The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

  “Oliver!” Carol said. “What have you just taken?”

  “Nothing,” I replied. ‘That’s why I’m so frightened.” Carol thought for a moment, then asked, “What have you just stopped taking?”

  ‘That’s it!” I said. “I was taking a huge amount of chloral hydrate and ran out of it last night.”

  “Oliver, you chump! You always overdo things,” Carol said. “You’ve got a classic case of the DTs, delirium tremens.”

  This was an immense relief—much better DTs than a schizophrenic psychosis. But I was quite aware of the dangers of the DTs: confusion, disorientation, hallucination, delusion, dehydration, fever, rapid heartbeat, exhaustion, seizures, death. I would have advised anyone else in my state to get to an emergency room immediately, but for myself I wanted to tough it out and experience it to the full. Carol agreed to sit with me for the first day and then, if she thought I was safe by myself, she would look by or phone me at intervals, calling in outside help if she judged it necessary. Given this safety net, I lost much of my anxiety and could even, in a way, enjoy the phantasms of delirium tremens (though the myriads of small animals and insects were anything but pleasant). The hallucinations continued for almost ninety-six hours, and when they finally stopped I fell into an exhausted stupor.

  As a boy, I had known extreme delight in the study of chemistry and the setting up of my own chemistry lab. This delight seemed to desert me at the age of fifteen or so; in my years at school, university, medical school, and then internship and residency, I kept my head above water, but the subjects I studied never excited me in the same intense way as chemistry had when I was a boy. It was not until I arrived in New York and began seeing patients in a migraine clinic in the summer of 1966 that I began to feel a little stirring of the intellectual excitement and emotional engagement I had known in my earlier years. In the hope of whipping up these intellectual and emotional excitements even further, I turned to amphetamines.

  I would take the stuff on Friday evenings after getting back from work and would then spend the whole weekend so high that images and thoughts would become rather like controllable hallucinations, imbued with ecstatic emotion. I often devoted these “drug holidays” to romantic daydreaming, but one Friday, in February 1967, while I was exploring the rare-book section of the medical library, I found and took out a rather rare book on migraine entitled On Megrim, Sick-Headache, and Some Allied Disorders: A Contribution to the Pathology of Nerve-Storms, written in 1873 by one Edward Liveing, MD. I had been working for several months in a migraine clinic, and I was fascinated by the range of symptoms and phenomena that could occur in migraine attacks. These attacks often included an aura, a prodrome in which aberrations of perception and even hallucinations occurred. They were entirely benign and would last only a few minutes, but those few minutes provided a window onto the functioning of the brain and how it could break down and then reintegrate. In this way, I felt, every attack of migraine opened out into an encyclopedia of neurology.

  I had read dozens of articles about migraine and its possible basis, but none of them seemed to present the full richness of its phenomenology or the range and depth of suffering that patients might experience. It was in the hope of finding a fuller, deeper, and more human approach to migraine that I took out Liveing’s book from the library that weekend. So, after downing my bitter draft of amphetamine—heavily sugared, to make it more palatable—I started reading. As the intensity of the amphetamine effect took hold of me, stimulating my emotions and imagination, Liveing’s book seemed to increase in intensity and depth and beauty. I wanted nothing but to enter Liveing’s mind and imbibe the atmosphere of the time in which he worked. In a sort of catatonic concentration so intense that in ten hours I scarcely moved a muscle or wet my lips, I read steadily through the five hundred pages of Megrim. As I did so, it seemed to me almost as if I were becoming Liveing himself, actually seeing the patients he described. At times I was unsure whether I was reading the book or writing it. I felt myself in the Dickensian London of the 1860s and ’70s. I loved Liveing’s humanity and social sensitivity, his strong assertion that migraine was not some indulgence of the idle rich but could affect those who were poorly nourished and worked long hours in ill-ventilated factories. In this way, his book reminded me of Henry Mayhew’s great 1861 study of London’s working classes, but equally one could tell how well Liveing had been trained in biology and the physical sciences, and what a master of clinical observation he was. I found myself thinking, This represents the best of mid-Victorian science and medicine; it is a veritable masterpiece! The book gave me what I had been hungering for during the months that I was seeing patients with migraine and being frustrated by the thin, impoverished articles that seemed to constitute the modern “literature” on the subject. At the height of this ecstasy, I saw migraine shining like an archipelago of stars in the neurological heavens.

  But about a century had passed since Liveing worked and wrote in London. Rousing myself from my reverie of being Liveing or one of his contemporaries, I came to and said to myself, “Now it is the 1960s, not the 1860s. Who could be the Liveing of our time?” A disingenuous clutter of names spoke themselves in my mind. I thought of Dr. A. and Dr. B. and Dr. C. and Dr. D., all of them good men but none with that mixture of science and humanism which was so powerful in Liveing. And then a very loud internal voice said, “You silly bugger! You’re the man!”

