Spring 2014
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An opinion piece in the NYTimes about whether letting cats outside is a disruption of natural habitats: The Evil of the Outdoor Cat
I came across this video via twitter the other day – it tells the story of how wolves have changed the geography of Yellowstone National Park. This is mostly a tale about how the “natural” actions of wolves – hunting deer – led to a cascade of changes that resulted in changes to rivers, and I suppose that one might say that the wolves weren’t so much actively changing as they were acting like wolves, with unintended consequences. But I do think that there are parallels between the wolfish behavior in this video and human interactions with the environment. So often, we read stories about the unintentional consequences of one act or another (for example, repopulating New England with beavers leading to the flooding of backyards).
Given our discussion of how we go about making animals the center of the story from last week, this video seems like a good example of how we can talk about animals as the main, and agentic, characters.
A few of you wrote about the naturalness of Davidson’s squirrels, prompting the archivist, Jan Blodgett, to send me this post on the history of campus squirrels – it turns out that they were imported to add to the atmosphere of campus! Her post reminded me of an article written by a friend of mine for a Popular Science blog, about a different article published in the Journal of American History on the history of urban squirrels.
The Popular Science overview article is here.
The original Journal of American History article is here.
Enjoy these, and your weekend.
Welcome to the history of American environments, taught at Davidson College in the Spring of 2014. This space will function in lieu of a Moddle forum – as a place for you to register weekly opinions on the reading, drop in interesting links. The blog is not indexed with Google, but it is still accessible to any who might stumble upon it. To that end, if you don’t want your posts to be searchable by your Davidson handle, feel free to change it (users>your profile>nickname) and send me the name you’ll be posting under.