The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

by Rebecca Skloot

  Yet they had to speak up. Someone had to. If they didn’t, there would have been no countermessage to the false information that was infecting the community, thanks to a one-man panic driver.

  Every few mornings during the winter and spring of 2009, Giampaolo Giuliani parked his gray ’96 Audi 80S on the curb of a narrow street in the tiny village of Coppito, just outside L’Aquila, and hurried into his shop. Past the cluttered piles of old keyboards, boxes of cables and cords, shelves filled with motherboard parts, and a haphazard assortment of electronics for sale, he made his way down a chipped stone staircase into his basement “lab.”

  His seismometer, about 20 inches tall, sat in the corner of the room, cordoned off by four old wooden chairs. On the other side of the space: a workstation, topped with a 10-year-old computer monitor, a scribble-filled notebook, and a thick instruction book titled Costruzioni Apparecchiature Elettroniche Nucleari (Nuclear Engineering Electronic Equipment). On the floor to the right of the workstation is a dark box. About the size of two shoeboxes, it is made of lead and, Giuliani claims, is more sensitive than similar detection equipment used by scientists the world over.

  Giuliani is 67, with a serious smoker’s cough and large sad eyes. Unlike soothsayers wielding crackpot ideas about crystals or signs of the zodiac, his theories are buttressed by logic. Earthquakes involve colossal amounts of energy. With such huge forces at work, it’s conceivable that there would be a connection between major seismic activity and measurable changes in gases percolating up from below. Think of it as a geochemical heads-up. Giuliani has focused his attention on radon, a heavy, radioactive gas that exists in higher concentrations over geologic faults.

  Seismologists have scrutinized radon for more than a generation to see if changing levels can indicate incoming quakes—and found nothing. Susan Hough, a seismologist at the Southern California Earthquake Center and the author of Predicting the Unpredictable: The Tumultuous Science of Earthquake Prediction, sums it up: there is “no statistically significant evidence for a relationship between radon anomalies and earthquakes.”

  But that didn’t stop Giuliani from becoming a go-to media source on seismic activity in L’Aquila. During those tense months of the swarm, his ominous messages helped local media inject tension into their coverage of the tremors. “I gave my number to a few people, but within a month or two it felt like all of Italy had it,” he says. His work as a technician at a nearby research facility for particle physics and nuclear astrophysics gave his pronouncements a veneer of institutional credibility. Technician, physicist, scientist—whatever. Even the New York Times would mistakenly refer to him as a seismologist.

  On March 29, 2009, the town of Sulmona, some 30 miles from L’Aquila, was shaken by a magnitude 3.9 tremor. Giuliani wrote on his website that this event would be followed by a big earthquake in the next day or two. With nothing else to go on, many Sulmona residents chose to evacuate.

  That earthquake never came. It was good news for the public, but local officials were not pleased with Giuliani. For inciting panic, he was slapped with the equivalent of a cease-and-desist order.

  He never predicted the deadly earthquake in L’Aquila, despite his continuing assertions. In reality, L’Aquila’s quake whisperer did nothing more than make noise about earthquake danger in a seismically active place, at a time when the ground was frequently shaking and residents’ nerves were frayed.

  I recently e-mailed Hough and asked what she would say to Giuliani if she were to sit down with him for a discussion. “I would frankly have to stifle an inclination to smack him,” she replied.

  The scientists and officials called to the now infamous meeting in L’Aquila, she said, “did not make their statements in a vacuum, but rather responded to an individual who was making very irresponsible statements, very loudly.” Without Giuliani and his divinations, there would have been no debate about the meaning of the seismic swarm, no moronic statement from Abruzzo officials that no earthquake would occur, no fumbled communications by scientists, no subsequent trial. It all traces back to the lead box in Giuliani’s subterranean lair.

