The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

by Rebecca Skloot

  The passenger pigeon story continued to resonate throughout the century. In the 1960s populations of the dickcissel, a sparrowlike neotropical migrant, began crashing, and some ornithologists predicted its extinction by 2000. It took decades to uncover the reason: During winters the entire world population of the grasslands bird converged into fewer than a dozen huge flocks, which settled into the llanos of Venezuela. There rice farmers who considered the dickcissels a pest illegally crop-dusted their roosts with pesticides. “They were literally capable, in a matter of minutes, of wiping out double-digit percentages of the world’s population,” says Temple, who studied the bird. “The accounts are very reminiscent of the passenger pigeon.” As conservationists negotiated with rice growers during the 1990s—using research that showed the dickcissel was not an economic threat—they also invoked the passenger pigeon extinction to rally their colleagues in North America and Europe. The efforts paid off: the bird’s population has stabilized, albeit at a lower level.

  Today the pigeon inspires artists and scientists alike. Sculptor Todd McGrain, creative director of the Lost Bird Project, has crafted enormous bronze memorials of five extinct birds; his passenger pigeon sits at the Grange Insurance Audubon Center in Columbus, Ohio. The Lost Bird Project has also designed an origami pigeon and says thousands have been folded—a symbolic recreation of the historic flocks.

  The most controversial effort inspired by the extinction is a plan to bring the passenger pigeon back to life. In 2012 Long Now Foundation president Stewart Brand (a futurist best known for creating the Whole Earth Catalog) and genetics entrepreneur Ryan Phelan cofounded Revive & Restore, a project that plans to use the tools of molecular biology to resurrect extinct animals. The project’s “flagship” species is the passenger pigeon, which Brand learned about from his mother when he was growing up in Illinois. Revive & Restore hopes to start with the band-tailed pigeon, a close relative, and “change its genome into the closest thing to the genetic code of the passenger pigeon that we can make,” says research consultant Ben Novak. The resulting creature will not have descended from the original species. “[But] if I give it to a team of scientists who have no idea that it was bioengineered, and I say, ‘Classify this,’ if it looks and behaves like a passenger pigeon, the natural historians arc going to say, ‘This is Ectopistes migratorius.’ And if the genome plops right next to all the other passenger pigeon genomes you’ve sequenced from history, then a geneticist will have to say, ‘This is a passenger pigeon. It’s not a band-tailed pigeon.’”

  Revive & Restore plans to breed the birds in captivity before returning them to the wild in the 2030s. Novak says the initial research indicates that North American forests could support a reintroduced population. He hopes animals brought back from extinction—not just birds but eventually also big creatures like woolly mammoths—will draw the public to zoos in droves, generating revenues that can be used to protect wildlife. “De-extinction [can] get the public interested in conservation in a way that the last forty years of doom and gloom has beaten out of them,” he says.

  Other experts aren’t so sanguine. They question whether the hybrid animal could really be called a passenger pigeon. They doubt the birds could survive without the enormous flocks of the 19th century. And they question Novak’s belief that the forests could safely absorb the reintroduction. “The ecosystem has moved on,” says Temple. “If you put the organism back in, it could be disruptive to a new dynamic equilibrium. It’s not altogether clear that putting one of these extinct species from the distant past back into an ecosystem today would be much more than introducing an exotic species. It would have repercussions that we’re probably not fully capable of predicting.”

  Blockstein says he wanted to use the 100th anniversary as a “teachable moment.” Which eventually led him to Greenberg, the Chicago researcher, who had been thinking independently about 2014’s potential. The two men reached out to others until more than 150 institutions were on board for a year-long commemoration: museums, universities, conservation groups (including Audubon state offices and local chapters), libraries, arts organizations, government agencies, and nature and history centers.

  Project Passenger Pigeon has since evolved to be a multimedia circus of sorts. Greenberg has published A Feathered River Across the Sky, a book-length account of the pigeon’s glory days and demise. Filmmaker David Mrazek plans to release a documentary called From Billions to None. At least four conferences will address the pigeon’s extinction, as will several exhibits. “We’re trying to take advantage of every possible mechanism to put the story in front of audiences that may not necessarily be birdwatchers, may not necessarily even be conservationists,” says Temple.

