"Thus did humans inadvertently create an ecological niche for a predator in one of the most densely populated regions of the country."

"In an exceedingly brief period, coyote, wolf and dog genes have been remixed into something new: a predator adapted to a landscape teeming with both prey and another apex predator, us. And this mongrel continues to evolve."

That NYT Magazine article seems like something the British sociologist Ben Pitcher should express concern about.

"The uprooting of invasive 'non-natives' such as the Japanese knotweed is of course not necessarily motivated by racist intent."

"Yet accounts of alien immigrant invasions, weak native hosts bedevilled by larger, more aggressive, rapidly reproducing foreign species, and stable sustainable environments upset and jeopardised by overpopulation, clearly demonstrate a language that is shared in descriptions of human and nonhuman life."

When global economic and environmental crises reveal the fragility of the nation state, I suggest that a defence of British nature – expressed, for example, when the “native” red squirrel is described as being “driven out by the relentless northern march of the greys” – can become the site of displaced nationalist sentiments. 

That's from the sociologist Ben Pitcher, whom we were just talking about a few days ago under the post heading "Is it racist — or uncomfortably racist-like — to express hostility to non-native plants?"

Is it racist — or uncomfortably racist-like — to express hostility to non-native plants?

This is a question I've asked many times — jocosely and semi-seriously — in my prairie walks with my gardener husband Meade, who emails me an article about a sociologist — Ben Pitcher — who raises the topic on a British radio show:

"Gardeners’ Question Time is not the most controversial show on Radio 4, and yet it is layered with, saturated with, racial meanings. The context here is the rise of nationalism. The rise of racist and fascist parties across Europe. Nationalism is about shoring up a fantasy of national integrity. My question is, what feeds nationalism? What makes nationalism powerful?"

Dr Pitcher said there is a "crisis in white identity in multicultural Britain" caused by the fact that "white culture" is historically associated with racism and far-Right views.

White people are therefore forced to find other ways of talking about white identity – such as through gardening – so they do not appear to be racist....

One response is to say this is "utterly absurd" (which is what a horticulturist on the show said), but overreaction like that displays defensiveness. Pitcher's point is that racists and other persons with racial sentiments that they must otherwise stifle find relief in opining about plants. If that's in fact what's going on, I would expect them to protest when someone threatens to blow their cover.* The way to appear nonracist — that is, the way to keep your cover if you need it — is to find the suggestion intriguing and to explore it with mild intellectual vigor and a delicate infusion of humor.
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*This is what "protest too much" means. Here, Wikipedia has an entry for "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

In rhetorical terms, the phrase can be thought of as indicating an unintentional apophasis — where the speaker who "protests too much" in favor of some assertion puts into others' minds the idea that the assertion is false, something that they may not have considered before.

"Protest too much" is useful, but it's overused and sometimes used morononically... Morisettishly:

Alanis Morissette wrote a song titled "Doth I Protest Too Much" [sic] for her album So-Called Chaos.