  Today lawyers for the seven men are putting the finishing touches on their arguments for an appeal set to begin in early October. While doing so, they may want to zero in on a few odd details. The scientists who took part in the press conference after the 2009 meeting insist that they never gave any blithe message of reassurance. Yet one of the strangest, if not outright suspicious, parts of this whole saga is that audio record of that press conference has disappeared, even though video footage is available.

  The lawyers may also want to present some seismology data, specifically showing how often seismic swarms are followed by nothing but calm. And they could gut Picuti’s causation argument by using historical examples like this one: In 1920 a seismic swarm occurred in northwestern Tuscany, just as in L’Aquila. One afternoon the tremor was so strong (magnitude 4.1) that people decided to spend the night away from home. Nothing happened that night, though, and in the morning all the men went out to work in the fields, while women returned to their households and children went to school. That’s when a magnitude 6.6 earthquake struck, killing close to 200 people, almost all of them women and children. This is the problem with the custom of fleeing during a tremor: When do you come back inside?

  Even if the appeal succeeds, it’s a process that could take years—years that older scientists like Boschi, who is 72, or former commission chief Franco Barberi, who is 75, may not have. Already the trial and verdict have taken a personal and professional toll, lost jobs, threatened pensions and, of course, the possibility of incarceration. At least two of the men are thinking about leaving Italy altogether.

  Meanwhile the fallout from the initial guilty verdict continues. Scientists and policy wonks from Boston to Jakarta worry about the effect the case will have on experts who are asked to provide an opinion. And in Italy itself, the situation now borders on farcical. Recently the reconstituted Serious Risks Commission warned of the “significant probability” of a major earthquake. No quake followed, but there was plenty of confusion as to what “significant probability” meant. If Italians aren’t totally numb to risk warnings from on high, they will be soon enough.

  To keep his stress in check, Selvaggi is trying to stay healthy. He cooks a lot. He quit smoking and does his best to speak openly about the case so that his frustration doesn’t fester. At home, though, he tries not to bring it up in front of the kids.

  Over dinner one night I asked him about the victims’ testimonies. He chose not to attend the hearings on most of those days. He thought it would be more respectful that way, and he worried that if he cried while listening to accounts of loved ones dying, his reaction might be misconstrued as an expression of remorse or guilt.

  Still, he knows many of their stories, especially that of Parisse, the journalist whose teenage children were killed.

  Selvaggi can’t fathom how he would respond if he were to lose his children. “Maybe I would kill myself,” he says. “I don’t know.”

  What he has been through, he says, is nowhere near the torment Parisse has endured. Yet he feels a kind of connection in loss. In his office at the institute he has two disabled wall clocks. A couple of years ago he pulled out the clocks’ batteries and set the hands of both to display 3:32 a.m.—the time when the earthquake struck L’Aquila, when all those people died, and when life as Selvaggi knew it came to a halt.

  “I have spent my life trying to understand earthquakes to help prevent harm to people,” he says. “Now those people are against me, when I think we should be together.”

  BARRY YEOMAN

  From Billions to None

  FROM Audubon

  Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons; trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a few decades hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.

  —Aldo Leopold, “On a Monument to the Pigeon,” 1947

/>   IN MAY 1850 a 20-year-old Potawatomi tribal leader named Simon Pokagon was camping at the headwaters of Michigan’s Manistee River during trapping season when a far-off gurgling sound startled him. It seemed as if “an army of horses laden with sleigh bells was advancing through the deep forests towards me,” he later wrote. “As I listened more intently, I concluded that instead of the tramping of horses it was distant thunder; and yet the morning was clear, calm, and beautiful.” The mysterious sound came “nearer and nearer,” until Pokagon deduced its source: “While I gazed in wonder and astonishment, I beheld moving toward me in an unbroken front millions of pigeons, the first I had seen that season.”

