Category: Nature and Environment book group

Wonderful read for the Nature and Environment book group. The language is sometimes a little precious: hippocampus described as “this whiff of tissue”; “a glister of goldfinches”; “a twitch of birders.”

I looked up:

• gökotta – Swedish tradition of getting up early to hear the first birdsong
• kagu (Rhynochetos jubatus) – rare flightless New Caledonian bird
• pigeons are better at the Monty Hall problem than humans
• Cuba uses pigeons to transmit election results from remote mountainous areas
• “in each of a bird’s cone cells is a drop of colored oil that enhances its ability to detect differences between similar colors”
• I was very surprised to hear that house sparrow populations are declining around the world. You wouldn’t know it around here – they thrive!

Short quotes / facts:

• “sexy” syllable: “when a male bird uses his syrinx to sing with two different voices at once”
• A pet monk parakeet “obligingly sat on my shoulder and periodically leaned in to my ear to say, ‘Whisper, whisper, whisper.'”
• “chickadees use their calls like language, complete with syntax that can generate an open-ended number of unique call types” (for example, the number of “dees” indicates the size of an approaching predator – more for smaller, hence more dangerous, predators)
• “A frigate bird with a seven-foot wingspan has a skeleton that weighs less than its feathers”
• mockingbird imitating a canary but not able to deliver the notes as rapidly “clusters the notes and pauses to breathe while still maintaining identical song length”; they regularly imitate as many as 200 different songs
• Quote from the New Yorker so most likely too good to be true: “after weeks of silence, the first words uttered by a Westchester parakeet were, ‘Talk, damn you, talk!’”
• Bowerbirds take seven years to mature, which correlates with their intelligence (learned a lot about them in Evolution of Beauty); females evaluate males in a way “very similar to a search for job candidates” (brief visit, then longer for the finalists)
• white-crowned sparrow flock: “each a single feathered ounce of fortitude”
• “Twilight is a rich source of information for navigating animals of all types. It’s the only period in the day when birds and other animals can combine light-polarization patterns, stars, and magnetic cues.”
• Complexity of mapping/relating odors could have driven the ability to remember relationships between unrelated elements: “for example, the scent of a certain mineral or tree and the direction toward home”
• In some cities, sparrows use cigarette butts in their nests for their ability to repel parasites
• Quoting Richard F. Johnston: “Everything that is is adaptive.”
• “A new study … suggests that, genetically speaking, the turkey is closer to its dinosaur ancestors than any other bird is; its chromosomes have undergone fewer changes than other birds since the days of feathered dinosaurs.”
• Interesting behaviors: crows and others dunking food, skuas stealing milk from lactating seals

Longer quotes

Newborn chicks spatially “map” numbers from left to right, as most humans do (left means less; right means more). This suggests that birds share with us a left-to-right orientation system—a cognitive strategy that underlies our human capacity for higher mathematics. Baby birds can also understand proportion and can learn to choose a target from an array of objects on the basis of its ordinal position (third, eighth, ninth). They can do simple arithmetic, as well, such as addition and subtraction.

Like the black-billed cuckoo a friend saw perched just above a nest of tent caterpillars: The cuckoo waited as the caterpillars climbed out of the nest to scale the tree, then plucked them off one at a time, like sushi from a conveyor belt.

Closely-related birds, the Bajan bullfinch and the black-faced grassquit:

“These two birds are virtual genetic twins with the same ancestor, having diverged probably only a couple of million years ago,” Lefebvre explains. “Both live in the same environment. Both are territorial and share the same social system.” The only difference is that the bullfinch is clever, fearless, and opportunistic; and the grassquit, skittish, deeply conservative, and afraid of nearly everything. … [A grad student] has measured the speed at which the two species will feed from an open cup of seed. The bullfinches find the novel food source in about five seconds, she says. It takes the grassquits five days. “A yogurt top filled with seeds is just too odd for them.”

