What your local coyote is doing tonight
Recent
highlights from the Ideas blog
By Joshua Rothman
Boston and Chicago are pretty different cities:
Other than Sox-themed baseball, about the only thing we have in common is
Pizzeria Uno. Here’s one more item for the “difference” column: Chicago is
using GPS-enabled coyotes to control rats and mice.
The
coyotes are part of The Cook County, Illinois Coyote Project, an effort by
zoologists, ecologists, foresters, and the Cook County Animal and Rabies
Control agency to understand how coyotes and cities get along. In the Midwest,
thousands of coyotes roam from city to city, crossing highways, forming packs,
and eating geese, woodchucks, mice, and rats.
Some
coyotes live right in the middle of things. The project’s “featured coyote,”
Big Mama, lives with her coyote mate, the mysteriously named Coyote 115, within
a few miles of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Using GPS, the researchers can track
their whereabouts on a map of the area. They write that Big Mama and Coyote 115
are like a married couple: “at times they are inseparable, and other times they
take short breaks from each other...they have defended the same territory
together continuously” since they met in 2004.
While
researchers track the coyotes, animal control officers watch them munch on area
pests, and explain the program to alarmed and surprised residents. After a
coyote was filmed loping through downtown Chicago one night this fall, Brad
Block, an animal control supervisor, had to provide reassurances. “He’s not a
threat....He’s not going to pick up your children....His job is to deal with
all of the nuisance problems, like mice, rats and rabbits.” Block wisely chose
not to mention that the coyotes sometimes prey on house cats. The researchers
admit that cat owners “view this function of coyotes as strongly negative.”
The optimum level of chill “information wants to be free.” The
Internet visionary Stewart Brand first said those words in 1984, and ever since
they’ve been an unofficial slogan for the online world. For many people the
Internet is defined by freedom, especially freedom of speech: It’s the one
place in our society where anyone can say anything. Most of the time, we think
of that freedom as a good thing.
Now,
though, a distinguished group of philosophers and legal scholars begs to
differ. “The Offensive Internet,” a new volume from Harvard University Press,
is edited by two eminent professors at the University of Chicago Law School,
Saul Levmore (who was until recently the dean) and Martha Nussbaum, and
includes essays from scholars who, as the critic Stanley Fish notes, “are
by-and-large free speech advocates.”
Levmore’s
essay is called “The Internet Anonymity Problem,” and it argues that on the
Internet speech is absurdly free — more free, for instance, than the proverbial
writing on the bathroom wall. Levmore cites a case in which the owner of a bar
was found liable for defamatory graffiti in his bar’s bathroom, which he failed
to remove despite knowing about it. And yet his modern-day equivalent, an
Internet service provider or website administrator, is explicitly protected
from that kind of liability by the Communications Decency Act. At least the
bathroom wall, Levmore points out, serves another purpose; many websites, like
the now-defunct JuicyCampus, exist solely for the purpose of anonymous libel
and rumor-mongering. Today the bathroom wall is permanent, global, and has a
search box.
Other essays in the book
focus on the way the Internet abets youthful indiscretion, the spread of false
information, or the objectification of women. (“Much of the damage done by the
spread of gossip and slander on the Internet,” Nussbaum notes, “is damage to
women.”) Why is the Internet such a social nightmare? Cass Sunstein, a
University of Chicago law professor who’s also head of President Obama’s Office
of Information and Regulatory Affairs, explains that in real life, there’s what
legal scholars call a “chilling effect” on false or damaging speech. Sometimes
laws discourage people from spreading scurrilous rumors or making false claims;
just as often, social pressures intervene. On the Internet, though, there is no
chilling effect. The goal of the law governing speech, Sunstein writes, must be
to ensure an “optimum level of chill,” whether face-to-face or online.
For a long time the
Internet was considered a nascent medium, and judges sought to protect it and
help it grow. Today, any attempt to regulate Internet speech is still attacked
as an assault on the First Amendment. And yet, Nussbaum and Levmore argue, the
laws governing speech are nuanced; they respect its power to harm as well as
help. “Regulation of speech,” they write, “is uncontroversially constitutional
with respect to threats, bribery, defamatory statements, fighting words, fraud,
copyright, plagiarism, and more.” The Internet has grown up, and should be
subject to grown-up laws.
The American character Does
America have a distinctive national character? Up until the 1960s, this was a
question of great interest to historians. But then, according to historian
David Kennedy, it dropped off the map, to be taken up only sporadically by
sociologists and political scientists. Writing in the Boston Review, Kennedy
argues that historians need to take the question back.
Kennedy is a professor of
history, emeritus at Stanford University, and as he sees it, historians are now
in a unique position to write on the subject of the American character. Over
the last half century, they’ve put together an extraordinarily diverse set of
very specific American histories, bringing once-marginalized groups into
historical focus. (In doing this, they stepped away from sweeping questions,
becoming “a guild of splitters, not joiners.”) Now, Kennedy argues, it’s time to
start drawing on “the large but disarticulated library of social history that
has emerged in the last few decades.” We’ve learned just how diverse Americans
are — now we can start to ask what they have in common, in a historically
informed way.
Kennedy singles out for
particular praise Claude Fischer’s “Made in America: A Social History of
American Culture and Character.” Fischer’s conclusion (according to Kennedy) is
that voluntarism is at the core of the American character. Voluntarism has two
aspects. On the one hand, it means thinking of yourself as an individual
equipped with a (voluntary) will, as someone who’s entitled to pursue your own
happiness. On the other hand, it means recognizing that, in Fischer’s words,
“individuals succeed through fellowship — not in egoistic isolation but in
sustaining, voluntary communities.” It’s because of these two aspects of
voluntarism that we have an affinity for both the exclusive and the inclusive:
for gated communities as well as religious diversity, or for casual manners as
well as social climbing. This can’t be the final answer, of course: Kennedy
hopes that it’s only the first salvo in an epic exchange of fire among
historians.
There are, needless to say,
good reasons to distrust any account of an abstraction like “the American
character.” But it’s still the case that our politics revolves around exactly
these sorts of abstractions. It might be interesting if historians entered the
conversation — bearing evidence.
Joshua Rothman is a
graduate student and teaching fellow in the Harvard English department and an
instructor in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He
teaches novels and political writing.
© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/01/09/what_your_local_coyote_is_doing_tonight/?page=2
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