.O. Wilson, Geoffrey Parker, and Jack Sepkoski. In each biography, Ruse tries to disentangle the subject’s philosophy from his science, demonstrating the dictum that just because a scientist desperately wants (for whatever reasons) a theory to be true, doesn’t mean it isn’t. An Affair with Africa: Expeditions and Adventures Across a Continent, by Alzada Carlisle Kistner. Island Press, Washington D.C., 1998, 246 pp., $24.95 cloth. For better or worse, marriage to entomologist David Kistner meant spending months at a time looking for bugs in Africa. Alzada Carlisle Kistner’s husband’s specialties are myrmecophiles and termitophiles, beetles that have evolved to resemble ants and termites, respectively, and that live in their hosts’ colonies. These beetles generally emerge only when the colony is on the move. So a collector, aspirator and vial in hand, must crouch adjacent to the never-ending columns of insects, vulnerable to heat, scratches, and bites, as the colony marches through forest and savanna, and wait patiently for hours to pounce on the occasional beetle. Alzada, often with her grade-school-age daughters alongside, accompanied her husband on expeditions to field stations and far-off villages throughout much of central and southern Africa. When she wasn’t searching intently for the awkward gait of the ant-imitators, she was experiencing firsthand the rapid reshuffling of Africa as each tussling country emerged from colonization. It is an amazing, humorous, and sometimes harrowing tale. Cal Alive! Exploring Biodiversity, an interactive CD-ROM about California Biodiversity. California Institute for Biodiversity, Oakland, for Macintosh or Windows PC., $49.95. Cal Alive! is for kids, but adults who love the natural state of California will enjoy it, too. The software seduces with games and photos, and then educates with good, solid ecological information about California’s major biomes and regions and the plants and animals that inhabit them. Some of the disk’s features aren’t worth much more than a perusal, but others can be rewardingly revisited again and again. Audio-video clips of interviews with naturalists spice the explorations with insight, and the text is well written—and well read in the voiceovers. If you’re like me, though, after a half-hour of exploring Cal Alive! on the computer, you’ll want to put on your boots and head outside |
Summer 1999
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