Quote by naturalist Edmond Selous about flocking birds:

“They circle; now dense like a polished roof, now disseminated like the meshes of some vast all-heaven-sweeping net, now darkening, now flashing out a million rays of light . . . a madness in the sky,” he wrote. “They must think collectively, all at the same time, or at least in streaks or patches—a square yard or so of an idea, a flash out of so many brains.”

An award for nest-building brilliance should go to the long-tailed tit, a common relative of the chickadee that lives in Europe and Asia. Its nest is a flexible bag composed of small-leaved mosses that form hooks, which are woven together with the silk loops of fluffy spider egg cocoons to create a kind of “Velcro.” The little birds work to line the inside of the bag with thousands of small insulating feathers and cover the outside with thousands of small lichen flakes for camouflage, creating a structure made of roughly six thousand separate pieces.

Is there something special in the cognitive toolkits of house sparrows and their like—pigeons, turtledoves, and other so-called synanthropes drawn to settle near humans—a set of mental skills that allows them to thrive in a place no matter how altered or degraded it may be?

Most vertebrates are either fearful of strange objects or indifferent to them. But newfangledness of most kinds doesn’t seem to faze a house sparrow. When Lynn Martin of the University of South Florida, Tampa, tested the sparrow’s tolerance for novel objects such as a rubber ball and a toy plastic lizard by placing them near seed-filled feeding cups, he discovered a surprise. The house sparrows were not only unperturbed by the strange objects, they actually seemed drawn to them—happier to approach the seed-filled dishes when ball or lizard was present. Martin noted that this was the first record of a novel object actually being attractive to a vertebrate (apart from man).

If you’re going to invade a new place, a love of novelty helps.

So does a fondness for hanging out in groups.

But later Daniel Sol explains in the case of Carib grackles:

“Bolder individuals tend to explore more quickly but more superficially, … the slower explorers gain better information and use this to act with more flexibility.”

Nature and Enviro selection. Fishman reached out to Forbes and we had a very enjoyable Skype session with him at the end of the meeting. We asked about what’s changed since 2011 and he shared a few more great win-win stories. He plugged his new book, One Giant Leap, with a compelling tie-in to climate change.

There are a lot of numbers – audio book listeners complained – and it was a bit repetitive, but overall I really liked it and it made an interesting comparison to When the Rivers Run Dry, which we read in 2018.

In this book I learned

• “Fit-for-purpose water” – just clean enough (e.g., use gray water on golf courses)
• It’s a location problem – we don’t have less water, it’s in different places, and saving it here doesn’t necessarily help over there
• Lots of success stories and win-win: “Americans in 2005 used less water per person than they did in 1955” (of how many other resources is that true?) “Business is actually ahead of politics, and ahead of popular awareness” – so much money to be saved
• “Caustics” – the wonderful word for “the shapes of shifting light water makes on the bottom of a swimming pool”
• Space water! Space is full of it! “There is enough water being formed [in the Orion Molecular Cloud] sufficient to fill all of the Earth’s oceans every twenty-four minutes.”
• The fourth state of water! Incorporated in hydrous minerals like serpentine – of 200 lbs of serpentine, 22 is H2O
• Ultra-pure water, used to clean semiconductors, is “not just regarded as an industrial solvent, but … considered akin to a poison. … UPW is ‘hungry’ – it will leach molecules right out of your body tissues.”
• OMG the crazy situation of Atlanta’s water supply from Lake Lanier. At publication time (2011) it wasn’t resolved, so I flagged it to look up. Summer 2019: still not resolved!!! Revisiting this to finish and publish in January 2025: the case was dismissed in August 2021. Only 11 years…
• Water service levels have gone backwards in India – most major cities had 24/7 water in 1947, but now “That level of service, and more important, the expectation of that level of service, has slipped away”
• Lack of water means girls are more likely to stop going to school once menstruation begins!
• Insane amount of pollution in the Yamuna river: “One eyedropper of Yamuna River water is enough to make six bathtubs of water unsafe to sit in. Says the CSE report, ‘The river is unfit for any human purpose.'”
• I want to see a WET fountain, like the one at the Bellagio!

