The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018

by Sam Kean

  Clearly, it made sense to take some of these cats into our home as pets. “They deserve a good life, too,” my mother insisted. The first cat was a long-haired Maine Coon tabby we named Ignatius. Then another tabby we named Madeline. And—life’s little blessings—Madeleine was pregnant, so out popped Oliver and Cassandra.

  Because they were fairly tame indoors, once they had food and warmth, I mostly ignored the cats—except for one thing. I’d majored in science in college but had since slacked off, letting that part of my brain grow flabby. I wanted to get it back in shape, so I picked up a few meaty science books, including a long tome on animal behavior. It was pretty dense—I couldn’t read more than a few pages each night, and it took me months to finish some chapters. I certainly didn’t understand all of it either. But one theme stuck in my mind: that animal behavior is largely programmed. Sometimes genes drive their behavior, sometimes hormones or neural circuits, sometimes environmental cues. But whatever the cause, animals act and react in highly predictable ways, the book argued. In some cases you could even describe their behavior with precise equations.

  Now, I knew this was controversial stuff. The author was an ant expert, and it made sense to think of ants as these little chemical zombies running around with no free will. But then he started working his way through the animal kingdom, applying the same ideas to fish, reptiles, birds—and mammals. Like cats. And that’s when the book started to get a little spooky. Because one example it mentioned was that overcrowding can drastically change an animal’s behavior. Animals get much more territorial if there are too many other creatures around, and even docile individuals can turn aggressive and nasty.

  So why was this spooky? Because right around the time I read this, my mom, bless her heart, took in a fifth cat, Elliott. And it was like a phase shift occurred—the Kean cat population had vaulted beyond some critical barrier.

  Ignatius started pouncing on the other cats from windowsills. Cassandra suffered gashes on her face and started tearing up furniture with her claws. Worst of all, Oliver and Elliott had a literal pissing match—spraying curtains and sofas to mark territory. The book had predicted that things like this would happen, and seeing the drama unfold like that, right in our living room, was uncanny. I felt like I’d stumbled into some sort of cabbalistic text about the animal kingdom, a shortcut to all its secrets. This was powerful stuff.

  Still, however spooky the scene was, at the end of the day these were just cats. Beasts. Of course something like overcrowding could override their basic decency.

  Then, a few months later, my brother also moved back home after college. Now we had four adult Homo sapiens living in one house. And honestly, we had a nice honeymoon of family togetherness at first—my family really can be great. But eventually that long South Dakota winter descended again and cooped us all indoors.

  The changes were subtle at first. It seemed like someone was always stomping up and down the stairs just to annoy me, or knocking on the bathroom door when I needed some privacy. And day by day I began to feel more—I guess the word is territorial. I would hole up in my bedroom instead of interacting with anyone, and would squirrel all my groceries away at the back of the cabinet so no one else could eat them. I didn’t do any of this consciously, mind you. It just felt natural.

  Not long afterward, the fights started. My mother would say something completely unreasonable like, “So, do you have any plans this weekend?” I didn’t, obviously, so I’d jab back. Things would escalate, and when I finally went too far, she would actually grunt at me. Her neck would swell up, her face would flush red, and she’d unleash this guttural scream—grrrraauuugh. I’d get so sputtering angry that I couldn’t speak either. I’d clench my fists and bare my lower canines instead. I had no idea, but these were classic territorial displays.

  For his part, my brother said one day, “I have got to get out of this zoo.” So he joined a gym and started lifting, packing 30 extra pounds of muscle onto his shoulders and legs. He basically became the alpha male, the silverback gorilla of the house.

  Meanwhile, there I was, still completely oblivious to what was really going on, even as I worked my way through the book’s final section, on primate behavior. One thing this section mentioned was that primates have more complicated reactions to overcrowding than other species; they’ll sometimes withdraw from social contact, for instance. Well, funny thing: my father would often run these useless errands to his office at night, just to leave the house. Weirdly, too, my brother and I weren’t going out much, and I’d more or less become nocturnal, just to find some peace and quiet. We also grew these hideously patchy neck beards, and we probably weren’t washing our hair as often as young men should. We’d basically stopped grooming ourselves.

  In fact, I was examining my new beard in the mirror one night, fuming over some now-forgotten slight, when I realized something: that I’d reverted to a savage state, just like the cats had. The book had nailed my behavior too.

  This was a real punch in the gut. We all want to think of ourselves as independent and autonomous, as fully in charge of our behavior and emotions—but you can’t fool biology. Even worse, all I could think to do at this point was keep reading ahead in the book and see what would happen to me now. It was like finding a biography of yourself while you’re still alive—you can’t help but flip to the end.

  My epiphany had two effects on me. First, it convinced me that I really, really needed to move out before we went full feral and started flinging ungodly things at each other. Second, it helped reroute my life. If it wasn’t obvious, I’d been drifting for several years at that point, unsure what to do with myself. Hoping to maximize my unemployment prospects, I’d gotten degrees in physics and English literature in college, then decided to write. But as stupid as it sounds, it had never really occurred to me to write about science. That book changed my outlook, shifted my weltanschauung. Even more than that, it shook up my view of what science and science writing could be. Before this, I’d always approached science like a logic game or riddle. I’d solve the problem at hand and feel a little ping of pleasure when I got the right answer; it pleased me the same way a perfectly filled-out crossword puzzle did, how neat and tidy everything looked.