  These were passenger pigeons, Ectopistes migratorius, at the time the most abundant bird in North America and possibly the world. Throughout the 19th century, witnesses had described similar sightings of pigeon migrations: how they took hours to pass over a single spot, darkening the firmament and rendering normal conversation inaudible. Pokagon remembered how sometimes a traveling flock, arriving at a deep valley, would “pour its living mass” hundreds of feet into a downward plunge. “I have stood by the grandest waterfall of America,” he wrote, “yet never have my astonishment, wonder, and admiration been so stirred as when I have witnessed these birds drop from their course like meteors from heaven.”

  Pokagon recorded these memories in 1895, more than four decades after his Manistee River observation. By then he was in the final years of his life. Passenger pigeons too were in their final years. In 1871 their great communal nesting sites had covered 850 square miles of Wisconsin’s sandy oak barrens—136 million breeding adults, naturalist A. W. Schorger later estimated. After that the population plummeted until, by the mid-1890s, wild flock sizes numbered in the dozens rather than the hundreds of millions (or even billions). Then they disappeared altogether, except for three captive breeding flocks spread across the Midwest. About September 1, 1914, the last known passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. She was roughly 29 years old, with a palsy that made her tremble. Not once in her life had she laid a fertile egg.

  This year marks the 100th anniversary of the passenger pigeon’s extinction. In the intervening years researchers have agreed that the bird was hunted out of existence, victimized by the fallacy that no amount of exploitation could endanger a creature so abundant. Between now and the end of the year, bird groups and museums will commemorate the centenary in a series of conferences, lectures, and exhibits. Most prominent among them is Project Passenger Pigeon, a wide-ranging effort by a group of scientists, artists, museum curators, and other bird lovers. While their focus is on public education, an unrelated organization called Revive & Restore is attempting something far more ambitious and controversial: using genetics to bring the bird back.

  Project Passenger Pigeon’s leaders hope that by sharing the pigeon’s story, they can impress upon adults and children alike our critical role in environmental conservation. “It’s surprising to me how many educated people I talk to who are completely unaware that the passenger pigeon even existed,” says ecologist David Blockstein, senior scientist at the National Council for Science and the Environment. “Using the centenary is a way to contemplate questions like ‘How was it possible that this extinction happened?’ and ‘What does it say about contemporary issues like climate change?’”

  They were evolutionary geniuses. Traveling in fast, gargantuan flocks throughout the eastern and midwestern United States and Canada—the males slate-blue with copper undersides and hints of purple, the females more muted—passenger pigeons would search out bumper crops of acorns and beechnuts. These they would devour, using their sheer numbers to ward off enemies, a strategy known as “predator satiation.” They would also outcompete other nut lovers—not only wild animals but also domestic pigs that had been set loose by farmers to forage.

  In forest and city alike, an arriving flock was a spectacle—“a feathered tempest,” in the words of conservationist Aldo Leopold. One 1855 account from Columbus, Ohio, described a “growing cloud” that blotted out the sun as it advanced toward the city. “Children screamed and ran for home,” it said. “Women gathered their long skirts and hurried for the shelter of stores. Horses bolted. A few people mumbled frightened words about the approach of the millennium, and several dropped on their knees and prayed.” When the flock had passed over, two hours later, “the town looked ghostly in the now-bright sunlight that illuminated a world plated with pigeon ejecta.”

  Nesting birds took over whole forests, forming what John James Audubon in 1831 called “solid masses as large as hogsheads.” Observers reported trees crammed with dozens of nests apiece, collectively weighing so much that branches would snap off and trunks would topple. In 1871 some hunters coming upon the morning exodus of adult males were so overwhelmed by the sound and spectacle that some of them dropped their guns. “Imagine a thousand threshing machines running under full headway, accompanied by as many steamboats groaning off steam, with an equal quota of R.R. trains passing through covered bridges—imagine these massed into a single flock, and you possibly have a faint conception of the terrific roar,” the Commonwealth, a newspaper in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, reported of that encounter.