  The commemoration goes beyond honoring one species. Telling the pigeon’s story can serve as a jumping-off point for exploring the many ways humans influence, and often jeopardize, their own environment. Today an estimated 13 percent of birds are threatened, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. So are 25 percent of mammals and 41 percent of amphibians, in large part because of human activity. Hydropower and road construction imperil China’s giant pandas. The northern bald ibis, once abundant in the Middle East, has been driven almost to extinction by hunting, habitat loss, and the difficulties of doing conservation work in war-torn Syria. Hunting and the destruction of wetlands for agriculture drove the population of North America’s tallest bird, the whooping crane, into the teens before stringent protections along the birds’ migratory route and wintering grounds helped the wild flock build back to a few hundred. Little brown bats are dying off in the United States and Canada from a fungus that might have been imported from Europe by travelers. Of some 300 species of freshwater mussels in North America, fully 70 percent are extinct, imperiled, or vulnerable, thanks to the impacts of water pollution from logging, dams, farm runoff, and shoreline development. Rising sea temperatures have disrupted the symbiotic relationship between corals and plantlike zooxanthellae, leading to a deadly phenomenon called coral bleaching. One third of the world’s reef-building coral species are now threatened.

  If public disinterest helped exterminate the passenger pigeon, then one modern-day parallel might be public skepticism about climate change. In an October poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, only 44 percent of Americans agreed there was solid evidence that the earth is warming because of human activity, as scientists now overwhelmingly believe. Twenty-six percent didn’t think there was significant proof of global warming at all. In another Pew poll, conducted last spring, 40 percent of Americans considered climate change a major national threat, compared with 65 percent of Latin Americans and slimmer majorities in Europe, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region.

  This denial of both the threat and our own responsibility sounds eerily familiar to those who study 19th-century attitudes toward wildlife. “Certainly if you read some of the writings of the time,” says Blockstein, “there were very few people who put stock in the idea that humanity could have any impact on the passenger pigeons.” (Audubon himself dismissed those who believed that “such dreadful havoc” as hunting would “soon put an end to the species.”) Today attitudes toward climate change sound similar, continues Blockstein. “It’s the same kind of argument: ‘The world is so big and the atmosphere is so big; how could we possibly have an impact on the global climate?’”

  Even the political rhetoric of those who don’t want to address climate change aggressively has 19th-century echoes. “The industry that paid people to kill these birds said, ‘If you restrict the killing, people will lose their jobs,’” notes Greenberg—“the very same things you hear today.”

  Project Passenger Pigeon might not change the minds of hardcore climate skeptics. For the rest of us, though, it could serve as a call to take responsibility for how our personal and collective actions affect wildlife and climate. Maybe a close look at the history of human folly will keep us from repeating it.

  Contributors’ Notes

/>   Jake Abrahamson is a writer living in California.

  Burkhard Bilger has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2000. He was a senior editor at Discover from 1999 to 2005, and from 1994 to 1999 a deputy editor and writer at The Sciences, where his work helped earn two National Magazine Awards and six nominations. His book, Noodling for Flatheads (2000), was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. Bilger is a Branford Fellow at Yale University, from which he graduated in 1986. He is at work on a book about his grandfather’s experiences during the Second World War.

  Sheila Webster Boneham writes about animals, environment, gender, and culture in the anthropological sense. She is as interested in the questions we ask as in the answers. Her publications include seventeen nonfiction books, four novels, and a number of essays, short stories, and poems. Her books have won the Maxwell Award for Fiction and for Nonfiction and the MUSE Award for Nonfiction. The essay included here won the Prime Number Magazine Award for Creative Nonfiction and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

  Rebecca Boyle is an award-winning journalist who grew up in Colorado, a mile closer to space. A former political reporter, she now writes about the vast realm of science, from astronomy to zoonoses. She focuses on bats and spiders for her blog, Eek Squad, which is hosted by Popular Science. Her work appears in Wired, New Scientist, Ask, Aeon, and many other publications for adults and kids. Boyle lives in St. Louis with her husband and daughter.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming’s most recent book is Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit (2014). She is the author of three additional nonfiction books and four poetry books, most recently Rope (2009), with Stairway to Heaven due out in 2016. She is Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice and professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow.

  Sheri Fink is the author of the New York Times best-selling book Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (2013), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, the Ridenhour Book Prize, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Book Award, the American Medical Writers Association Medical Book Award, and the NASW Science in Society Journalism Book Award. Fink’s news reporting has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the Overseas Press Club Lowell Thomas Award, among other journalism prizes. A former relief worker in disaster and conflict zones, Fink received her MD and PhD from Stanford University. Her first book, War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival (2003), is about medical professionals under siege during the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. She is a correspondent at the New York Times.

