In January 1991, Scott Lancaster, an athletic 18-year-old, went for a run in the middle of the day near his high school in the Denver suburbs. He never came back. Days later, when a search party found Lancaster’s body in the woods within sight of I-70, they also found his killer: a healthy, 100-pound male mountain lion.
“This was something that the experts would have told you was not supposed to happen,” says David Baron, author of the new book The Beast in the Garden, a study of the complex relationship between mountain lions and humans in Colorado’s Front Range. But Baron, a former Ted Scripps Fellow, contends in his book that there were a few experts who weren’t at all surprised.
In 1988 in nearby Boulder, two University of Colorado wildlife biologists had been studying the behavior of mountain lions and growing increasingly concerned. Michael Sanders and Jim Halfpenny noted that as the giant cats moved back into the area—following their prey, the deer—they became more comfortable around humans. They came out in broad daylight. They ventured into yards. They started eating people’s pets.
Sanders and Halfpenny warned that as the cats’ fear of humans lessened, they would become more dangerous. Lancaster’s death, the first documented case of a mountain lion killing an adult in at least a century, was just what the researchers had feared.
“In hindsight, it signaled the beginning of a kind of trend,” Baron says.
And for Baron it was the spark for the story he wanted to tell.
Baron hatched the idea for his book while he was a Scripps Fellow during the 1998-99 academic year. He had already done a few pieces on human-predator interactions for National Public Radio, and he had a vague idea that he wanted to write more about the growing number of conflicts between humans and predators. In Boulder, he researched his topic and wrote a story for the Boston Globe Magazine. The main subject for that story was Andy Peterson, a man who survived an attack by a mountain lion in April 1998, near Denver.
Baron was worried that Lancaster’s death, which happened almost eight years before, was too outdated for his book. But he decided that the story, combined with Halfpenny’s and Sanders’ research, was compelling enough to carry the narrative.
By the end of his fellowship year Baron had found an agent for his idea. He moved back to Boston and his job at NPR and spent the next year working on his book proposal. In August 2000, with a modest advance in his pocket, he left his job and started writing. But even working on the project full-time, it took two and a half years to complete.
Baron says one of the biggest challenges for him was the writing itself. The 15-year public radio veteran says he “could count on one hand” the number of newspaper articles he’d written before he jumped into what would become a 288-page project.
In radio, writing needs to be simple and short. Baron says that even a long radio piece looks short on paper. “Just figuring out how to fill that space” was hard, he says.
And then there was the research.
“I interviewed so many people you can’t believe it,” he says.
In his book, Baron described the scene of Lancaster’s death in vivid detail. He relied on interviews, police reports, photographs, and even a video taken at the crime scene to give life to his story. More than 150 people are listed as “witnesses” in the back of the book; even more provided background information. He also had an entire file cabinet filled with factual information: predator-prey interactions, human persecution of predators, history of the Front Range, deer behavior.
Even juggling all that information, Baron found a way to make his writing flow. Publishers Weekly wrote that Baron’s book “reads like a true crime thriller,” and Baron says “to the extent that it’s a good read,” he agrees. But he cautions that it doesn’t mean his conclusions are simple or straightforward.
He says what emerged for him during his research is the certainty that conflicts between people and wildlife are inherently complicated. People tend to polarize around the issue, with some saying habitat encroachment is our fault and we should move out, and others arguing that predators are pests that should be moved or killed. Baron says he thinks the truth is somewhere nearer the middle.
He says the problem is not just that there are too many people living in the predators’ habitat. In some cases, there are more predators now, too. To illustrate, he points to black bears that are now living within 20 miles of New York City, where they haven’t been for 150 years. He says changing demographics of people and wildlife mean there is no single answer to solve conflicts.
“Where the wildlife should take precedence, we should tread lightly,” Baron says. But there are other places “where it’s too late,” and predators need to be kept in check.
Last February Baron sent the manuscript off to his publisher, then went back to work for NPR through the spring and summer. He is now a visiting scholar at Boston University’s Knight Center for Science and Medical Journalism.
Baron says writing his book was “a very satisfying experience,” and one that he would like to try again in a year or so. He’s mysterious about his next topic, hinting only that he wants to tell a true story about the Amazon in the 19th century.
But for now, he’s just glad he’s finished.
“I would like to say I really loved writing the book,” he says, “but that would be a lie.”
 |
| Author David Baron |
No comments:
Post a Comment