The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

by Deborah Blum

  Nevertheless, they’ve made progress. “Suffice it to say, we actually have embryos now of this extinct animal,” says Archer. “We’re pretty far down this track.” The Lazarus Project scientists are confident that they just need to get more high-quality eggs to keep moving forward. “At this point it’s just a numbers game,” says French.

  The matchless oddity of the gastric brooding frogs’ reproduction drives home what we lose when a species becomes extinct. But does that mean we should bring them back? Would the world be that much richer for having female frogs that grow little frogs in their stomachs? There are tangible benefits, French argues, such as the insights the frogs might be able to provide about reproduction—insights that might someday lead to treatments for pregnant women who have trouble carrying babies to term. But for many scientists, de-extinction is a distraction from the pressing work required to stave off mass extinctions.

  “There is clearly a terrible urgency to saving threatened species and habitats,” says John Wiens, an evolutionary biologist at Stony Brook University in New York. “As far as I can see, there is little urgency for bringing back extinct ones. Why invest millions of dollars in bringing a handful of species back from the dead, when there are millions still waiting to be discovered, described, and protected?”

  De-extinction advocates counter that the cloning and genomic engineering technologies being developed for de-extinction could also help preserve endangered species, especially ones that don’t breed easily in captivity. And though cutting-edge biotechnology can be expensive when it’s first developed, it has a way of becoming very cheap very fast. “Maybe some people thought polio vaccines were a distraction from iron lungs,” says George Church. “It’s hard in advance to say what’s distraction and what’s salvation.”

  But what would we be willing to call salvation? Even if Church and his colleagues manage to retrofit every passenger pigeon–specific trait into a rock pigeon, would the resulting creature truly be a passenger pigeon or just an engineered curiosity? If Archer and French do produce a single gastric brooding frog—if they haven’t already—does that mean they’ve revived the species? If that frog doesn’t have a mate, then it becomes an amphibian version of Celia, and its species is as good as extinct. Would it be enough to keep a population of the frogs in a lab or perhaps in a zoo, where people could gawk at it? Or would it need to be introduced back into the wild to be truly de-extinct?

  “The history of putting species back after they’ve gone extinct in the wild is fraught with difficulty,” says the conservation biologist Stuart Pimm of Duke University. A huge effort went into restoring the Arabian oryx to the wild, for example. But after the animals were returned to a refuge in central Oman in 1982, almost all were wiped out by poachers. “We had the animals, and we put them back, and the world wasn’t ready,” says Pimm. “Having the species solves only a tiny, tiny part of the problem.”

  Hunting is not the only threat that would face recovered species. For many, there’s no place left to call home. The Chinese river dolphin became extinct due to pollution and other pressures from the human population on the Yangtze River. Things are just as bad there today. Around the world frogs are getting decimated by a human-spread pathogen called the chytrid fungus. If Australian biologists someday release gastric brooding frogs into their old mountain streams, they could promptly become extinct again.

  “Without an environment to put re-created species back into, the whole exercise is futile and a gross waste of money,” says Glenn Albrecht, director of the Institute for Social Sustainability at Murdoch University in Australia.

  Even if de-extinction proved a complete logistical success, the questions would not end. Passenger pigeons might find the rebounding forests of the eastern United States a welcoming home. But wouldn’t that be, in effect, the introduction of a genetically engineered organism into the environment? Could passenger pigeons become a reservoir for a virus that might wipe out another bird species? And how would the residents of Chicago, New York, or Washington, DC, feel about a new pigeon species arriving in their cities, darkening their skies, and covering their streets with snowstorms of dung?

  De-extinction advocates are pondering these questions, and most believe they need to be resolved before any major project moves forward. Hank Greely, a leading bioethicist at Stanford University, has taken a keen interest in investigating the ethical and legal implications of de-extinction. And yet for Greely, as for many others, the very fact that science has advanced to the point that such a spectacular feat is possible is a compelling reason to embrace de-extinction, not to shun it.

  “What intrigues me is just that it’s really cool,” Greely says. “A saber-toothed cat? It would be neat to see one of those.”

  Contributors’ Notes

  Katherine Bagley is a staff reporter for InsideClimate News, covering the intersection of environmental science, politics, and policy, with an emphasis on climate change. She is also the coauthor of Bloomberg’s Hidden Legacy: Climate Change and the Future of New York City. Her print and multimedia work has appeared in Popular Science, Audubon, OnEarth, and The Scientist, among other publications. She lives in the Hudson Valley region of New York.