  Atul Gawande practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and is a professor at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School. He is also executive director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1998. He is the author of four New York Times bestsellers: Complications, Better, The Checklist Manifesto, and, most recently, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.

  Writer and photographer Lisa M. Hamilton focuses on agriculture and rural communities. She is the author of Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness and has written for Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Atlantic. Her current work is about crop genetic resources in the era of climate change.

  Rowan Jacobsen writes for Harper’s Magazine, Outside, Mother Jones, Orion, and other magazines. His Outside piece “Heart of Dark Chocolate” received the Lowell Thomas Award from the Society of American Travel Writers for adventure story of the year; his Eating Well piece “Or Not to Bee” received a James Beard Award; his Harper’s piece “The Homeless Herd” was named magazine piece of the year by the Overseas Press Club; and his Outside piece “Spill Seekers” was selected for The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011. He was a 2012 Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow, writing about endangered cultures on the borderlands between India, Myanmar, and China, and is a 2015 McGraw Fellow, writing about the promise of fake meat. He is also the author of six books, including Fruitless Fall, The Living Shore, and Shadows on the Gulf.

  Leslie Jamison has written a novel, The Gin Closet, and a collection of essays, The Empathy Exams. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, and the New York Times, where she is a columnist for the Sunday Book Review. She lives in Brooklyn.

  Brooke Jarvis is an independent journalist who focuses on longform narrative and environmental reporting. She is the author of “When We Are Called to Part,” published by The Atavist, and has written features for a long list of magazines. Her work has been supported by the Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. She lives in Seattle.

  Sam Kean is the New York Times best-selling author of The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, The Disappearing Spoon, and The Violinist’s Thumb. He has given well over a hundred talks on his books, in five different countries and in two dozen different states.

  Jourdan Imani Keith has been awarded fellowships from Wildbranch, Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop, VONA, Hedgebrook, and Jack Straw. She received funding from Artist Trust, 4Culture, and Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture for her choreopoem/play, The Uterine Files, and Coyote Autumn, a memoir. Seattle Poet Populist emerita and Seattle Public Library’s first naturalist in residence, she is a storyteller and student of Sonia Sanchez. An excerpt from her memoir is included in the travel writing anthology Something to Declare. She is at work on a series of linked essays called Tugging at the Web, an expansion of her TEDx Talk.

  Eli Kintisch is a contributing correspondent for Science magazine. A two-time MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow, he covers climate change, oceans, and the Arctic and has written for Slate, Nautilus, New Scientist, and the Los Angeles Times. His 2010 book, Hack the Planet: Science’s Best Hope—or Worst Nightmare—for Averting Climate Catastrophe, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

  Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Sixth Extinction, which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize. Her series on global warming, “The Climate of Man,” won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine writing award and a National Academies communications award. Those articles became the basis for 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 and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Kolbert lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

  Amy Maxmen writes for Newsweek, Nature, the New York Times, Nautilus, and many other publications. She’s interested in the entanglements of evolution, medicine, policy, and the people behind the research. With fellowships from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, she has reported several stories from Africa. Prior to writing she earned a PhD from Harvard University in evolutionary and organismic biology.

  Seth Mnookin is an associate professor of comparative media studies/writing and the associate director of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at MIT. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story of the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, won the National Association of Science Writers 2012 Science in Society book award. He is also the author of the 2006 national bestseller Feeding the Monster, about the Boston Red Sox, and 2004’s Hard News, about the New York Times. He lives with his wife, their two children, and their ten-year-old adopted pit bull in Boston, Massachusetts, and can be found online at sethmnookin.com and @sethmnookin.

  Dennis Overbye is a science reporter for the New York Times. He is the author of Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance, which was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Story of the Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe, a finali
st for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the winner of the American Institute of Physics award for science writing. “Chasing the Higgs,” an article he wrote for the New York Times, was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Nancy Wartik, and their daughter.

  Matthew Power died in March 2014 while on an assignment in Uganda for Men’s Journal. He was thirty-nine. Described by his editor at Outside magazine as “relentlessly generous,” he regularly encouraged young writers. His articles have been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing, The Best American Spiritual Writing, and now, to our good fortune, here.

  Sarah Schweitzer is a feature writer for the Boston Globe. She joined the paper’s staff in 2001 after working for the St. Petersburg Times and the Concord Monitor. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing in 2015 for “Chasing Bayla.” She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, two children, and two dogs.