Things I’d already thought about that he expressed really well:

• the ridiculousness of paying for bottled water. “Ten gallons of tap water, at home, costs on average 3 pennies. … We happily pay three thousand times that price at the convenience store … But when the water bill goes from $30 to $34 a month, customers react as if they’ll have to choose between their prescription drugs and their water service.” “Bottled water undermines our financial and civic commitment to a reliable public water system.” “It is easier for the typical American living in Beverly Hills or Miami or Manhattan to get a drink of safe, pure, refreshing Fijian water than it is for most people in Fiji.” Many of us in the group didn’t realize it was more than just marketing, that the water actually comes from freakin’ Fiji. WTF!

Given that water is both the most familiar substance in our lives, and the most important substance in our lives, the really astonishing thing is that most of us don’t think of ourselves as having a relationship to water. It’s perfectly natural to talk about our relationship to our car or our relationship to food, our relationship to alcohol, or money, or God.

But water has achieved an invisibility in our lives that is only more remarkable given how central it is. Water used to be part of the rhythm and motivation of daily life, and there are plenty of places, including farms and whole swaths of the developing world, where it still is.

But in the United States and the developed world, we’ve spent the last hundred years in a kind of aquatic paradise: our water has been abundant, safe, and cheap.

Water is tirelessly resilient. Water participates in a mind-bending array of physical, chemical, biochemical, geological, and human-created processes every minute of the day—water is essential to creating soup and computer servers, it drives both hurricanes and erosion, it is the essential element in human beings maintaining our body temperature at 98.6 degrees—and yet water emerges from every one of those processes intact, undamaged, unchanged, ready to make a fresh cloud or a fresh drop of sweat, an iceberg or a jellyfish, as the occasion requires.

Water’s indestructibility, its reusability, will be vital as we confront an era where water scarcity becomes more common. Water itself isn’t becoming more scare, it’s simply disappearing from places where people have become accustomed to finding it—where they have built communities assuming a certain availability of water—and reappearing somewhere else.

We want a comforting mental and physical distance between the last time our water was dirty and the moment we use it to stir up a pitcher of ice tea. It’s easy for water professionals who live every day of their careers with the reality that while there is plenty of pure water, there is no fresh water—our water was Tyrannosaurus rex pee and dirty snow at some point, because there is no other water. For ordinary people, though, our consciousness of water doesn’t even include a willful forgetting about its source, as it does with the hamburger. We really don’t know where our water comes from, just that it needs to be “fresh” when we fill the ice cube tray.s

In any meaningful measure of reality, there was nothing in the purified water but water. In scientific terms, there were some molecules of other stuff.

But the difference between “nothing” and “virtually nothing” is the difference between security and anxiety. In a heated political campaign, it’s the difference between trust and suspicion.

One of the legacies of scaling an economy to abundant water is that when the abundance disappears, it turns out we not only don’t have the water, we don’t have a water system that can adapt to scarcity.

One of the interesting things about water is that it is one of those rare areas where the gold standard of service and the basic level of service are the same thing: Water should be provided twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in pipes that keep it clean and safe.

Water poverty doesn’t just mean your hands are dirty, or you can’t wash your clothes, or you are often thirsty. Water poverty may mean you never learn to read, it means you get sick more often than you should, it means you and your children are hungry. Water poverty traps you in a primitive day-to-day struggle. Water poverty is, quite literally, de-civilizing.

Water issues, in particular, are often made worse when everyone operates independently—all those pumps sucking water from mains in Delhi and Hyderabad and Bangalore make everyone’s water dirty. The collective solution is usually cheaper, more efficient, less wasteful, and better for the fate of the water itself. Money and technology are often not the best solutions to water issues—rainwater harvesting is simple, low-tech, and it’s a lot easier and less expensive than finding new sources of water.

When you think about the qualities of water that are so appealing—the energy, the playfulness, the adaptability, the variety of mood, the artistry, and also the sheer everyday usefulness—what’s striking is how much the personality of water mirrors our own personality as people.

