Additional praise for NATURAL ACTS
“Quammen’s writing style is so delightful that his content could almost be secondary. Happily, the author (most recently of The Reluctant Mr. Darwin) and his subjects are equally engaging…. Abook to ponder and enjoy.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Quammen interrupts his reverent, ruminative and copiously researched accounts with bursts of puckish humor; at times he seems to view nature as one grand Zen joke, at which he and his readers can smile like beatific monks.”
—Time
“David Quammen has earned his place in the front rank of writers on natural history…. [He has] a tendency to function as a kind of-one-man Legal Aid Society for those unfortunate creatures long regarded with fear and loathing by most of mankind…. He succeeds marvelously.”
—Sports Illustrated
“Natural Acts is one bright jewel of a book.”
—Denver Post
Praise for David Quammen
“David Quammen writes with clarity, precision, and a certain sly humor about vermin and philosophy; about literature, sex in its myriad fascination, and exotic beasts I never knew existed.”
—Tim Cahill, author of Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park
“I have been wandering around in the outdoors for forty years and in recent times have come to depend on David Quammen to tell me what I’m looking at. He has an extraordinary eye and is a truly extraordinary writer. I now place him up there with my favorites, Matthiessen, Hoagland, and Lopez, and will read everything he writes.”
—Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall and True North
ALSO BY DAVID QUAMMEN
NONFICTION
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin
Monster of God
The Song of the Dodo
ESSAYS
The Boilerplate Rhino
Wild Thoughts from Wild Places
The Flight of the Iguana
FICTION
Blood Line
The Soul of Viktor Tronko
The Zolta Configuration
To Walk the Line
NATURAL ACTS
A SIDELONG VIEW OF SCIENCE & NATURE
Revised and expanded edition, with a new introduction Including “Planet of Weeds” and the Megatransect series
David Quammen
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York London
To M.E.Q. and W.A.Q.
for everything
Copyright © 2008, 1985 by David Quammen
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
“September 1, 1939,” copyright 1940 & renewed 1968 by W.H. Auden, “As I Walked Out One Evening,” copyright 1940 & renewed 1968 by W.H. Auden, from Collected Poems by W.H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.
Production manager: Andrew Marasia
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Quammen, David, 1948–
Natural acts: a sidelong view of science & nature / David Quammen.—
Rev. and expanded ed., with a new introduction including “Planet of weeds” and the Megatransect series.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-393-07632-5
1. Natural history—Miscellanea. I. Title.
QH45.5.Q36 2008
508—dc22
2007027545
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
CONTENTS
New, Retrospective Introduction: Learning Curve (2007)
Old, Ingenuous Introduction: An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles (1985)
ALL GOD’S VERMIN
Sympathy for the Devil (1981)
Has Success Spoiled the Crow? (1983)
The Widow Knows (1982)
The Troubled Gaze of the Octopus (1984)
Avatars of the Soul in Malaya (1984)
Rumors of a Snake (1984)
Wool of Bat (1982)
PROPHETS AND PARIAHS
The Excavation of Jack Horner (1984)
The Lives of Eugène Marais (1981)
The Man with the Metal Nose (1983)
Animal Rights and Beyond (1984)
Alias Benowitz Shoe Repair (1983)
The Tree People (1984)
ELOQUENT PRACTICES, NATURAL ACTS
Love’s Martyrs (1983)
A Deathly Chill (1983)
Is Sex Necessary? (1982)
Desert Sanitaire (1983)
Jeremy Bentham, the Pietà, and a Precious Few Grayling (1982)
Yin and Yang in the Tularosa Basin (1985)
AFTER THOUGHTS
Planet of Weeds (1998)
The River Jumps Over the Mountain (2002)
The Post-Communist Wolf (2000)
The Megatransect (2000–2001)
A Passion for Order (2007)
Citizen Wiley (2006)
Clone Your Troubles Away (2005)
Author’s Note
Partial Sources
NEW, RETROSPECTIVE INTRODUCTION
Learning Curve
THIS BOOK AS YOU HOLD IT is a chimerical creature, like a griffin, bird-shaped in front with a mammalian caboose. It consists of two asymmetrical but, I hope, complementary halves: a selection of what I take to be the most durable of my recent shorter nonfiction (in the fourth section, titled “After Thoughts”) and a selection of my earliest work in roughly the same vein (sections one through three), most of which appeared in the first edition of Natural Acts, published in 1985. Combining them now in one volume is probably risky, and perhaps presumptuous, but I’d like to think it serves three modest purposes: 1) reviving the best parts of a book that is otherwise out of print, 2) putting back into circulation some recent essays on subjects about which I have strong convictions (such as “Planet of Weeds”), and 3) offering readers evidence by juxtaposition of how one writer might have changed and developed over a period of twenty-six years.
