This week on Cultivating Place, life in the garden gets a little more wild when we speak with Beth Pratt-Bergstrom, California director of the National Wildlife Federation. Beth is the author of the recently released book titled "When Mountain Lions are Neighbors - People and Wildlife Working it Out in California.”
Something of a surprise to me, the book walks readers through the detailed stories of several specific wild animals and their plights — and sometimes successes — at co-existing with humans throughout the state of California. The stories deftly and effectively pull us as humans (poetically, emotionally and personally, but never condescendingly) into them and then launch us from these specific stories into broader concepts. These broader concepts like habitat degradation, fragmentation and outright loss are sometimes so overwhelming as to make us as readers and listeners shut down, but I did not shut down when reading this book.
"When Mountain Lions are Neighbors” interweaves hope and examples of on-going, broad solution approaches to some of these issues, such as the National Wildlife Federation’s Certified Back Yard Habitat Garden program, by focusing on the importance of relationship/education, connectivity and finally citizen science on the parts of people just like us — gardeners, nature lovers, thinkers.
