The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (2 page)

It has been a delight working with Mary Roach; I'm looking forward to reading her latest book,
Packing for Mars.
Once again this year I'm grateful to Amanda Cook and Meagan Stacey at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for making this book possible, and for their forgiveness of missed deadlines. And, as always, I would be lost without my beauteous wife, Anne Nolan.

T
IM
F
OLGER

A
T A WRITING
conference in 2007, the
New Yorker
writer Burkhard Bilger told the story of an article he'd recently written, about cheese makers who flout government regulations by using unpasteurized milk. Bilger described a moment that, I think, goes a long way toward explaining the consistent excellence of his work. He had just spent three days with a cheese maker in Indiana. As he got into the car to drive home, a creeping gloom descended. The material was flat—he didn't have it. But at some point in the next round of phone calls, he heard tell of a cloistered convent in Connecticut making raw cow's-milk cheese. Nuns! Bilger got back into his car.

For another writer, the sexy lawlessness of the "raw milk underground," as Bilger cleverly phrased it in his subtitle, might have been enough. As cheese stories go, that is practically a potboiler. For Bilger, it wasn't.
His
raw milk underground would be populated by Benedictine sisters. (To my delight, Bilger has returned to the topic of edible rot in 2010, with dumpster-diving, road kill–eating "opportunivores" standing in for nuns.)

Very few people, I think, would tell you that they'd like to read a 5,000-word article about food safety and fermentation, which is, in essence, what Bilger's two pieces are about. People are not drawn to his writing for the science as much as for the things that bring it to life: characters, settings, stories, wit. These are the sugar, to be all cliché about it, that makes the medicine go down. Make no mistake, good science writing is medicine. It is a cure for ignorance and fallacy. Good science writing peels away the blinders, generates wonder, brings the open palm to the forehead:
Oh! Now I get it!
And sometimes it does much more than that.

In "The Love That Dare Not Squawk Its Name," Jon Mooallem finds his nuns in an albatross colony on Kaena Point, Oahu. The birds and the woman who studies them become the narrative framework for a look at the science of same-sex animal pairings. Mooallem's wry eye for detail immediately wins the reader over. "At any given moment...," he writes of the scene at Kaena Point, "some birds may be just turning up while others sit there killing time. It feels like an airport baggage-claim area."

 

The science going on at Kaena Point is a launch pad for something loftier: a meditation on politics and human nature. We have a strong inclination to view animals as mute, hairy (or feathered) versions of ourselves and to use—or distort—zoologists' findings to validate our beliefs and even to promote our political agendas. When the albatross researcher's paper came out (har! unintended!), it was lauded by gay rights activists as a call for equality, and at the same time it was condemned by social conservatives as propaganda. (Even Stephen Colbert got in on the act, denouncing "albatresbians" and their "Sappho-avian agenda.") The researcher was blindsided. "The study is about albatross," she said to Mooallem. "The study is not about humans." In Mooallem's hands, it is about both. As clearheadedly as he takes on the social coils and kinks, he delves into the conundrum of a behavior that seems, on the surface, to be at cross-purposes with natural selection. The result is one of the most balanced, far-reaching but never meandering, thoughtful, deep but witty pieces of writing I've seen in a while.

Like Mooallem, Jaron Lanier, in "The First Church of Robotics," examines our eagerness to see humanness where it is does not really exist. As Lanier smoothly argues, the personification—and occasional deification—of computer intelligence not only overinflates the machine, it debases the human being. "Lulled by the concept of ever-more intelligent AI's, [we] are expected to trust algorithms to assess our aesthetic choices, the progress of a student, the credit risk of a homeowner ... In doing so we only end up misreading the capability of our machines and distorting our own capabilities as human beings." Lanier's calm, effective prose lowers the flame beneath the AI hype, all the dire prognostications of superintelligent robotic takeovers. S
ettle down,
it seems to say.
Let's look at the facts.