  This experience of science was different—very personal, very potent. I wasn’t even happy about it necessarily; the insights definitely made me uncomfortable. But I probably needed some discomfort then, and like Kant reading Hume, it did awaken me from my “dogmatic slumbers.” I wasn’t sure what exactly I wanted to write about yet, or how to start, but whatever reaction this book provoked, I wanted more of it.

  So that summer I applied for a science-writing internship in a faraway city, St. Louis, where I knew no one. And as soon as I announced plans to leave, of course, that honeymoon of family togetherness descended again. On the day I left, my parents both hugged me goodbye, hard, and as I pulled out of our driveway, I actually got choked up. Because for all that I’d hated being there, another big theme of the book, besides the aggression stuff, was that family is deeply rooted inside us. That’s as biological as anything.

  At the same time, I took comfort in something else the book told me: that in many species of primates, individuals disperse at a certain age. That is, they leave their families and join another troop somewhere. It’s never easy for them—some keep looking back every few yards, afraid to abandon all they knew. But it’s the law of the wild, and it was high time for this allegedly adult ape to strike out on his own.

  Four books and probably a million words later, here I am, still chasing that dragon. I feel immensely lucky to write about science for a living, and not only because it’s every bit as satisfying as I’d hoped back in my feral days. The truth is, this is one of the most exciting times in the history of science. Things aren’t perfect by any means. But there are more scientists making more discoveries in more places about more things than ever before, and it’s a privilege to have a front-row seat.

  Perhaps not coincidentally,
science writing itself has never been better either. There’s always been a misconception among the public that science is Vulcan, a strictly logical enterprise. In reality it’s an intensely human activity, employing the full range of both reason and emotions, of logos and pathos. And the best science writing captures all that—there’s conflict and characters and drama in these tales, a real sense of craft and storytelling. (If you don’t believe me, start reading this collection with Caitlin Kuehn’s “Of Mothers and Monkeys” and Kenneth Brower’s “The Starship or the Canoe.”) It’s always hard to judge greatness in its own time; you can look pretty foolish down the road. But damn the torpedoes: I think we’re living in an age of great science writing.

  That’s why I’m thrilled to introduce the 2018 edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Among the two dozen or so pieces here, I know you’ll find stories that make you think. I also hope you’ll find stories that move you and stories that make you laugh—even stories that, yes, make you uncomfortable. Because that’s an important part of science too: it constantly forces us to revise our beliefs, however cherished. It doesn’t give a whistle about our opinions.

  I easily could have included more. To be frank, winnowing down the 100+ nominees I received was a gigantic pain in the catookus. When the individual pieces started trickling into my inbox, I immediately opened three folders on my computer: yes, no, maybe. After finishing each one I would weigh different factors and make a decision about it (or with the maybes, decide to decide later). The only problem was, the yes folder was soon bulging ominously; I couldn’t bear to let anything go. Even with the maybes, I found myself thinking about them long after I’d finished reading—they wouldn’t leave me alone.

  In short, my filing system proved useless. I had to read half of the stories twice, a few three times, and make some excruciating decisions. So I want to thank you, science writers of the world, for two months of agony. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

  I’m sure editing BASNW is always a challenge, but this year in particular it was agonizing. Beyond just having to leave some great pieces behind, the subject matter of many of the stories is painful. And I put off writing this introduction as long as editorially possible, because there was something I dreaded having to address.

  It’s no big mystery what. There was an election in the United States in late 2016, and if you’re even bothering to pick up a book about science and/or writing, I can guess how you felt about the outcome. But no matter what your personal beliefs, the election fractured the country—or to be more accurate, deepened a longstanding fissure. Many people felt bitter and disappointed about the results, including (it’s safe to say) the majority of scientists, probably the vast majority. Two years on from the election, the shadow of that day still looms over the scientific world, and it’s been an exhausting ordeal for everyone. Those who are political wake up outraged or dispirited every day. Those who aren’t political—who simply love tramping around in forests or tinkering in the lab or teaching science to children, and who would be happy to ignore politics for the rest of their lives—suddenly can’t. I had a magazine editor tell me recently that she just couldn’t consider science stories these day: “Politics,” she said, “is sucking up all the oxygen.” That struck me as incredibly depressing. Not because I missed the chance to write a story or two—that’s small beer. What depressed me was the sentiment itself: that there wasn’t room to cover science now (or the arts, or a dozen other things) because of a few thousand ballots on a random Tuesday in a year divisible by four. Ugh.

  So that’s how things stand. Science and science writing have never been stronger, never been richer. But with the country so angry, they’re not getting the attention they deserve. So what, if anything, should a humble little anthology do in trying to capture this bizarre year?