Nature and Environment selection. We had a good discussion about it—generally we thought that it was somewhat of a slog to read because the details were inherently dry, but that it explained a lot about the sources of the media and public opinion problems we have with scientific information.

I didn’t realize how early the dangers of tobacco were recognized: “German scientists had shown in the 1930s that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer, and the Nazi government had run major antismoking campaigns; Adolf Hitler forbade smoking in his presence. However, the German scientific work was tainted by its Nazi associations, and to some extent ignored, if not actually suppressed, after the war.” Or that the discovery of ozone depletion by CFCs was accidental—the original concern was that super-sonic flights would disrupt the troposphere.

Here’s an early ID of the “just asking questions” strategy: “you could create the impression of controversy simply by asking questions, even if you actually knew the answers and they didn’t help your case.” The authors highlight the problem with the Fairness Doctrine (1949) and journalistic balance: “Balance was interpreted, it seems, as giving equal weight to both sides, rather than giving accurate weight to both sides.” And the consistent pattern of “scientific claims” (or retractions/corrections) “being published in scientific journals, where only scientists would read them, but unscientific claims were being published in the mass media.”

I didn’t know how unbalanced the money was! “The American Cancer Society and American Lung Association in 1981 devoted just under $300,000 to research; that same year, the tobacco industry gave $6.3 million.”

The biggest shocker for me was how much distortion was driven by just a couple of men (Frederick Seitz, Fred Singer), and the personal reasons (grudges, slighted feelings, rabid anti-communism, and of course greed and ego) that primed them to lead the charge against public heath and safety. Zinger on Singer: “For a man who worried enormously about scientific uncertainties, he was remarkably untroubled by economic ones.” And “his skepticism also gained him a huge amount of attention—far more than most scientists ever get for their research, quietly published in academic journals. So if scientists should be discredited for getting money for their research, or for enjoying the limelight, the same argument would logically apply to Singer.”

I didn’t know that “since nuclear weapon cores decay over time and lose their explosive capacity, any agreement to stop building new ones was, in effect, an agreement to disarm.” Or that the tobacco industry investigated avoiding the second-hand smoke issue by making the smoke “simply less visible“!

Useful term I’ve learned before but forgotten: hormesis (low dose good, high dose bad), but in a weird context: critics claiming that maybe small amounts of second-hand smoke or radiation were good.

Well-researched non-fiction books typically collect interesting quotes from other sources that are often the highlights for me—even from books I’ve read myself. For example, I’m pretty sure I’ve read C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves—if not, I want to—but don’t remember this great analysis of conspiracy-theory argument: “the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden.” Similarly, a funny anecdote about Lord Harris, the architect of Thatcherism who venerated Adam Smith: “he declined a coat of arms on the grounds that the invisible hand could not be blazoned.” And Isaiah Berlin saying “liberty for wolves means death to lambs.” (Given that he’s the hedgehog/fox person, I wonder how many other mammal analogies he made?)

Describing the global warming that’s already committed: “‘sentenced’ might be a better word.” Arguments against trying to fix climate change: “It was equivalent to arguing that medical researchers shouldn’t try to cure cancer, because that would be too expensive, and in any case people in the future might decide that dying from cancer is not so bad.”

I’m looking forward to reading Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet; the same philosophical contrast is described here as that between Cornucopians and neo-Malthusians.

Free market fundamentalism:

 The idea that free markets produce optimum allocation of resources depends on participants having perfect information. But one of several ironies of our story is that our protagonists did everything in their power to ensure that the American people did not have good (much less perfect) information on crucial issues. Our protagonists, while ostensibly defending free markets, distorted the marketplace of ideas in the service of political goals and commercial interests. The American belief in fairness and the importance of hearing “both sides” was used and abused by people who didn’t want to admit the truth about the impacts of industrial capitalism.

One leading scientist said about the 1983 report, Changing Climate, “We knew it was garbage, so we just ignored it.” Unfortunately, garbage doesn’t just go away. Someone has to deal with it, and that someone is all of us: journalists who report scientific findings, specialist professional bodies who represent the scientific fields, and all of us as citizens.