The mixture of science and religion—so spicy, so impossible to emulsify—has also, this year, drawn in the immense talents of Jill Sisson Quinn. "Sign Here If You Exist" begins with a description of the surreally complex egg-laying behavior of the ichneumon wasp. Had Quinn written about nothing more than that, the beauty of her phrasings would still have left me speechless. But her musings on the ichneumon led her to reframe her views on God and afterlife. She comes to see body, not soul, as immortal. "I got my elements from stars: mass from water, muscles from beans, thoughts from fish and olives. When Edward Abbey died, his body was buried in nothing more than an old sleeping bag in the southern Arizona desert. He said, 'If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me.'"

First-rate essays like Quinn's tempt the nonbeliever to adopt science as a kind of God stand-in—infallible, omniscient, eternal, good. "Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science" is a bucket of ice water to the face. David H. Freedman profiles the Greek gadfly and meta-researcher John Ioannidis. In a 2005
Journal of the American Medical Association
article, Ioannidis looked at forty-five of the most often cited and highly regarded medical research papers of the past thirteen years: among them, studies recommending hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women, vitamin E to reduce the risk of heart disease, and daily low-dose aspirin to prevent heart attacks and strokes. Forty-one percent of these, Ioannidis found, "had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated."

Science writing regularly honors the accomplishments of science, but it is equally important to expose its shortcomings. Atul Gawande's "Letting Go" profiles the American physician's overcommitment to preserving life. There is a tendency among surgeons and oncologists to equate death with failure. Death is someone else's job. Too often, Gawande argues, doctors do not merely shy away from death. They get in the way of it, and by their obfuscation or omissions, their rosy-hued prognoses, they deprive patients of a dignified death.

Gawande's and Freedman's articles happened to be back to back in the stack by my bed. Happily, Jon Cohen's piece on how to collect semen from a chimpanzee was next on the pile.

 

In simpler times, good, careful writing about the natural world fostered awe and wonder, the necessary starting points for good stewardship. Today's nature writing, more and more, fosters disquiet and concern. Much of this year's best nature writing is a call to action, the writers' work artfully spotlighting environmental atrocities both within and far outside our normal gaze. If not for their work, I would not have realized the extent to which broken space hardware clutters our heavens and jellyfish clog our oceans. The plight of songbirds on Cyprus netted by the thousands for diners would have remained distant and abstract.

Two of my favorite pieces manage to impart urgency without sowing despair. The authors use fine narrative writing, humor even, to draw readers in and quietly open their eyes to the direness of the situation. In "New Dog in Town," Christopher Ketcham charms the reader with his opening description of coyotes on the Van Cortlandt Park Golf Course in the Bronx. "They apparently like to watch the players tee off among the Canada geese. They hunt squirrels and rabbits and wild turkeys along the edge of the forest surrounding the course, where there are big old hardwoods and ivy that looks like it could strangle a man—good habitat in which to den, skulk, plan. Sometimes in summer the coyotes emerge from the steam of the woods to chew golf balls and spit them onto the grass in disgust." Ketcham meets a golfer who describes a coyote trotting alongside his golf cart, stopping and starting when he does. The man mimes the coyote watching the golf balls fly—"following with his head the coyote-tracked ball's trajectory up and up, along the fairway, then its long arc down." Ketcham goes on to explain how, over millennia, the coyote's "elasticity" has allowed it to expand its range, while the less adaptable wolf has dwindled. The coyote has no need for a pack or for cover of woods. It sleeps anywhere, eats anything ("garbage, darkness, rats, air"). Coyotes have been around since North America teemed with saber-toothed cats, mastodons, and the glyptodon, "a turtle as big as a Volkswagen." All but the coyote perished in a mysterious mass extinction.

By the end of Ketcham's essay, we realize that the coyote on the golf course, the coyote who howls along with the ambulance sirens, is a wily portent of doom. Another massive die-off is underway. Nothing loud or catastrophic, no asteroids, just the slow, expanding vacuum of habitat loss. The "weed species" thrive as thousands of others blink out, all but unnoticed, year upon year. One day, millennia from now, scientists will ponder the massive die-off of the late Holocene.
Whatever could have happened
?