Once I was a young man so blithe and unfettered that I could write the sentence “Biology has great potential as vulgar entertainment.” (See the following “Old, Ingenuous Introduction.”) It was like being a sleek juvenile shark before the remoras of sophistication and judiciousness attached themselves. I had, in those years, only recently blundered into the craft of science journalism. I was unencumbered by experience, professional qualifications, broad knowledge, or a sense of decorum. I had no training in science, but then again I had no training in journalism either.
It all began in the winter of 1980–81, when I wrote a short essay for Outside magazine on the redeeming merits, insofar as there are any, of mosquitoes. I had pitched the idea to the magazine’s editor, John Rasmus, after a long day of fly-fishing in the small Montana town where I then lived. Mr. Rasmus, an august figure (it seemed to me) but even younger than I, was visiting Montana to find and cultivate new voices. Along with Rasmus and a close friend (Stephen Byers, nowadays a New York editor himself), I took off in a johnboat to torment trout on our local stretch of river. After the big rainbows had been subdued and released and the sun had set behind the Gravelly Mountains, Steve and his wife of the time (E. Jean Carroll, now a columnist for Elle) and I softened John up with a ranch-kitchen dinner of whiskey and steak and whiskey. Then I made my pitch: What about a piece on mosquitoes? The upside! The counterintuitive, good things to be said for those noxious insects! Um, okay, said poor Rasmus. Although the whiskey wore off within a day or two, the deal stuck.
My
mosquito paean was intended to be a one-off piece. But sometime that winter, after receiving a draft, John called me with an unexpected proposition: Would I be interested in becoming a columnist for Outside, writing regularly on nature and science under the column title (already deployed in the magazine by a previous writer) “Natural Acts”? The mosquito piece, he suggested, could run as the first of my columns and I could follow in the same vein, with whatever nature-related expository and opinionated jive I cared to offer. At that moment, just beginning my efforts at free-lancing, I could scarcely go to the grocery store and buy hamburger without first balancing my checkbook to see exactly where I stood. Yes, I said. Yes, absolutely, I’ll be glad to do it…for a year or two.
Fifteen years passed and, son of a gun, I found I had written about 160 columns. During that time I had been given extraordinary freedom and trust by John Rasmus and his successors, indulged to follow my curiosity virtually wherever it led (so long as each monthly essay had some connection to nature or science) and to educate myself somewhat in the fields of ecology, field biology, and evolutionary theory. I was still an outsider to the biological sciences, a nonexpert with a noneducation, but those areas had become familiar to me as a journalistic beat. You don’t have to be a cop or a burglar to cover the crime stories down at the courthouse, and you don’t have to be a biologist to write about biology. My lack of formal scientific training may even have been an advantage in some ways, leaving me with a fresh eye and an ingenuous ignorance similar to those of the general readers as whose proxy I tried to serve.
My style of research for the early columns, partly conditioned by the fact that I’d never darkened the door of a school of journalism, was roundabout, unsystematic, ruminative as a feral goat, highly dependent on arcane printed materials and personal experience, and, some might say, unprofessional. That is, I didn’t choose a subject, then choose an angle, then call experts on the phone and ask for quotes. Instead, I wandered amid obscure sources (old books, back issues of scientific journals, newspaper clippings, classic texts, fragments of remembered literature) and, whenever possible, wild places (the Amazon headwaters, the Sonoran Desert, the rivers of western Montana) until my attention seized on a fact or a creature that seemed to me both interesting and important. I researched outward from that point, trying to find a broader cultural context, and also downward, more deeply into it; then, usually under severe deadline pressure, I wrote a short essay in a tone of voice meant to seem as immediate and informal as a telephone harangue to my best friend. By embracing the results, the readers of Outside during those years subsidized and encouraged my overdue scientific education. I take this chance to thank them again.
The book Natural Acts, as originally published in 1985, collected about two dozen of those early columns, along with a few longer pieces I had written for Esquire, Audubon, and other magazines. The good people at Nick Lyons Books (and that company’s successor, Lyons and Burford) kept it available in hardback over the years, while a couple of paperback editions came and went. Meanwhile, as I continued writing columns, the character of those short essays gradually changed, becoming (for better or worse) more careful of fact and complexity, more deeply informed by the main themes and principles of ecology and evolutionary biology, possibly more shapely, definitely less naive and blunt. Some of them are gathered in my later collections, such as The Boilerplate Rhino. In 1995, I resigned from the columnist’s role when I reached such a point of exhaustion—exhaustion not with science or with nonfiction, just with that jaunty little form, the column-length essay—that I felt I might start repeating or imitating myself. I hadn’t seen the end coming. I just realized one day, suddenly, as I rewrote a troublesome column, that this was it.