It especially does not make sense to dismiss the consensus of experts if the dissenter is superannuated, disgruntled, a habitual contrarian, or in the pay of a group with an obvious ideological agenda or vested political or economic interest. Or in some cases, all of the above.

Or an opinionated amateur!

In this book I learned about

• “Species cleansing” (eradication, e.g. of rats)
• Mouse invasion in 1927 Kern County (California), after coyotes and hawks had been eliminated, which “left highways grossly slick, and ultimately undriveable, after traffic flattened unbelievable swarms of mice”
• Scapegoating coyotes after the wolves were gone
• The Coyote’s Lament (Disney, 1961)

Legendary federal coyote nemesis Stanley Young characterized the animal as the Biological Survey’s most frustrating opponent, an enemy members of the agency actually lumped in with fascism as a threat to the American Way.

Most predators are either solitary or social, not both. But like us, the coyote gets to have it both ways.

Coyote power: surviving by one’s intelligence and wits when others cannot; embracing existence in a mad, dancing, laughing, sympathetic expression of pure joy at evading the grimmest of fates; exulting in sheer aliveness; recognizing our shortcomings with rueful chagrin. These are the values Old Man America has embodied for thousands of years.

In my view the coyote’s howl is the original national anthem of North America … [but] The coyote’s cry, for many Americans riveted by the sound, did not intone the ballad of the continent—America’s ancient native song—that some of us hear today. …

A sense that so much about North America was strange and frightening and that we ought to terraform and remake it extended to every element of continental ecology, from grasses to animals of all kinds. But in truth, almost no other creature reaped the whirlwind of condescension and hostility toward “alien” American nature in quite the way coyotes did. We campaigned to erase those “manic, lunatic” howls for all time and good riddance. And even as evidence mounted of the wrongheadedness and futility of that course, we spent more than half a century in furious pursuit of it.

Chemists and researchers in the Eradication Methods Laboratory [making strychnine and other poisons in huge volume], with government jobs and benefits, presumably realized the American Dream in the 1920s, buying houses, automobiles, radios, and washing machines, all the latest technologies of the decade. Their products, meanwhile, destroyed America’s wild animals, the foundations of an ecology that 20,000 years of evolution had perfected, as if their victims were of no consequence whatsoever.

[Ernest Thompson] Seton has taken his licks across the years as a fellow traveler of the “Nature Faker” writers of the early twentieth century … One critic of Seton’s book Animals I Have Known even wrote, sarcastically, that its proper title ought to have been Animals I Alone Have Known.

The average coyote litter size is 5.7 pups, but that number can range from as low as 2 to as high as 19. The reason for such variability is that coyotes possess an autogenic trait that allows them to assess the ecological possibilities around them. If not persecuted, they saturate a landscape to carrying capacity, then usually have small litters that produce only a couple of surviving pups. But if they sense a suppressed coyote population relative to available resources, they give birth to very large littlers. The coyote’s yipping howl … has several functions, one very important one of which is to assess the size of the surrounding coyote population.

[Olaus] Murie knew that once, in his Yellowstone research, his brother had stood rapt, watching a coyote trot along a trail with a sprig of sagebrush in its mouth. At repeated intervals it had tossed the sprig joyously into the air, caught it, then trotted on. Why had so many in the [Bureau of Biological Survey], without any science to back them up, so hated an animal that took that kind of pleasure in being alive in the world? Why had they encouraged hatred for coyotes among the public? It was not an attitude or a culture Olaus cared to be associated with. He ended up leaving the bureau for the Wilderness Society.

“Biocentrism” in one sense was actually evolutionary. It implied yet another extension of the circle of ethical treatment that had begun long ago in human affairs, when we first moved beyond kinship and our own genetics and granted rights to others outside our families.