In "Fish Out of Water"—so titled for the Asian carp's alarm response of leaping fifteen feet into the air, "knocking boaters' glasses off and breaking their noses and chipping their teeth and leaving body bruises in the shape of fish"—Ian Frazier charts the well-meaning, largely ineffectual, occasionally comical efforts to brake the spread of this swiftly invasive, ecologically disastrous species. These efforts include exporting them to China ("Rick Smith belongs to the very small number of motorcycle-rally food vendors who also ink multimillion-dollar deals with the Chinese"), erecting electric fish barriers, and attempting to legislate them out of existence. (The Obama administration has a "zero tolerance policy" for Asian carp.)

The hardest science in Frazier's piece is the DNA analysis being used to track carpal creep through Illinois's waterways. "I did not follow all the science of it," Frazier admits. He tends to spend his word count on the places that make for better reading. Had this piece run in a science magazine rather than
The New Yorker,
I suspect the explanation of the DNA work would have been expanded and we would probably not have read about the Redneck Fishing Tournament (prizes awarded for most carp taken in a two-day period, and costumes). That would be a shame. Readers would have missed "the smell of ketchup and mud," the sound of "crushed blue and white Busch beer cans disappearing into the mud, crinkling underfoot," and the winning costumes—"devils from Greenview, Illinois, and cavemen from Michigan."

There is nothing wrong with an article on the intricacies of DNA analysis for monitoring invasive species. But you risk missing the waterways for the fish. Environmental science happens in a context. Frazier handily captures the complexities of the challenge—logistical and political—and the flavor of the grass-roots creativity being applied to overcome it. Explaining DNA science clearly to readers is a laudable skill, but equally so is reporting the issue in a way that roots the science in a place—in people and their situations. That can be, in its way, even more complex than sequencing DNA. "Through waving weedbeds of bureaucracy and human cross-purposes," writes Frazier, "the fish swims."

 

When your characters are galaxies or subatomic particles, different standards apply. If your topic is "time" or "the elusive theory of everything," simply helping the reader to understand will more than suffice. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow got me all the way to the top of the second column before they lost me. ("According to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.") This was long before they dropped the bomb that there are no less than five different string theories, and that all five are about to be scrapped for a network of theories collectively known as M-theory. It may make you feel better to know that although physicists are on the verge of assembling a unifying network of theories to explain the workings of the universe, none of them "seems to know what the M stands for."

Hawking and Mlodinow's central metaphor is the goldfish in the glass bowl, believing its view of reality to be an accurate representation of the external world. He has the reader imagine the goldfish as they "formulate scientific laws from their distorted frame of reference that would always hold true and that would enable them to make predictions about the future motion of objects outside the bowl." This was a good year for fish humor in science writing.

M
ARY
R
OACH

FROM
Discover

E
LENI DAGIASI FLEW
from Athens to Delhi in January 2008 on a mission to save her life. With her husband, Leonidas, she took a taxi from the airport past sparkling multiplexes and office buildings to a guesthouse in the booming exurb of Gurgaon. A kitchen staff was on hand, the rooms had cable, and there was a recreation area with billiards, providing patients with creature comforts while kidney transplants were arranged. Over the next week, as her operation was scheduled, Dagiasi went to a makeshift hospital for dialysis. Then one night, while she was watching TV with her husband, a chef turned off the lights and urged everyone to leave. Shortly afterward, ten policemen stormed in. "We were too stunned to react," says Leonidas Dagiasi, a former fisherman who borrowed money from his employer to finance the trip. The couple and other guests were hauled off for questioning. The Gurgaon hospital, it turned out, was the hub of a thriving black market in kidneys. The organs were harvested from poor Indian workers, many of whom had been tricked or forced into selling the organ for as little as $300.