  Nicholas Carr is the author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and The Glass Cage: Automation and Us. He has written for The Atlantic, the New York Times, Wired, and Nature, among other periodicals.

  David Dobbs writes for The Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Nature, and other publications. He is currently writing a book with the working title The Orchid and the Dandelion, exploring the notion that the genes and traits underlying some of our most tormenting mood and behavior problems may also generate some of our greatest strengths and contentment. He is the author of four previous books, most recently My Mother’s Lover, which unearths a secret affair his mother had with a doomed flight surgeon in World War II. He blogs on culture, science, and literature at Neuron Culture.

  Pippa Goldschmidt, a writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland, has a PhD in astronomy. Her novel The Falling Sky, about an astronomer who thinks she’s found evidence contradicting the Big Bang theory, was a runner-up for the Dundee International Book Prize in 2012. She has been a writer in residence at the University of Edinburgh. Her collection of short stories inspired by science will be published next year. Find out more about Goldschmidt’s writing at http://www.pippagoldschmidt.co.uk.

  Amy Harmon is a New York Times reporter who seeks to illuminate the intersection of science and society through narrative storytelling. Harmon has won two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 2008 for her series “The DNA Age,” the other as part of a team for the series “How Race Is Lived in America” in 2001. Her series “Target Cancer” received the 2011 National Academies of Science award for print journalism. In 2012 her article “Autistic and Seeking a Place in an Adult World” won the Casey Medal for meritorious reporting. Harmon is the author of Asperger Love, which portrays a real-life relationship between two teenagers on the autism spectrum. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in science writing. Harmon lives in New York City with her husband and nine-year-old daughter.

  Robin Marantz Henig is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, where she has specialized in long-form science journalism, with cover stories on such topics as anxiety, death, belief in God, obesity, assisted suicide, and the science of lying. She has written nine books, most recently Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck?, coauthored with her daughter, Samantha Henig. Her previous books include Pandora’s Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution and The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel. Henig’s awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 and a Career Achievement Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors in 2010. She is currently serving a two-year term as president of the National Association of Science Writers.

  Virginia Hughes is a journalist based in Broo
klyn, New York. She is a contributing editor at Popular Science and Matter and has written for Nature, Smithsonian, and Slate, among other publications. She focuses on the brain, behavior, and genetics for her blog, Only Human, which is hosted by National Geographic.

  Ferris Jabr is a writer based in New York City.

  Sarah Stewart Johnson is an assistant professor at Georgetown University, where she studies planetary science and is currently working on a book about the exploration of Mars.

  Barbara J. King is a biological anthropologist at the College of William and Mary, where she teaches half-time in order to devote more time to freelance science writing. Her research, initially focused on wild baboons and captive African apes, now includes cognition and emotion in animals from chickens to chimpanzees. Her latest book, How Animals Grieve, has been featured on BBC-TV and in other international media. King contributes weekly to NPR.org’s 13.7 Cosmos & Culture blog and writes regularly for The Times Literary Supplement. At home in Virginia, she and her husband care for rescued cats.

  Barbara Kingsolver’s fourteen books of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction include the novels The Bean Trees, The Poisonwood Bible, The Lacuna, and her most recent novel, Flight Behavior. Translated into more than twenty languages, her work has won a devoted worldwide readership, a place in the core English literature curriculum, and many awards, including the National Humanities Medal. Her fiction has been three times shortlisted for and once a winner of Britain’s Orange Prize.

  Maggie Koerth-Baker is a freelance science journalist. She writes the monthly column “Eureka” for the New York Times Magazine and is also the science editor at BoingBoing.net, a technology and culture blog with 6 million monthly readers. In 2012 she published Before the Lights Go Out, a book about the future of energy and the United States electric grid.

  Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Sixth Extinction and Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. She is a two-time National Magazine Award winner and has received a Heinz Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Kolbert lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

  Joshua Lang is a medical student at the University of California, San Francisco. He has lived in barns on horse-racing tracks in Chicago, chronicled a Sudanese woman’s struggle to find health care in Alaska, slept in underground laboratories in Wisconsin, and trained at an abortion clinic in New Mexico. His writing on social and scientific topics related to medicine has appeared in publications including The Atlantic and the New York Times Magazine. His academic research focuses on early identification and prevention of chronic diseases in persons living with HIV.

