Thursday, June 16, 2016

Once upon a time...

Seeing a deer was a big deal. Seriously. As recently as the Seventies, just seeing a whitetail in suburbia east of the Mississippi was a rare thing. Now, though? After half a century of careful herd management here are so many of the damn things that some stretches of interstate can look like an abbatoir, with four or five of the things bloating along the roadside in the space of a mile or two.

Similarly, Walt Disney World opened in Florida in 1971 and would have been in operation for sixteen years before the American alligator was removed from the endangered species list. Now the things are traffic hazards in Florida. They also seem to serve the same function as grizzlies in Alaska: A reminder that we're not automatically at the top of the food chain.
.