The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010

by Tim Folger

  So the number of private vehicles just keeps on rising. At the last count, in March 2007, there were almost 1.6 million cars in the city, Mukhopadhyay had told me, more than in India's other two megacities—Mumbai and Kolkata—combined. And there are twice that number of two-wheelers. More than 1,000 new vehicles hit the roads every day.

  We arrived at the Tata showroom at last, and while I waited for the regional manager to get there I made small talk with a couple of the salesmen. They spoke about Ratan Tata, the head of the company, with something approaching reverence, as if he were not only a corporate titan but a personal guru, even a saint. It was those overloaded two-wheelers, one of the salesmen said, that had inspired Mr. Tata to come up with the idea of the Nano. He wanted something for families that was safe, affordable, and environmentally friendly.

  One side of the showroom was given over to Tata, the other to Fiat; the two companies have a joint marketing arrangement. But I couldn't see any car that looked small enough to be a Nano. "No," the salesman said, "they haven't let anyone see it yet, not even us." He giggled with anticipation, like a kid waiting for Santa Claus.

  His boss, Vishwas Kapoor, arrived at last, full of apologies for being late. "Stuck in traffic," he said, unnecessarily.

  He walked me around. Many of the models on display were variants of the Indica, the car I'd seen at Mahavir Singh's house in Rajasthan. Nearby were several larger Tata cars and SUVs.

  "What kind of mileage do all these vehicles get?" I asked, wondering how they would compare to the aptly named Nano, which looks a bit like a four-door version of the tiny, slope-fronted Smart car that is so popular in Europe.

  The answer amazed me. The various models of Indica get any thing from 35 to 50 miles per gallon. Even the ten-seat diesel Sumo Victa, the biggest of the SUVs, boasts more than 32 mpg on the highway. Impressive numbers by U.S. standards.

  Around eleven o'clock the first walk-in customer of the day arrived, a smartly dressed Sikh in a red turban. He introduced himself as Manjeet Singh, a travel agent in the suburban neighborhood of Vasant Vihar. He already owned a small fleet of eight Indicas, which the company used for commercial purposes. He was here today to buy number nine.

  I asked him the same question I'd asked the other Mr. Singh, back in the village of Badgujran: "Would you consider a Nano?"

  "Not for myself," he said, "but a lot of my friends are thinking about it. It could be as a second car, or maybe a gift for their wife or their eighteen-year-old who has just learned to drive. And the two-wheelers are also interested, of course."

  That was really the crux of the matter, Mukhopadhay had said. It all depended on how the Nano was marketed. The idea of millions of two-wheelers being replaced by four-wheelers appalled him, no matter how high the mpg. "But in the unlikely event the Nano becomes a lifestyle statement, switching people away from larger cars, it could be a great success," he said. "It will be a test of our social imagination about what car ownership means."

  The Nano will appeal to both market segments, said the man from Tata, although no one really knows what to expect. The numbers will be small at first, just a few thousand cars a month; the main production facility, in the state of Gujarat, isn't even on line yet. As if to assuage my anxiety at the prospect of all those two-wheeler owners upgrading, he pointed at the Fiat poster on the wall. It showed a car swerving around a scenic bend, as cars always do in the ads. It was the latest incarnation of the humble Fiat 500, introduced in the 1950s as the Italian equivalent of Germany's VW Beetle or France's tin-can Citroën 2CV.

  "How much does one of those cost in India?" I asked.

  "With 100 percent import duty, about fourteen or fifteen lakhs," Kapoor said.

  "Thirty thousand dollars? Who's going to pay that?"

  "Oh, you'd be surprised. It's very popular. We get famous movie actors, models, fashion photographers in here all the time to buy it. In Europe it may be basic, but here it's a lifestyle product."

  In India, he was suggesting, small can be über-cool.

  What Would Gandhi Drive?

  Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wound up his presentation of the National Action Plan on Climate Change last year with the homage to Gandhi that is obligatory for any Indian politician. In this instance he paraphrased one of the Mahatma's most famous sayings: "Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need but not for every man's greed."

  But virtually in the same breath, Singh set the bottom line of India's climate policy, and it seemed to sit oddly with Gandhi's philosophy: per capita greenhouse-gas emissions would never exceed those of the industrialized world. To put this in perspective, the current per capita level is only about one-twentieth that of the United States. But a population of 1.15 billion is a powerful multiplier. India is already the world's fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and its recent economic growth rates, if sustained, will mean a doubling of energy demand by 2020.