  On every previous occasion when I had come down after two days of amphetamine-induced mania, I had experienced a severe reaction in the other direction, feeling an almost narcoleptic drowsiness and depression. I would also have an acute sense of folly that I had endangered my life for nothing—amphetamines in the large doses I took would give me a sustained pulse rate close to 200 and a blood pressure of I-know-not-what; several people I knew had died from overdoses of amphetamines. I would feel that I had made a crazy ascent into the stratosphere but had come back empty-handed and had nothing to show for it; that the experience had been as empty and vacuous as it was intense. This time, though, when I came down, I retained a sense of illumination and insight; I had had a sort of revelation about migraine. I had a sense of resolution, too, that I was indeed equipped to write a Liveing-like book, that perhaps I could be the Liveing of our time.

  The next day, before I returned Liveing’s book to the library, I photocopied the whole thing, and then, bit by bit, I started to write my own book. The joy I got from doing this was real—infinitely more substantial than the vapid mania of amphetamines—and I never took amphetamines again.

  ELIZABETH KOLBERT

  Recall of the Wild

  FROM The New Yorker

  FLEVOLAND, WHICH SITS more or less in the center of the Netherlands, half an hour from Amsterdam, is the country’s newest province, a status that is partly administrative and partly existential. For most of the past several millennia, Flevoland lay at the bottom of an inlet of the North Sea. In the 1930s a massive network of dams transformed the inlet into a freshwater lake, and in the 1950s a drainage project, which was very nearly as massive, allowed Flevoland to emerge out of the muck of the former sea floor. The province’s coat of arms, drawn up when it was incorporated in the 1980s, features a beast that has the head of a lion and the tail of a mermaid.

  Flevoland has some of Europe’s richest farmland; its long, narrow fields are planted with potatoes and sugar beets and barley. On each side of the province is a city that has been built from scratch: Almere in the west and Lelystad in the east. In between lies a wilderness that was also constructed, Genesis-like, from the mud.

  Known as the Oostvaardersplassen, a name that is pretty much unpronounceable for English-speakers, the reserve occupies 15,000 almost perfectly flat acres on the shore of the inlet-turned-lake. This area was originally designated for industry; however, while it was still in the process of drying out, a handful of biologists convinced the Dutch government that they had a better idea. The newest land in Europe could be used to create a Paleolithic l
andscape. The biologists set about stocking the Oostvaardersplassen with the sorts of animals that would have inhabited the region in prehistoric times—had it not at that point been underwater. In many cases, the animals had been exterminated, so they had to settle for the next best thing. For example, in place of the aurochs, a large and now extinct bovine, they brought in Heck cattle, a variety specially bred by Nazi scientists. (More on the Nazis later.) The cattle grazed and multiplied. So did the red deer, which were trucked in from Scotland, and the horses, which were imported from Poland, and the foxes and the geese and the egrets. In fact, the large mammals reproduced so prolifically that they formed what could, with a certain amount of squinting, be said to resemble the great migratory herds of Africa; the German magazine Der Spiegel has called the Oostvaardersplassen “the Serengeti behind the dikes.” Visitors now pay up to forty-five dollars each to take safari-like tours of the park. These are especially popular in the fall, during rutting season.

  Such is the success of the Dutch experiment—whatever, exactly, it is—that it has inspired a new movement. Dubbed Rewilding Europe, the movement takes the old notion of wilderness and turns it inside out. Perhaps it’s true that genuine wildernesses can only be destroyed, but new “wilderness,” what the Dutch call “new nature,” can be created. Every year, tens of thousands of acres of economically marginal farmland in Europe are taken out of production. Why not use this land to produce “new nature” to replace what’s been lost? The same basic idea could, of course, be applied outside of Europe—it’s been proposed, for example, that depopulated expanses of the American Midwest are also candidates for rewilding.

  I visited the Oostvaardersplassen during a stretch of very blue days in early fall. As it happened, two film crews, one Dutch and the other French, were also there. The French crew, whose credits include the international hit Winged Migration, was scouting the reserve for possible use in an upcoming feature about the history of Europe as seen through the eyes of other species. The Dutch crew was finishing up a full-length nature documentary. One afternoon we all got into vans and drove to the middle of the park. A stiff breeze was blowing, as it almost always does near the North Sea. We passed a marshy area covered in reeds, which nodded in the wind. Ducks bobbed in a pond. Farther on, where the land grew drier, the reeds gave way to grass. We passed a herd of red deer, some aurochs wannabes, and the carcass of a deer, which had been picked almost clean by foxes and ravens. (The Dutch crew had filmed the scavenging with a time-lapse camera.) Eventually, we came to a herd of about a thousand wild—or at least feral—horses. They whinnied and cantered and shook their heads. The horses were an almost uniform buff color, and the breeze lifted their manes, which were dark brown. We all piled out of the vans. The horses seemed not to notice us, though we were just a few yards away.

  “Ah, c’est joli ça!” the French exclaimed. A flock of black-and-white barnacle geese rose into the air and then, a moment later, a yellow train clicked by, carrying passengers from Almere to Lelystad or perhaps vice versa. A few members of the French crew had brought along video cameras. As they panned across the horses—at the edge of the herd, a mare nuzzled a foal that couldn’t have been more than two or three days old—I wondered what they would do with the high-voltage power lines in the background. It occurred to me that, like so many postmodern projects, the Oostvaardersplassen was faintly ridiculous. It was also, I had to admit, inspiring.