Since then I’ve divided my working time between nonfiction books and magazine pieces of a sort that wasn’t possible within the constraints of a monthly column. Most of the latter have been written for National Geographic and Harper’s, two very different magazines, with very different readerships, that have offered me very different opportunities and satisfactions. One blessing they have both provided is the freedom to spend much more time gathering raw material from the field—out amid the equatorial forests, the snowy mountainsides, and the laboratories where some biologists (see “Clone Your Troubles Away”) do their work. Related to that is another enlarged opportunity: to follow a subject much further and deeper, either in terms of sheer miles walked (“The Megatransect”) or in terms of complexity, than a column allows. In an extended essay or feature-length story, a writer isn’t forced so sternly toward neatness, toward the elliptical comment as opposed to the unfolded thought, toward lapidary concision and punch lines. He has space to walk around a subject, not just up to it.
In the years since I quit the column, I have never regretted ending that hectic and privileged duty. Then again, though, there is something special about a columnist’s ongoing relationship with his audience. Almost necessarily, it becomes personal, at least in its one-sided way. Readers turn to a certain page of the magazine month after month, by habit and affinity, expecting not just information but a familiar human voice. They begin to feel that they know you. They want to hear what you’ve got to say about whatever subject may be in question. This invites an intimacy of tone and an occasional unguarded revelation, a showing of authorial ankle, that can be put to some good uses beyond the legitimate (but perilous) use of sheer autobiography. I accepted that invitation often enough when I was a columnist, maybe too often, and I’ve intruded myself as a major character in a few of the longer pieces here also. Never mind which; you’ll know me when you see me. Whatever those pieces may try to say or whatever they may inadvertently reveal, I hope they’ll suggest that I’ve learned at least a little something over the years besides science.
One truth I’ve learned—big surprise—is that magazine writing comes and goes. Most magazines (even those with august histories, such as Harper’s and National Geographic) have an issue-by-issue hold on our attention that’s shorter than the refrigerator life of an opened jar of mayonnaise. But where else can short nonfiction—the essay, the profile, the adventure narrative, the thoughtful investigation—find its first existence but in magazines? That’s why magazine writers, at least the more presumptuous of us, harbor an unspoken division of purpose: We’re writing for the subscribers, yes, and the people in the barbershops and the dental waiting rooms, yes, but we’re also writing for time, posterity, the shelf. We’re writing for you, who will find us later between stiff covers, without the glossy ads and the resubscription cards.
And that’s why I’m gratified to introduce, for your kindly attention, a book of short nonfiction pieces that in large part I introduced once before, twenty-two years ago. I haven’t entirely expunged the youthful bumptiousness, but this edition is older and at least a little wiser.
OLD, INGENUOUS INTRODUCTION
An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles
BIOLOGY HAS GREAT POTENTIAL as vulgar entertainment. For that matter, so do geology, ecology, paleontology, and the history of astronomy. Browsing at the intricacies of the natural world and at the lives and works of the scientists who map that world can be fascinating, mesmeric, outrageous good fun. Alas, it can also be heart-squashingly boring. Edifying but deadly, like the novels of Henry James. Or just harmlessly quaint—nature as vast curio shop with an inventory tending to cuteness. The crucial difference, at least to my biased view, is in the angle of approach. The choice of perspective. Lively writing about science and nature depends less on the offering of good answers, I think, than on the offering of good questions.
My own taste runs toward such as What are the redeeming merits, if any, of the mosquito? Or Why is the act of sex invariably fatal for some species of salmon? Or Are crows too intelligent for their station in life? Why do certain bamboo species wait 120 years before bursting into bloom? How do seals stay cool in the Arctic? Does a termite colony constitute many little animals or one big one? Or, perhaps best of all, Why are there so many dif
ferent species of beetle?
That last question has enthralled me for years—ever since I came across the delightful and mind-opening fact that one of every four animals on Earth (by count of the number of species) is, yes, a beetle.
This is actually a conservative estimate, reflecting only the number of animal species that have been discovered and identified by science. Add up all the known species of mammals and birds and reptiles and amphibians, all the fishes and crustaceans and protoplasmic tentacle-waving sea creatures, every brand of zooplankton that has ever been given a name, every type of worm, every flea every mite every spider, also of course every insect on the current entomological roster, and the total comes to around 1.25 million known species of animal. Of that vast assemblage, one in four is a beetle.
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