My wife sent this to me the other day, ostensibly as a candidate for a blog-post, and even though it's over a year and a half old, I think that it's of a quality that deserves posting regardless.
An excerpt of British environmental writer George Monbiot's TED Talk set to music and images of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.
Here's the original TED talk:
While I've mentioned trophic cascades before on this blog, as this is largely a piecemeal affair put together during my spare time, I have not yet been able to address the concept as fully as I would like. What's valuable about the preceding clips is that Monbiot explains trophic cascades in simple, easily understandable terms that do not presuppose or need a sophisticated understanding in order to make sense.
As for Monbiot's narrative, it's worth mentioning that when he says "deer," he's mostly referring to what we in North America think of as "elk," though there are also large populations of mule deer and moose in the greater Yellowstone area, both of which are also members of the "deer" family.
As for myself, in the summer of 1993 I was fortunate enough to spend several months working in Yellowstone before, along with 13 of my friends, being busted for smoking pot, an activity that the National Park Service, at least at that time, took a very dim view of. I was fined $90 and told to leave the park within 48 hours, which I did, but not before having one last look around the place. In any case, my memories of Yellowstone are fond and one day I would very much like to return, not only for the spectacle of the park itself, but also because I want to see how much it has changed in the two decades since I was last there.
