NPR science reporter David Baron has a new book out, called "The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature." Baron's book is about the return of cougars to the Boulder, Colorado area after decades of hunting-induced absence, and their eventual taste for eating human beings — along with the various fantasy ideologies regarding wildlife and nature that this chain of events revealed. But, in light of the book's subtitle, I don't think it will be terribly unfair if I use this story as a, er, parable. For the story it tells is, at core, an old...