.Acme’s overconfidence rivaled that of the Coyote. In these classic cartoons the promise of the technological fix took the form of Acme Jet-Propelled Roller Skates, an Acme Batman Outfit, Acme Leg Muscle Vitamins, and the Acme Burmese Tiger Trap, so many mad-genius devices of pursuit that today an online poster … totals up more than one hundred of them. In iconic, American style, Wile E. trusted every one of those contraptions naively, optimistically, wonderfully. A corporation offers it for sale? Then of course it’s going to work!

Nature and Environment Book Group selection. Wow, so this I think is the first time I’m writing a second post about the same book. First one was in 2004—when it was new!—and I’m not going to look back at it until I’m done with this one. I love Bryson, and this book is the finest thing he ever did IMO, so this is probably just going to be a great big bag o’ quotes. [I wrote this in 2018 but am finishing and back-dating it in 2023, when I have long given up on doing anything but a big bag o’ quotes; I’ve left in my 2018 attempts to contextualize the quotes, so this is a bit of a mish-mash.]

Yay, first dinosaur tracks discovered very near here—little did I know when first I read, etc. Although it’s interesting that Bryson calls him “Plinus Moody” (Plinius, Pliny for short appears to be the correct spelling)—I think of Bryson’s fact-checking as being good, but what do I know? Hmm, and he calls U. anceps “Unitatheres anceps” whereas it’s Unitathereium anceps, with “Unitatheres” being the plural for the genus (context is about the rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope and Othaniel Charles Marsh: “Between them they managed to ‘discover’ a species called Uintatheres anceps no fewer than twenty-two times.”

In this book I learned

• The Moon’s gravitational influence keeps the Earth spinning smoothly; otherwise, according to Bryson, it “would wobble like a dying top.”
• Like in Winter World, we’re reminded how important it is for life on earth that ice is less dense than water. Bryson quotes John Gribbin saying that’s “an utterly bizarre property.”
• I keep forgetting that there are living stromatolites in Australia—I want to see them! “It is a curiously giddying moment to find yourself staring at living remnants of Earth as it was 3.5 billion years ago.” But apparently in the Bahamas as well?
• “It has been estimated that less than one species in ten thousand has made it into the fossil record.”
• But hurray, Bryson (and everyone) was wrong to think that the brain cells we are born with are “all you are ever going to get.”

Short quotes

• Peter Medawar: a virus is “a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news”
• David Raup: “To a first approximation, all species are extinct.”
• “Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.”
• “Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.”
• Charles Lyell: “His other slight peculiarity was the habit, when distracted by thought, of taking up improbable positions on furniture—lying across two chairs at once or ‘resting his head on the seat of a chair, while standing up’ (to quote his friend Darwin). Often when lost in thought he would slink so low in a chair that his buttocks would all but touch the floor.”
• “Right up to the closing years of the eighteenth century (and in Priestley’s case a little beyond) scientists everywhere searched for, and sometimes believed they had actually found, things that just weren’t there: vitiated airs, dephlogisticated marine acids, phloxes, calxes, terraqueous exhalations, and, above all, phlogiston, the substance that was thought to be the active agent in combustion.”
• “’Young man,’ Enrico Fermi replied when a student asked him the name of a particular particle, ‘if I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist.’”
• “There was so much unrecognized novelty in the [Burgess Shale] collection that at one point upon opening a new drawer Conway Morris famously was heard to mutter, ‘Oh fuck, not another phylum.’”
• “For random events to produce even a single protein would seem a stunning improbability—like a whirlwind spinning through a junkyard and leaving behind a fully assembled jumbo jet, in the colorful simile of the astronomer Fred Hoyle.”
• “Indeed, some organisms that we think of as primitive enjoy a level of cellular organization that makes our own look carelessly pedestrian. Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again.”
• “Remarkably, we are even quite closely related to fruit and vegetables. About half the chemical functions that take place in a banana are fundamentally the same as the chemical functions that take place in you.
  It cannot be said too often: all life is one. That is, and I suspect will forever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is.”