  By the time you read this, India will have a new coalition government. Perhaps the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party will come out on top this time; perhaps the Congress Party. Either way, there will be the same onward rush of economic growth, the same commitment to bring millions out of poverty. And given its agricultural and service-based economy, its lack of dependence on exports, India may be shielded from the worst of the global meltdown. Indian diplomats will take part in the climate negotiations that will lead, by the end of this year, to a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, and they will insist, with good reason, that the United States take the lead in finding a solution. You created the problem, they will say; you solve it. Meanwhile, the monsoons will grow more erratic. There will be worse floods and more severe droughts. The glaciers will go on melting. There will be more coal-fired power plants and more hydro dams. More Indians will buy cars.

  What would Gandhi make of it all? I wondered. I had a pretty good idea what he'd think if he stood on that footbridge at the Okhla train station and peered out into the murk at the cranes and the malls of NOIDA. There was no mystery about what he'd think of the ads for the E-Class Mercedes. But in other respects I was less sure.

  What would Gandhi make of the Nano? And, come to that, what would he think of village kids going to school in an SUV instead of sitting with their teacher in the shade of a neem tree or, more likely, not going to school at all? What would he think of a water pyramid, or the chance to power the spinning wheel in his ashram with solar panels? These were not easy questions to answer, and in trying to do so it seemed wise to leave many of my Western preconceptions behind.

  The rutted back roads of Rajasthan and the sleek flyways of the Delhi suburbs: at first they seemed worlds apart. Yet there was a common logic in the changes that were under way in both places, and it was summed up in that word entrepreneur that people kept using. There are the kinds of entrepreneurs, of course, who have created entire new Silicon Valleys in Bangalore and Hyderabad. There are those who will design the next generation of diesel engines and variable crankshafts. But there are also the jal sabhas with their account books and Mr. Singh with his lantern, Mr. Ram with his pyramid and Dilip Chenoy's parable of the milkman—all of them hints, however small, of how India might yet realize its dreams of development without tearing itself, and the rest of the planet, apart.

  Contributors' Notes

  Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2009

  Contributors' Notes

  Gustave Axelson is the managing editor of Minnesota Conservation Volunteer (www.mndnr.gov/magazine), a nonprofit outdoors-advocacy magazine published by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. Axelson also freelances for the New York Times, Backpacker, Men's Journal, and Midwest Living. A graduate of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign journalism school and a Knight Digital Media Center fellow at the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, he lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with his wife, Amy, and two sons, Anders, seven, and Henrik, three, with whom he makes frequent paddling trips into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wil
derness every year.

  Burkhard Bilger has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2000. His articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, the New York Times, and other publications, and his book Noodling for Flatheads was a finalist for a PEN-Faulkner Award. A former senior editor of Discover and deputy editor of The Sciences, Bilger lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Jennifer Nelson, and his children, Hans, Ruby, and Evangeline.

  George Black lives in New York with his wife, the writer Anne Nelson. In the course of his extensive travels on five continents, he has written about the civil wars in Central America in the early 1980s, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the Chinese democracy movement, the impact of climate change in Bangladesh, and many other topics. His next book, his sixth, is about the 1870 military-civilian expedition to Yellowstone—the first systematic exploration of the future national park—and its relationship to the Indian Wars in the West.

  Brian Boyd is the University Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Auckland, where, inter alia, he teaches a course on literature and science. The world's leading authority on Vladimir Nabokov, he coedited Nabokov's Butterflies: Uncollected and Unpublished Writings (2000). Since then he has been working on evolutionary approaches to literature, especially in On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (2009), in which "Purpose-Driven Life" is the Afterword; in the coedited Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader (2010); and in the forthcoming On the Ends of Stories: Literature and Evolution. He is also writing a biography of the philosopher of science Karl Popper.

  Kenneth Brower, the son of the pioneering environmentalist David Brower, is a freelance writer and the author of many books and magazine articles on the environment and natural history. His first memories are of the Sierra Nevada and the wild country of the American West. His work has taken him to all the continents. He lives in Berkeley, California.

  Jim Carrier is an award-winning journalist, civil rights activist, and filmmaker. In a forty-year career, Jim has written nine books, been published in National Geographic and the New York Times, written Denver Post series on the legacy of the atomic bomb and on the Marlboro Man, and produced multimedia projects for the Southern Poverty Law Center. He has roamed by Jeep through the American West and by sailboat across the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Now based in Madison, Wisconsin, he is at work on a film about the racial history of the banjo.

  John Colapinto is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the nonfiction book As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Girl and the novel About the Author. He is married and has an eleven-year-old son.

  In the fifteen years that Andrew Corsello has been writing for GQ, his work has been nominated five times for the National Magazine Award, winning once, and anthologized three times in The Best American Magazine Writing. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, an Episcopal priest, and their two young sons.

