The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2001

by Bilger, Burkhard; Wilson, Edward O.

• ISBN13: 9780618082964
• ISBN10: 0618082964
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-10-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads hundreds of pieces from dozens of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind. This second annual BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING volume, edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, scientist, and naturalist Edward O. Wilson, proves to be another "eclectic, provocative collection" (Entertainment Weekly). The volume highlights writing that ranges from the outer edges of scientific thinking -- Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, imagining "some better answers" to germline engineering -- to the inner life of a field biologist -- Jane Goodall writing on science as ecstasy. Read on for remarkable, timely writing from Gregg Easterbrook, Malcolm Gladwell, Jerome Groopman, Bernd Heinrich, Edward Hoagland, Barbara Kingsolver, Verlyn Klinkenborg, David Quammen, and many more in a volume that is both a science reader's dream and a nature lover's sustenance.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
Introduction: Life is a Narrative	xiii
Edward O. Wilson
Iterations of Immortality	1	(7)
David Berlinske
Harper's Magazine
To Save a Watering Hole	8	(7)
Mark Cherrington
Discover
New Life in a Death Trap	15	(8)
Edwin Dobb
Discover
Abortion and Brain Waves	23	(11)
Gregg Easterbrook
The New Republic
Baby Steps	34	(13)
Malcolm Gladwell
The New Yorker
In the Forests of Gombe	47	(7)
Jane Goodall
Orion
The Doubting Disease	54	(9)
Jerome Groopman
the New Yorker
The Recycled Generation	63	(19)
Stephen S. Hall
the New York Times Magazine
Endurance Predator	82	(8)
Bernd Heinrich
Outside
Harpy Eagles	90	(6)
Edward Hoagland
Orion
Why the Future Doesn't Need Us	96	(31)
Bill Joy
Wired
A Killing at Dawn	127	(5)
Ted Kerasote
Audubon
Seeing Scarlet	132	(7)
Barbara Kingsolver
Steven Hopp
Audubon
The Best Clock in the World	139	(8)
Verlyn Klinkenborg
Discover
The Wild World's Scotland Yard	147	(8)
Jon R. Luoma
Audubon
Breeding Discontent	155	(10)
Cynthia Mills
The Sciences
Ice Station Vostok	165	(21)
Oliver Morton
Wired
Being Prey	186	(10)
Val Plumwood
Utne Reader
Troubled Waters	196	(11)
Sandra Postel
The Sciences
The Genome Warrior	207	(31)
Richard Preston
The New Yorker
Megatransect	238	(15)
David Quammen
National Geographic
Inside the Volcano	253	(10)
Donovan Webster
National Geographic
Contributors' Notes	263	(4)
Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2000	267

Excerpts

Introduction: Life Is a Narrative Let me tell you a story. It is about two ants. In the early 1960s, when I was a young professor of zoology at Harvard University, one of the vexing mysteries of evolution was the origin of ants. That was far from a trivial problem in science. Ants are the most abundant of insects, the most effective predators of other insects, and the busiest scavengers of small dead animals. They transport the seeds of thousands of plant species, and they turn and enrich more soil than earthworms. In totality (they number roughly in the million billions and weigh about as much as all of humanity), they are among the key players of Earths terrestrial environment. Of equal general interest, they have attained their dominion by means of the most advanced social organization known among animals. I had chosen these insects for the focus of my research. It was the culmination of a fascination that dated back to childhood. Now, I spent a lot of time thinking about how they came to be. At first the problem seemed insoluble, because the oldest known ants, found in fossil deposits up to 57 million years old, were already advanced anatomically. In fact, they were quite similar to the modern forms all about us. And just as today, these ancient ants were among the most diverse and abundant of insects. It was as though an opaque curtain had been lowered to block our view of everything that occurred before. All we had to work with was the tail end of evolution. Somewhere in the world the Ur-ants awaited discovery. I had many conversations with William L. Brown, a friend and fellow myrmecologist, about where the missing links might turn up and what traits they possess that could reveal their ancestry among the nonsocial wasps. We guessed that they first appeared in the late Mesozoic era, 65 million or more years ago, far back enough to have stung and otherwise annoyed the last of the dinosaurs. We were not willing to accept the alternative hypothesis favored by some biblical creationists, that ants did not evolve at all but appeared on Earth full-blown. Because well-preserved fossils had already been collected by the tens of thousands from all around the northern hemisphere over a period of two centuries without any trace of the Ur-species, I was afraid I would never see one in my lifetime. Then, as so often happens in science, a chance event changed everything. One Sunday morning in 1967, a middle-aged couple, Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Frey, were strolling along the base of the seaside bluffs at Cliffwood Beach, New Jersey, collecting bits of fossilized wood and amber from a thin layer of clay freshly exposed by a storm the day before. They were especially interested in the amber, which are jewel-like fragments of fossil tree sap. In one lump they rescued, clear as yellow glass, were two beautifully preserved ants. At first, that might have seemed nothing unusual: museums, including the one at Harvard, are awash in ambe

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Excerpted from The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2001
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