CONTRARlAN

I understand you better now, but I still see it a bit differently. People with chickens tend to think ahead about how to keep them from being eaten.

People with cats, on the other hand, tend to just kill the thing that's threatening their cat.

And rural settings have a more endless supply of threats. Yeah, you could go out every single night with your raccoon, or you could put up an electric fence.

Also, not one of the cases I've seen in the city sought permits to trap or kill. When you live somewhere where there are murders, who gives a crap about an animal?

I think we're both right, honestly, but I think the city situation is far more complicated-and far less raccoon-friendly–than you think. But I get where you're coming from.

Spend some time in Manhattan and the concept of carrier pigeons becomes impossible to believe.

I'm sure you didn't mean to, but that comment comes across as an easy stereotype that sees city-dwellers as respecters of nature and rural people as killers.

The other thing is, my own anecdotal experience contrasts with your own anecdotal experience. (For what that's worth, which isn't much, I admit.)

I've lived in big cities almost all my life and people around me have killed or otherwise sought to harm raccoons on numerous occasions. They're thought of as pest, and in cities, pests abound unless you do drastic things. I've heard raccoons killed outside my window, I've seen bunnies dead from being fed rat poison, etc. In big cities. There's the pests angle, but there's also a fear of animals that seems to be associated with a lack of familiarity with and experience around animals that rural settings are more conducive to having.

By contrast, the years I spent living in rural places I encountered much more sensible attitudes towards things like raccoons. I found that people who live somewhere that leaves one more aware of one's place in nature have more respect for it.

Of course, there were numerous exceptions to both dynamics. And again, just my experience, but I think the notion that city-dwellers are somehow friendlier to nature is a too-easy misconception that's fueled mostly by the us-vs.-them narrative that's being pushed on us by politicians and the media alike. Country-dwellers hate nature! City-dwellers love nature! It's just too easy, too lacking nuance.

And then there's the whole problem to get around of cities being the most subdued nature there is: pouring concrete and asphalt over a large piece of nature and then claiming some kind of moral authority is a difficult concept for me. Manhattan used to be populated by the Lenape...

I know that per-capita you could make a strong case that cities have lower impact per capita, but something about that just doesn't feel sufficient to me.

That'd be funny if it wasn't such an infuriating brand of stupidity on their part.

With only one or two exceptions where I like to keep print copies around for reference (or for travel use where I want something disposable–don't want to leave an iPad on the beach or by the pool, for example), I'm the same as you: it arrives, it goes straight to recycling, and I read it on my iPad/Kindle/whatever. Last year I went on a tear, trying to stop all paper delivery while retaining digital access.

Turns out very, very few publications were helpful. Everyone understood why I wanted to do it, but they make their ad money off of paper copies shipped. So, as with the Economist, you have a lot of rags who're talking the talk about conservation, provided it doesn't cost them a penny.

Sure, they'll charge the customer more for less.

A couple were great about it: a quick email and it was moved over to Newsstand, or their app, etc. But the rest, the bigger publications, almost uniformly baulked, and could never make it happen.

I even considered trying to shame them by creating a site so everyone see who's forward-thinking, and who's myopic. I may yet.

It kind of reaffirmed my view that the whole print industry is a broken model. The end result is that I canceled a bunch of subscriptions, since the ones that are supposed to have credibility about world affairs just lost it in my eyes, I couldn't take them seriously (not that I ever should have).

It's also made me extra sensitive to the whored-out nature of publications that take ad dollars.

As a result, I canceled a bunch of subscriptions, and focused my energy on the ones that operate from subscription models (which are more expensive individually, but I saved more than that getting there).

Turns out I'm getting better information, paying more attention to it, and don't have a stack of magazines to worry about recycling every month.

That's unfortunate.

The Economist's attempts at creating a sensible digital pricing model has just been a range of awful options. From the Kindle, to the iPad, etc.

To say nothing of the fact that it's still cheaper to just find a decent discount on the print edition and access the web version via that account, than it is to save the materials and costs and go digital-only.

For all the normative claims they make about the need for better environmentalism and economic policies, they sure seem to have difficulty keeping their own house in order.

So, reclaimed by the city and turned into safe drinking water?