  I sounded out friends and colleagues about this, and (fittingly) they had divided opinions. The first approach was to ignore politics completely. Create a little oasis, they said, a place free from all that crap. Science is more dignified—it will rise above, will outlast any single man or administration, no matter how coarse or ugly. Politics breve, science larga, you might say. (And there are indeed pieces this year, like John Lanchester’s “The Case Against Civilization” and Susannah Felts’s “Astonish Me,” that provide exactly this sort of cosmic perspective.)

  Other people suggested a second approach: go all-in on politics. This is a crisis for science, they argued, in fact, a crisis for the very type of open, democratic society that makes science possible. The state of the Union is too imperiled to focus on anything else. And these people have a point. The current leaders of some of the federal agencies tasked with upholding scientific standards are in no way qualified to lead those agencies, and in a few cases are actively hostile toward the agencies’ missions. Not only that but the White House seems to hold science in contempt: it took 18 months to appoint a national science adviser to help shape policy, and its proposed travel and immigration bans are threatening to keep talented young scientists out of U.S. universities for generations. (Lest you think this is all partisan carping, check out Rachel Leven’s eye-opening “A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Scott Pruitt’s Dysfunctional EPA,” wherein science advisers to Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes all criticize the current administration.)

  But filling a science anthology with nothing but political stories would be a mistake, I think. First of all, it would punish all the wonderful apolitical pieces that appeared this year. Moreover, when putting together an anthology, you aspire to something that will last, with stories that will be just as fresh and exciting 20 years from now as they are today. And one long political diatribe would almost certainly feel dated. Politics doesn’t need to dominate every thought every day.

  In the end, the selections here try to split the difference. You’ll find mostly pure science pieces, pieces that celebrate the sheer wonder of the natural world. Take Ed Yong’s “Tiny Jumping Spiders Can See the Moon,” which (to mangle Robert Frost) begins on Twitter and ends in wisdom, combining astronomy with arachnology in a way I never dreamed possible. Or take “The Detective of Northern Oddities” by Christopher Solomon, which tracks the wonderfully eclectic career of a wildlife pathologist in rural Alaska. Another piece, “Fantastic Beasts and How to Rank Them” by Kathryn Schulz, trucks exclusively in mythical creatures like Bigfoot and Nessie, and tries to understand why some seem more plausible to us than others. In doing so, she reveals more than you’d ever imagine about how your own mind works. I think science writers have a built-in advantage over writers who cover other topics, in that our domain has already touched nearly every human being at some point. Every child has been captivated by a wild animal, or stared up at the night sky and said wow. (In comparison, how many of us have ever been moved, even slightly, by a theorem in economics?) Stories like these tap into that latent wonder and show us our best scientific selves.

  Other pieces here are more intentionally uncomfortable—if no less smart, hard-nosed, and well-written. Some pieces take on big, structural problems in society. Even before #MeToo, the scientific community had been rocked by a number of sexual-assault scandals, and Kayla Webley Adler’s “Female Scientists Report a Horrifying Culture of Sexual Assault” uses several personal stories to evoke the hell some women endure during their careers, simply for pursuing something they love. But as serious as the human challenges are, we can’t lose track of the devastating toll our activities are taking on the environment. In “Firestorm,” Douglas Fox explores the astonishing science behind a forest inferno and reveals just how brittle many of our western landscapes have become. And in a more fanciful vein, “Pleistocene Park” by Ross Andersen discusses the prospects of resurrecting a long-lost grassland in Siberia, complete with lab-grown woolly mammoths, in an effort to stem destructive climate change.

  Still, while there’s plenty of cause for concern out there, on land and air and sea, not all the activist stories here are doom and gloom. One of the most bracing,
a nonpartisan plea on “The Irreversible Momentum of Clean Energy,” comes from the pen of one Barack Obama. He’s still somewhat better known in fields beyond science writing, but I thought we all could use a little hope.

  There’s one more thing I want to mention—a sort of third way to address the state of science nowadays. We currently live in an era of Big Science. Papers on the results of large medical trials can have hundreds of authors. Genome-sequencing papers might have thousands. The peak of “hyperauthorship” so far, a paper pinning down the mass of the Higgs boson, required 24 full pages (of 33 total) simply to list all 5,154 contributors.

  But scientists have never come together before and spoken with one voice quite like they did in April 2017, during the March for Science in Washington, D.C., and 600 other locations worldwide. All told, the protests drew an estimated 1.07 million men and women—some truly big-ass science. The movement even garnered cross-species support, with the five-bird “March of the Penguins for Science” at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. (The video is every bit as adorable as you’d think.)

  To be sure, the marches were controversial in some circles, and some observers wondered whether holding them was even a good idea. After all, perhaps the greatest power of science is its air, even aura, of objectivity. There’s no such thing as a truly objective individual, of course, but science as a whole—the collective work of many, many individuals—is still the best tool for getting at the truth we’ve ever devised. It took centuries to build up that aura, and there’s a risk of losing it, of becoming just another political faction, when scientists take to the streets.