  The birds weren’t just noisy. They were tasty too, and their arrival guaranteed an abundance of free protein. “You think about this especially with the spring flocks,” says Blockstein, the ecologist. “The people on the frontiers have survived the winter. They’ve been eating whatever food they’ve been able to preserve from the year before. Then, all of a sudden, here’s all this fresh meat flying by you. It must have been a time for great rejoicing: the pigeons are here!” (Not everyone shouted with joy. The birds also devoured crops, frustrating farmers and prompting Baron de Lahontan, a French soldier who explored North America during the 17th century, to write that “the Bishop has been forc’d to excommunicate ’em oftner than once, upon the account of the Damage they do to the Product of the Earth.”)

  The flocks were so thick that hunting was easy—even waving a pole at the low-flying birds would kill some. Still, harvesting for subsistence didn’t threaten the species’ survival. But after the Civil War came two technological developments that set in motion the pigeon’s extinction: the national expansions of the telegraph and the railroad. They enabled a commercial pigeon industry to blossom, fueled by professional sportsmen who could learn quickly about new nestings and follow the flocks around the continent. “Hardly a train arrives that does not bring hunters or trappers,” reported Wisconsin’s Kilbourn City Mirror in 1871. “Hotels are full, coopers are busy making barrels, and men, women, and children are active in packing the birds or filling the barrels. They are shipped to all places on the railroad, and to Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.”

  The professionals and amateurs together outflocked their quarry with brute force. They shot the pigeons and trapped them with nets, torched their roosts, and asphyxiated them with burning sulfur. They attacked the birds with rakes, pitchforks, and potatoes. They poisoned them with whiskey-soaked corn. Learning of some of these methods, Potawatomi leader Pokagon despaired. “These outlaws to all moral sense would touch a lighted match to the bark of the tree at the base, when with a flash—more like an explosion—the blast would reach every limb of the tree,” he wrote of an 1880 massacre, describing how the scorched adults would flee and the squabs would “burst open upon hitting the ground.” Witnessing this, Pokagon wondered what type of divine punishment might be “awaiting our white neighbors who have so wantonly butchered and driven from our forests these wild pigeons, the most beautiful flowers of the animal creation of North America.”

  Ultimately the pigeons’ survival strategy—flying in huge predator-proof flocks—proved their undoing. “If you’re unfortunate enough to be a species that concentrates in time and space, you make yourself very, very vulnerable,” says Stanley Temple, a professor emeritus of conservation at the University of Wisconsin.


  Passenger pigeons might have even survived the commercial slaughter if hunters weren’t also disrupting their nesting grounds—killing some adults, driving away others, and harvesting the squabs. “It was the double whammy,” says Temple. “It was the demographic nightmare of overkill and impaired reproduction. If you’re killing a species far faster than they can reproduce, the end is a mathematical certainty.” The last known hunting victim was “Buttons,” a female, which was shot in Pike County, Ohio, in 1900 and mounted by the sheriff’s wife (who used two buttons in lieu of glass eyes). Almost seven decades later a man named Press Clay Southworth took responsibility for shooting Buttons, not knowing her species, when he was a boy.

  Even as the pigeons’ numbers crashed, “there was virtually no effort to save them,” says Joel Greenberg, a research associate with Chicago’s Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum and the Field Museum. “People just slaughtered them more intensely. They killed them until the very end.”

  Contemporary environmentalism arrived too late to prevent the passenger pigeon’s demise. But the two phenomena share a historical connection. “The extinction was part of the motivation for the birth of modern twentieth-century conservation,” says Temple. In 1900, even before Martha’s death in the Cincinnati Zoo, Republican congressman John F. Lacey of Iowa introduced the nation’s first wildlife protection law, which banned the interstate shipping of unlawfully killed game. “The wild pigeon, formerly in flocks of millions, has entirely disappeared from the face of the earth,” Lacey said on the House floor. “We have given an awful exhibition of slaughter and destruction, which may serve as a warning to all mankind. Let us now give an example of wise conservation of what remains of the gifts of nature.” That year Congress passed the Lacey Act, followed by the tougher Weeks-McLean Act in 1913 and, five years later, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which protected not just birds but also their eggs, nests, and feathers.