Mountain lion

6 November, East Village, New York

As I walked in, Beth Pratt cut a striking figure in the dining room, clad in shocking pink and the more arresting because she was clutching a large stuffed toy mountain lion. An eccentric choice of accessory, I thought, but then remembered that this was a dinner in New York’s East Village! I made a bee-line for her and quickly fell under her spell.

Until Thursday night I had never heard of Beth, but it turns out she is as close as you can get to environmentalist royalty, the woman behind the movement to create the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over the 101 Freeway in Los Angeles, a project to reconnect fragmented mountain lion habitats in the Santa Monica Mountains. The crossing is nearing completion and is due to be fully operational by 2026. People’s thrill on recognising her and at being in her presence was palpable. And she was charming. 

Nor – I should say – was this any old stuffed mountain lion she was carrying! A tag on his plush ear declared him to be ‘P-22’, modelled on the cougar made famous in 2013 by National Geographic’s publication of his photo with the famous Hollywood sign behind him, propelling him into unexpected stardom as the poster-boy for urban big cats in America. Inspired by him, Beth’s efforts achieved the liberation and the emancipation of other scattered and isolated lions, allowing them to roam and to breed, and to repopulate the West Coast. 

I was in the East Village as the guest of Ben Goldsmith, back at the uber-trendy Bowery Hotel (where last time, just a few weeks ago, I was with Annie Lennox!) to attend a dinner to mark and to celebrate the first year of a new ‘big cat’ project, aimed this time not at the West Coast but at the East. And what fun it was! Amazing company, great conversation and some powerful presentations. Ben is, of course, an eloquent and passionate speaker on things environmental, and if he was momentarily wrong-footed by the organisers’ surprise announcement – seconds before he spoke – that the dinner was being dedicated to the memory of his mother, Annabel, whose funeral we held in London last week and a picture of whom, on Ben’s arm, flashed up into the screen bringing a lump to many a throat, he rode his momentary wave of sadness and rose to the occasion on the other side with brio. It just makes sense, this project, he explained, and its impact – completely out of proportion to its relatively modest cost – is potentially huge. 

But why reintroduce big cats into the wild? Aren’t we safer without them? Well, yes, in one sense we are. But so are the wild deer who are now breeding and increasing exponentially, eating all the ground-level herbage in the forests of the East Coast. The woodlands have only just recovered from the terrible coastal deforestation wrought by European settlers several centuries ago, and if the deer go unchecked, within 80 years – Ben explained – we could be back to square one. Think of the landscape of Sutherland in Scotland, majestic but barren. Worse in the short term for humans, the huge deer population is the cause of the rapid rise in Lyme Disease, caused by deer ticks, an illness now striking down half a million Americans per year on the Eastern seaboard. Mountain lions (or cougars, or panthers, or – in Vermont – ‘catamounts’) are the keystone predator in the ecological system that is currently failing because of their extinction by hunters; bringing them back will allow nature to rebalance itself, with gains for all. And if walking in the mountains of the east coast will, as a result, become marginally more risky as an activity, there is – Ben opined with a smile – something rather wonderful about the frisson of knowing that in theory there’s something out there that could eat you, and a healthy level of fear is a great corrective to the modern habit of spending time outside looking at your iPhone! We imagined that the natural world would be safer if we erased predators from it; in fact we have by so doing unleashed ecological chaos, and are we reaping its reward. 

I have to confess, with some shame, that environmentalism has never really gripped me. I know it should have, but I suspect like many others I have quietly labelled it ‘worthy’, and left it to people with more of an instinctive sense for it. That changed for me on Thursday evening. The case, outlined by Renee Seacor, project officer for this new catamount programme in Vermont, was compelling: not a romantic appeal on the basis of nostalgia for what has been lost (which at its worst environmentalism can sometimes seem to be), but a forward-looking argument for ecological justice, restoration, and the re-establishing of a web of connections that for centuries sustained and shaped a whole landscape, within which we had our place  – a landscape, Renee suggested, ‘not free from conflict but guided by coexistence’. 

Beth’s passion was infectious, and by the end of the evening I’d been engulfed and overtaken by it. I wondered that night what I could do to advance the cause. Start conversations and become an advocate, presumably, a bit like Beth. And if shocking pink isn’t quite my style, my only question now is where can I acquire a similar stuffed plush big cat?!