Longer quotes

Reverend Robert Evans, supernova finder:

To understand what a feat this is, imagine a standard dining room table covered in a black tablecloth and someone throwing a handful of salt across it. The scattered grains can be thought of as a galaxy. Now imagine fifteen hundred more tables like the first one—enough to fill a Wal-Mart parking lot, say, or to make a single line two miles long—each with a random array of salt across it. Now add one grain of salt to any table and let Bob Evans walk among them. At a glance he will spot it. That grain of salt is the supernova.

What Michelson and Morley did, without actually intending to, was undermine a longstanding belief in something called the luminiferous ether, a stable, invisible, weightless, frictionless, and unfortunately wholly imaginary medium that was thought to permeate the universe. Conceived by Descartes, embraced by Newton, and venerated by nearly everyone ever since, the ether held a position of absolute centrality in nineteenth-century physics as a way of explaining how light traveled across the emptiness of space. It was especially needed in the 1800s because light and electromagnetism were now seen as waves, which is to say types of vibrations. Vibrations must occur in something; hence the need for, and lasting devotion to, an ether. As late as 1909, the great British physicist J. J. Thomson was insisting: “The ether is not a fantastic creation of the speculative philosopher; it is as essential to us as the air we breathe”—this more than four years after it was pretty incontestably established that it didn’t exist. People, in short, were really attached to the ether.

The part I remembered most vividly from my first reading, which I’ve come across in other articles since, is the Yellowstone supervolcano.

Beneath the surface is a magma chamber that is about forty-five miles across—roughly the same dimensions as the park—and about eight miles thick at its thickest point. Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of.

That second sentence is peak Bryson—a concrete, memorable image, contrasted with the mundane and comical “shuffling around on top of.”

Now I’m reading McKibben’s The End of Nature, which also emphasizes what I keep forgetting and re-learning: how horizontal our notion of distance and how shallow our livable space on the globe is. McKibben talked about the up, the atmosphere; Bryson is memorable on the down:

Without assistance, the deepest anyone has gone and lived to talk about it afterward was an Italian named Umberto Pelizzari, who in 1992 dove to a depth of 236 feet, lingered for a nanosecond, and then shot back to the surface. In terrestrial terms, 236 feet is just slightly over the length of one New York City block. So even in our most exuberant stunts we can hardly claim to be masters of the abyss.

And also (granted this is going on two decades ago, but I bet we aren’t much further along):

There are still no submersibles that can go anywhere near the depth of the Mariana Trench and only five, including Alvin, that can reach the depths of the “abyssal plain”—the deep ocean floor—that covers more than half the planet’s surface. A typical submersible costs about $25,000 a day to operate, so they are hardly dropped into the water on a whim, still less put to sea in the hope that they will randomly stumble on something of interest. It’s rather as if our firsthand experience of the surface world were based on the work of five guys exploring on garden tractors after dark. According to Robert Kunzig, humans may have scrutinized “perhaps a millionth or a billionth of the sea’s darkness. Maybe less. Maybe much less.”

“Five guys on garden tractors”—perfect. And a few pages later, “We are astoundingly, sumptuously, radiantly ignorant of life beneath the seas.”

As you might expect, oxygen is our most abundant element, accounting for just under 50 percent of the Earth’s crust, but after that the relative abundances are often surprising. Who would guess, for instance, that silicon is the second most common element on Earth or that titanium is tenth? Abundance has little to do with their familiarity or utility to us. Many of the more obscure elements are actually more common than the better-known ones. There is more cerium on Earth than copper, more neodymium and lanthanum than cobalt or nitrogen. Tin barely makes it into the top fifty, eclipsed by such relative obscurities as praseodymium, samarium, gadolinium, and dysprosium.

We couldn’t live for two minutes without them, yet even after a billion years mitochondria behave as if they think things might not work out between us. They maintain their own DNA. They reproduce at a different time from their host cell. They look like bacteria, divide like bacteria, and sometimes respond to antibiotics in the way bacteria do. In short, they keep their bags packed. They don’t even speak the same genetic language as the cell in which they live. It is like having a stranger in your house, but one who has been there for a billion years.

