Hatchet Men

Jibbenainosay is quite right to link this with human institutional adaptability, and the risks pertaining thereunto.

For, after all, isn't it precisely -- and the Confidence Man does mean precisely -- this kind of adaptability that led to the Enron meltdown?

Food supply running low, the scavengers and foragers decided to evolve themselves into a veritable Adaptability Machine -- and thereby abstracted themselves into transactors of adaptability, rather than the "natural" foragers that their environment had shaped them to be.

As a sidebar, note also in the CNN article the curiously placed invocation of the Colorado State Line, which connotes it almost as an environmental function.

Which, if Jibbenainosay is correct in his assumption that this elk migration was driven by human interlopers, is in fact true. However, editing the story in such a way as to disguise this fact also elides what is no doubt a heated political debate amongst Coloradans and Wyomingians over human migratory patterns ...

... in fact, now that the Confidence Man gets to thinking about it ... Wyoming is ranch country, right? OK, not that the conditions conducive to ranching stop at the state line, but ... anyway: we have elk crossing over into potential cattle-grazing territory, right? Driven by herds of yuppieus americanis establishing nesting territory ("subdivisions," the natives call them) that encroaches on the elk feeding grounds.

Dollars to donuts that acidic lichen ain't natcherly so -- and you'll find a cattleman's bootprints leading away from it ...