2012 Trap Liner Award

“Like so many others of my tenure and temperament—stubborn ancients, I suppose—web reporting is anathema to everything I love about newspapering: getting a tip, developing leads, fleshing-out the details, then telling the story.”

“Now,” laments former Times-Picayune reporter Chris Rose in the August issue of the Oxford American (excerpted in the current issue of Utne), “it stops with the tip. Just verify (hopefully!) and post it. I didn’t write stories anymore; I ‘produced content.’”

Perhaps this emphasis on “web reporting” explains the largely pathetic coverage surrounding the free-roaming cat/TNR issue. There’s probably not even a tip in many cases, just a press release.

Whatever the cause, the effect (in addition to a misinformed public, misguided policy, etc.) is a very competitive field for the 2012 Trap Liner Award. Read more

War on Nature, War on Cats

In Nature Wars, to be released next week, award-winning journalist Jim Sterba argues that it’s time for Americans to reconnect with nature—and what better incentive than a massive lethal control campaign against any number of plants and animals, including feral cats? His book reflects attitudes that are out of step with contemporary culture, and a rationale that’s not supported by the science. As the song says: War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothin’…

“People have very different ideas regarding what to do, if anything, about the wild creatures in their midst,” writes Jim Sterba in his new book Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards Into Battlegrounds, “even when they are causing problems.”

“Enjoy them? Adjust to them? Move them? Remove them? Relations between people and wildlife have never been more confused, complicated, or conflicted.” [1]

Agreed. And I largely agree with Sterba’s diagnosis: “Americans have become denatured.”

“That is to say, they have forgotten the skills their ancestors acquired to manage an often unruly natural world around them, and they have largely withdrawn from direct contact with that world by spending most of their time indoors, substituting a great deal of real nature with reel nature—edited, packaged, digitized, and piped in electronically.” [1]

So what’s the solution? Here, Sterba and I part company. Read more