Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature
David Quammen
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 0393333604
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"David Quammen is simply the best natural essayist working today."--Tim Cahill, author of Lost in My Own Backyard
"Lively writing about science and nature depends less on the offering of good answers, I think, than on the offering of good questions," said David Quammen in the original introduction to Natural Acts. For more than two decades, he has stuck to that credo. In this updated version of curiosity leads him from New Mexico to Romania, from the Congo to the Amazon, asking questions about mosquitoes (what are their redeeming merits?), dinosaurs (how did they change the life of a dyslexic Vietnam vet?), and cloning (can it save endangered species?).
This revised and expanded edition best-loved "Natural Acts" columns, which first appeared in Outside magazine in the early 1980s, and includes recent pieces such as "Planet of Weeds," an influential new Natural Acts is an eye-opening journey that will please both Quammen fans and newcomers to his work.
Russian. Knows almost nothing about computers. Unlike Leakey, Horner did not even have the advantage of famous scientist parents; his family owned a gravel-and-concrete business in Shelby, Montana. Horner is simply a brilliant and dogged bone-hunter, a field man, a natural, with a keen brain for imagining the ecological particulars of an age 70 million years gone. He has a nose for fossils and a head full of provocative ideas. On a bare hillside not far from the Teton River in northwestern
New Zealand imported British red deer; European brown trout and coastal rainbows were planted in disregard of the native cutthroat trout of Rocky Mountain rivers. Prickly-pear cactus, rabbits, and cane toads were inadvisedly welcomed to Australia. Goats went wild in the Galápagos. The bacteria that cause bubonic plague journeyed from China to Europe by way of fleas, rats, Mongolian horsemen, and sailing ships, and eventually traveled also to California. The Atlantic sea lamprey found its own way
again later. Crows using twenty-three distinct forms of call to communicate various kinds of information to one another. Crows in flight dropping clams or walnuts on highway pavement, to break open the shells so the meats can be eaten. Then there’s the one about the hooded crow, a species whose range includes Finland: “In this land Hoodies show great initiative during winter when men fish through holes in the ice. Fishermen leave baited lines in the water to catch fish and on their return they
I’m awake in my tent, preparing for the day’s walk by duct-taping over the sores and raw spots on my toes, ankles, and heels. To travel the way Mike Fay travels is hard on the feet, even hard on his feet, not because of the distance he walks but because of where and how. After a week of crossing swamps and stream channels behind him, I’ve long since converted to Fay’s notion of the optimal trail outfit—river sandals, shorts, one T-shirt that can be rinsed and dried. But the problem of foot care
his time bent at the waist, crouching through Mambeleme’s tunnel. He learned to summon a Zenlike state of self-control, patience, humility. The alternative was to start hating every stem of this Marantaceae hell, regretting he had ever blundered into it—and along that route a person might go completely nuts. Mambeleme and the other Pygmies had their own form of Zenlike accommodation. “Eyali djama,” they would say. “Njamba eyaliboyé.” That’s the forest. That’s the way it is. But this wasn’t the