Run-Up

Abstract

Augustine’s defense of mice and fleas was, as it remains, a minority position. At times—on the Sabbath, so to speak—people may tolerate, and even appreciate, mice in the kitchen, but the rest of the time they quite properly go about the business of excluding them. No less a champion of nature than John Muir, when not living as a mendicant out in the woods, was a prosperous orchardist, managing a business that specifically entails excluding—or killing—mice (actually, in Muir’s case, ground squirrels and a host of other orchard pests).1 And if Augustine’s doctrine of regard for vermin anticipated Muir’s off-hours deep ecology by a couple of millennia, the utilitarian philosophy espoused by Muir’s nemesis, Gifford Pinchot, has always been well represented.