  Maryn McKenna is an independent journalist specializing in public health, global health, and food policy. She is a contributing writer for Wired and for National Geographic’s food-writing platform The Plate, and she writes for Scientific American, Nature, Slate, the Guardian, The Atlantic, and other publications in the United States and Europe. She is the author of the award-winning books Superbug, about the global rise of antibiotic resistance, and Beating Back the Devil, about the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and is currently working on a book about food production. She is a senior fellow of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University and has been a research fellow at MIT and the University of Michigan.

  Seth Mnookin is the associate director of the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story of the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, won the National Association of Science Writers’ Science in Society book award in 2012. He is also the author of the 2006 national bestseller Feeding the Monster, about the Boston Red Sox, and Hard News, about the New York Times. He lives with his wife, their two children, and their nine-year-old adopted pit bull in Brookline, Massachusetts.

  “Each life is an encyclopedia,” wrote Italo Calvino. “A library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles.” With such inspiration stuffed deep in his pouch, Justin Nobel has begun a project he calls The Decalogy, a set of ten books on topics close to the heart. He’s presently at work on the second book, a string of vignettes from forgotten small towns of the American South, as well as the third, a collection of tales about the weather. Nobel lives in New Orleans with MissKarret and Jazzy-B, Fern, Ishtar, and Lady Sal.

  Fred Pearce is a longtime journalist and author on issues of the environment and development. He is an environment consultant at New Scientist and a regular contributor to Yale e360. His books include The Coming Population Crash, When the Rivers Run Dry, and The Landgrabbers.

  Corey S. Powell is editor at large at Discover magazine, where he writes the “Out There” column and blog. He is also the acting editor of American Scientist and a visiting scholar at NYU’s Science Health and Environmental Reporting Program. His writing appears in Smithsonian, Popular Science, and Slate in addition to Nautilus. He is the author of God in the Equation, an exploration of the spiritual impulse in modern cosmology.

  Roy Scranton’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Review, Sierra Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Theory & Event, Kenyon Review, The Appendix, and other periodicals. He edited and contributed to Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War, an anthology of literary fiction by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and is currently working on a book-length version of “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene,” to be published in 2015. Scranton lives in New York and is finishing a PhD in English at Princeton.

  Kate Sheppard is a senior reporter and the environment and energy editor at the Huffington Post. She previously reported for Mother Jones, Grist, and the American Prospect. Her reporting has been recognized with awards from the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), the Online News Association, and Planned Parenthood, and she is a board member of SEJ. She was raised on a vegetable farm in New Jersey but now calls Washington, DC, home.

  Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, nature writer Bill Sherwonit has called Alaska home since 1982. He has contributed essays and articles to a wide variety of newspapers, magazines, journals, and anthologies and is the author of more than a dozen books. His most recent books include Living with Wildness: An Alaskan Odyssey and Changing Paths: Travels and Meditations in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness. A collection of his essays, Animal Stories: Encounters with Alaska’s Wildlife will be published in fall 2014. See www.billsherwonit.alaskawriters.com.

  Rebecca Solnit is the author of fifteen books about environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope, and memory, including The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and a Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine and a frequent contributor to the political site Tomdispatch.com.

  David Treuer is an Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. He is the author of three novels, a book of criticism, and, most recently, a major work of nonfiction entitled Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, Orion, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.

  Edward Osborne Wilson is generally recognized as one of the leading biologists in the world. He is acknowledged as the creator of two scientific disciplines (island biogeography and sociobiology), three unifying concepts for science and the humanities jointly (biophilia, biodiversity studies, and consilience), and one major technological advance in the study of global biodiversity (the Encyclopedia of Life). Among more than one hundred awards he has received worldwide are the U.S. National Medal of Science, the Crafoord Prize (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for ecology) of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and
the International Prize of Biology of Japan; in letters, he has received two Pulitzer prizes in nonfiction, the Nonino and Serono prizes of Italy, and the International Cosmos Prize of Japan. He is currently Honorary Curator in Entomology and University Research Professor Emeritus, Harvard University.

  Carl Zimmer is a columnist for the New York Times and writes features and a blog for National Geographic. He is the author of twelve books, including Parasite Rex and Evolution: Making Sense of Life, a textbook he coauthored with the biologist Doug Emlen. He has won the American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Award three times and has also won the National Academies Communication Award. A lecturer at Yale University, Zimmer lives in Guilford, Connecticut, with his wife, Grace Zimmer, and their two daughters.

  Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2013