Comments on Urbanization and Nature

Love it, they shot it down: Seattle would have formed a committee to discuss what we should do to protect the animal's feelings.

City dwellers, consider this a confirmation: It is a jungle out there.

See, the difference between new media and old media is that old media "journalists" think they deserve to be paid for making up lines like that, while new media realizes you just about have to pay your readers to tolerate it. The same writer quizzically highlighted that authorities called it alternately a cougar and a mountain lion. No dictionary in the newsroom that day?

Didn't read past that. Sorry about them newspaper layoffs. No really.

The mountain lion probably lived in Discovery Park previously and then moved to Chicago, disgusted by how much it was paying in rent and the treatment of its friend the coyote. Then just as he found some cheap, but nice digs in Roscoe Village, just off the brown line, the racist cops of Chicago shot to kill.

^_^

If we'd built that monorail, we'd get whales up on Capitol Hill all the time.

I have a fondness for mountain lions, as it is fear of them that kept my mother from making us go hiking during my adolescence in Colorado.

Um, cougar and mountain lion are synonymous.

There is no existential competition between the Pacific NW and Chicago.

No one cares about the Midwest.

We get angsty about S.F. and NYC, but that's it.

@2 - Yeah, the Sun Times pretty much sucks, except for a couple columnists. The Tribune article's a little better, and includes tips on what to do if you encounter a cougar.

It did not include tips for what to do if you're in line behind a coyote at a downtown Quizno's. That was Chicago's last great wildlife moment.

Cougars roaming the city streets are not indicative of a superior natural environment; quite the opposite. He's been driven there by the disappearance of his habitat further out. The same thing is happening here, in Issaquah and Bellevue. Only we tranquilize and transport them, not shoot them.

@6

Yes. That's why the fact that authorities used both terms alternately is not important enough to print, let alone feature in the second paragraph.

How come this cougar story is stuck to the top of the Slog and all the new posts are going below it?

urbanization make us lost our way and heart, it make me begin to love the gothic style, and i find the true life with the goth on gothicloving.com which is a dating site for goth.

@ FNARF: Conversely, the fact that a mountain lion could physically make it to Chicago means that the range of the species is expanding. Young males head out looking for females, and preservation of green spaces gives them access to the cities. This isn't to say that sprawl isn't cutting into habitats in urban/suburban areas, but the presence of coyotes, beavers, otters, and other wildlife long-absent from Chicago shows the larger environmental picture (especially the waterways and preservation of green corridors) is better than it once was. This is different from the habitat loss in the Mountain West and Pacific Northwest, where formerly unbuilt-up areas are being built upon.

@10 As for the later posts appearing below, when you begin writing a post, a time code appears, and unless you change it to the time when you finished writing the post, it goes on the SLOG in that time slot. Dan started those posts before I posted mine, but didn't finish them till after.

i never even THINK about Chicago, much less feel competitive with it. it's metro region is 5 times our size.

guns are so 20th century. we taser our large predators to death - remember last summer in the U District?

Lovely how the cops think seeing an animal in the city is free license to start popping it. Also awesome is the fact that it took them more than three sets of shooting to actually (unneccessarily) kill it. Makes me glad that these cops "protecting" the populace can't hit the broad side of a barn with deadly force. Great.

Most "Stranger" readers and writers wouldn't last two seconds in Roscoe Village, Rogers Park, Uptown or any North side ghetto, let alone anyplace on the South side or West side.

Yawn. Try again when the Chicago PD bags a bear.

NOBODY GIVES A FUCK ABOUT CHICAGO. learn it. live it.

Josh, Seattle is like the annoying retarded kid in elemetry school; it wants to play ball but is so backwards and malformed that it never will. Any city can aspire to be like SF, NYC, Chicago, but only Seattle has delusions that it is like those cities.

No one in Chicago thinks about Seattle. Most people outside of the PNW don't think about Seattle.

@15: having lasted more than 2 seconds in several of those places when i was a skinny white youth at Northwestern, i wonder what your point was.

no one in seattle is claiming they're bigger badasses than chicagoans. in fact, no one in seattle is claiming shit about chicago, since we NEVER THINK ABOUT CHICAGO.

now what to do about those blow dart pigeons?

@15. You obviously haven't been to Roscoe Village in awhile. Was there for brunch last weekend and on a two block stretch there are three brunch places -- one vegetarian, one specializing in fancy pancakes, and one with a "retro" theme.

It's hardly Cabrini Green over there nowadays.