  If one person could be said to be responsible for the Oostvaardersplassen, it is an ecologist named Frans Vera. Vera, who is sixty-three, has gray hair, a gray beard, and a cheerfully combative manner. He spent most of his adult life working for one or another branch of the Dutch government and now works for a private foundation, of which, as far as I could tell, he is the sole employee. Vera picked me up one day at my hotel in Lelystad, and we drove over to the reserve’s administrative offices, where we had a cup of coffee in a room decorated with the mounted head of a very large, black Heck bull.

  Vera explained that he first became interested in the Oostvaardersplassen in the late 1970s. At that point, he had just graduated from university in Amsterdam and was unemployed. He read an article about some graylag geese that had appeared in the reclaimed area, which was then a boggy no man’s land. The geese kept the vegetation low by chomping on it, and in this way maintained their marshy habitat. Vera was an avid bird watcher, and the story intrigued him. He wrote his own article, arguing that the place ought to be turned into a nature preserve. Soon afterward, he got a job with the Dutch forestry agency.

  In the late seventies, the prevailing view in the Netherlands was—and, to a certain extent, it still is—that nature was something to be managed, like a farm. According to this view, a preserve needed to be planted, pruned, and mowed, and the bigger the preserve, the more intervention was required. Vera chafed at this notion. The problem, he decided, was that Europe’s large grazers had been hunted to oblivion. If they could be restored, then nature could take care of itself. This theory, coming from a very junior civil servant, was not particularly popular.

  “Mostly there’s no trouble as long as you are within the borders of an accepted paradigm,” Vera told me. “But be aware when you start to discuss the paradigm. Then it starts to be only twenty-five percent discussion of facts and seventy-five percent psychology. The thing I most often heard was, ‘Who do you think you are?’” Undaunted, Vera kept pushing. He had a few allies at various government ministries, and one of them arranged for him to get the money to buy some Heck cattle. In 1983, while the future of the Oostvaardersplassen was still being debated, Vera acquired the cows from Germany, although he had not yet secured permission from the governing authorities to release them.

  “I bought them and I was standing here with the trucks,” he recalled happily. “And they were so angry!” This first group of Heck cattle was not allowed onto the site, but a second group, acquired some months later, was let in. The following year, Vera bought forty Konik horses from Poland. Koniks are believed to be descended from tarpans, one of the world’s last subspecies of truly wild horse, which survived in eastern Europe into the nineteenth century. (Practically all the horses that are called “wild” today are, in fact, the offspring of domesticated horses that were, at some point or another, let loose.) Red deer, which are closely related to what Americans call elk, were brought in during the 1990s.

  Meanwhile, other animals were finding their way to the Oostvaardersplassen on their own. Foxes arrived, as did muskrats, which in Europe count as an invasive species. Buzzards and goshawks and gray herons and kingfishers and kestrels turned up. A pair of very large white-tailed eagles swooped in and built their nest in an improbably small tree. In 2005 a rare black vulture appeared, but after a few months in residence it wandered onto the railroad tracks, where it was hit by a train. (The rail line runs along the southern edge of the preserve.) Vera’s dream is that one day the Oostvaardersplassen will be connected to other nature reserves in the Netherlands—a plan that has been partly but never fully funded—and that this will, in turn, allow it to attract wolves. Wolves were extirpated from most of western Europe more than a century ago, but owing to stringent protections put in place over the past few decades, they have recently been making a comeback in countries like Germany and France. (Two packs, with about ten wolves each, now live within forty miles of Berlin.) Last year a wolf believed to be the first seen in Holland since the 1860s was spotted about seventy miles southeast of the Oostvaardersplassen, in the town of Duiven.

  “That is probably unimaginable for people in the United States—having wolves in the Netherlands,” Vera said. “But it is the future.”

  After we had finished our coffee, we got into a truck and drove through the gates of the preserve. So effectively have the cows and the horses and the deer kept the place grazed that there was barely a bush to be seen—just acre after very flat acre of clipped grass, like a bowling green. We passed a few groups of deer and a fox that looked back at us with pale, glittering
eyes. Vera stopped the truck at a lookout built on stilts. We climbed up a narrow ladder. “This is a window that shows us how the Netherlands looked thousands of years ago,” he said, gesturing at the grassland below.

  A corollary of Vera’s theory about large grazers is a second hypothesis, which he has pushed even more vigorously than the first, if that’s possible. Among ecologists, the prevailing view of Europe in its natural, which is to say preagrarian, state is that it was heavily forested. (The continent’s last stands of old-growth forest are found on the border of Poland and Belarus, in the Białowiez.a Forest, which the author Alan Weisman has described as a “relic of what once stretched east to Siberia and west to Ireland.”) Vera argues that even before Europeans figured out how to farm, the continent was more of a parklike landscape, with large expanses of open meadow. It was kept this way, he maintains, by large herds of herbivores—aurochs, red deer, tarpans, and European bison. (The bison, also known as wisents, were hunted nearly to extinction by the late 1800s.)