  Timothy Ferris has written a dozen books—among them The Science of Liberty, The Whole Shebang, and Coming of Age in the Milky Way—and made three nonfiction films: The Creation of the Universe (1986), Life Beyond Earth (1999), and Seeing in the Dark (2007). He produced the Voyager phonograph record, an artifact of human civilization containing music and sounds of Earth launched aboard the twin Voyager interstellar spacecraft; now exiting the solar system, the Voyagers are the most distant probes ever created by humans. Called "the best popular science writer in the English language" by the Christian Science Monitor and "the best science writer of his generation" by the Washington Post, Ferris has received the American Institute of Physics prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His works have been nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Ferris has taught in five disciplines—astronomy, English, history, journalism, and philosophy—at four universities. He is currently an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

  Tim Flannery has published more than 140 peer-reviewed scientific papers. His books include the landmark works The Future Eaters and The Weather Makers, which has been translated into twenty-five languages. In 2006 the book won the New South Wales Premier's Literary Prize, the O2 (a German environmental prize), and the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. In 2007 he cofounded and was appointed the chair of the Copenhagen Climate Council, a coalition of community, business, and political leaders who have come together to confront climate change.

  Jane Goodall, Ph.D., DBE, the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and a UN Messenger of Peace, began her landmark study of chimpanzee behavior in what is now Tanzania in July 1960 under the mentorship of the famed anthropologist and paleontologist Louis Leakey. Her work at the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve became the foundation of primatological research and redefined the relationship between humans and animals. In 1977 she established the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI), which is now a global leader in the effort to protect chimpanzees and their habitats. It also is widely recognized for establishing innovative community-centered conservation and development programs in Africa and Jane Goodall's Roots & Shoots, a global environmental and humanitarian youth program, which has groups in more than 120 countries. For more information, please visit www.janegoodall.org.

  Philip Gourevitch, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, is the author of The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (2008), A Cold Case (2001), and We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (1998), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting, and the Guardian First Book Award. His books, short fiction, essays, and reportage have been translated into a dozen languages. From 2005 to 2010 he was the editor of the Paris Review. He is writing a new book from Rwanda.

  Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. Her series on global warming, "The Climate of Man," from which the book was adapted, won a National Magazine Award and a National Academies Communications Award. She lives with her husband and three sons in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

  Robert Kunzig is a senior environment editor at National Geographic and has been a science writer for nearly thirty years, including fourteen on the staff of Discover. He is the author of two books: Mapping the Deep, about oceanography, which won the science-writing prize of the Royal Society in 2000; and Fixing Climate, written with the climate scientist Wallace Broecker, which was published in 2008. Kunzig lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with his wife, Karen Fitzpatrick.

  Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired and the author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist. He has also written for The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Nature, McSweeney's, and Outside.

  Richard Manning is the author of eight books, including One Round River, which was named a significant book of the year by the New York Times in 1998. He has worked as a consultant on agriculture, poverty, and the environment to the McKnight Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. He has written for Harper's Magazine, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Wired, Men's Journal, OnEarth, the Los Angeles Times, The American Scholar, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and many other publications. Among his several awards are the University of Montana's Mansfield Center's Lud Browman Award for science writing and the C. B. Blethen Award for investigative journalism.

  Kathleen McGowan is a contributing editor at Discover. She writes about neuroscience, genetics, and other subjects in science and medicine for publications such as Psychology Today, Self and Redbook. She lives in New York City.

  Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008. He is the magazine's correspondent in China, where he has lived since 2005. Previously he worked as the Beijing bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, where he contributed to a series that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Before his appointment in China, he w
orked in the Middle East, reporting mostly from Iraq.

  David Quammen is a freelance journalist and author whose eleven books include fiction, essay collections, and the nonfiction titles The Song of the Dodo, Monster of God, and The Reluctant Mr. Darwin. His short work has appeared in a range of journals, from Rolling Stone and Outside to the New York Times Book Review and Harper's Magazine. Presently he is a contributing writer for National Geographic. His current book project involves the ecology and evolution of scary viruses. Quammen lives in Montana with his wife, Betsy Gaines, a conservationist, and travels on assignment, by preference to jungles, deserts, and swamps.

  Matt Ridley is the author of several books on genetics, evolution, and economics, including The Red Queen, Genome, and The Rational Optimist. He did research in zoology at Oxford University before becoming a journalist with The Economist and then as a freelance. He lives near Newcastle in northern England.

  Felix Salmon is the finance blogger at Reuters.

  Michael Specter, who has been on the staff of The New Yorker since 1998, writes frequently about science, public health, and the impact of new technologies on society. His book Denialism is out in paperback this fall.

  Don Stap is the author of two works of natural history—Birdsong and A Parrot Without a Name—and a collection of poems, Letter at the End of Winter. He is a frequent contributor to Audubon and has written as well for such publications as National Wildlife, Smithsonian, Orion, Living Bird, the North American Review, and the New York Times. In addition, he is the recipient of a fellowship in creative writing from the National Endowment for the Arts. A native of Michigan, Stap has taught at the University of Central Florida since 1985, where he is a professor of English.