Bacteria can be exasperatingly difficult to isolate and study. Only about 1 percent will grow in culture. Considering how wildly adaptable they are in nature, it is an odd fact that the one place they seem not to wish to live is a petri dish. Plop them on a bed of agar and pamper them as you will, and most will just lie there, declining every inducement to bloom. Any bacterium that thrives in a lab is by definition exceptional, and yet these were, almost exclusively, the organisms studied by microbiologists. It was, said Woese, “like learning about animals from visiting zoos.”

Every cell in nature is a thing of wonder. Even the simplest are far beyond the limits of human ingenuity. To build the most basic yeast cell, for example, you would have to miniaturize about the same number of components as are found in a Boeing 777 jetliner and fit them into a sphere just five microns across; then somehow you would have to persuade that sphere to reproduce.

If you could visit a cell, you wouldn’t like it. Blown up to a scale at which atoms were about the size of peas, a cell itself would be a sphere roughly half a mile across, and supported by a complex framework of girders called the cytoskeleton. Within it, millions upon millions of objects—some the size of basketballs, others the size of cars—would whiz about like bullets. There wouldn’t be a place you could stand without being pummeled and ripped thousands of times every second from every direction. Even for its full-time occupants the inside of a cell is a hazardous place. Each strand of DNA is on average attacked or damaged once every 8.4 seconds—ten thousand times in a day—by chemicals and other agents that whack into or carelessly slice through it, and each of these wounds must be swiftly stitched up if the cell is not to perish.

The proteins are especially lively, spinning, pulsating, and flying into each other up to a billion times a second. Enzymes, themselves a type of protein, dash everywhere, performing up to a thousand tasks a second. Like greatly speeded up worker ants, they busily build and rebuild molecules, hauling a piece off this one, adding a piece to that one. Some monitor passing proteins and mark with a chemical those that are irreparably damaged or flawed. Once so selected, the doomed proteins proceed to a structure called a proteasome, where they are stripped down and their components used to build new proteins. Some types of protein exist for less than half an hour; others survive for weeks. But all lead existences that are inconceivably frenzied. As de Duve notes, “The molecular world must necessarily remain entirely beyond the powers of our imagination owing to the incredible speed with which things happen in it.”

But it is worth remembering, before we move on, that all of these evolutionary jostlings over five million years, from distant, puzzled australopithecine to fully modern human, produced a creature that is still 98.4 percent genetically indistinguishable from the modern chimpanzee. There is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world.

I mostly trust Bryson’s research, but here’s a case where I think he twisted something to fit a narrative. In talking about collectors who killed and pushed to extinction the species they supposedly loved, he says, “In 1907 when a well-known collector named Alanson Bryan realized that he had shot the last three specimens of black mamos, a species of forest bird that had only been discovered the previous decade, he noted that the news filled him with ‘joy.'” I remember this striking me as odd in previous readings, so I looked it up. This is not a primary source, but it appears he wrote: ” To my joy I found the mangled remains” [of the bird he had shot and couldn’t find], so the joy, awful as it is, isn’t about the extinction per se. It’s possible someone like Bryan may not even have believed in extinction, right? But Bryson is leading up to this powerful ending, worth quoting almost in full:

I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn’t choose human beings for the job.

But here’s an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
Because we are so remarkably careless about looking after things, both when alive and when not, we have no idea—really none at all—about how many things have died off permanently, or may soon, or may never, and what role we have played in any part of the process. …

The fact is, we don’t know. Don’t have any idea. We don’t know when we started doing many of the things we’ve done. We don’t know what we are doing right now or how our present actions will affect the future. What we do know is that there is only one planet to do it on, and only one species of being capable of making a considered difference. Edward O. Wilson expressed it with unimprovable brevity in The Diversity of Life: “One planet, one experiment.”

If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here—and by “we” I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.

We have arrived at this position of eminence in a stunningly short time. Behaviorally modern human beings—that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities—have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth’s history. But surviving for even that little while has required a nearly endless string of good fortune.

We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks.

Alas, the Nature and Environment book group didn’t think much of this book. There’s a revised edition coming out soon (August 2018), but unless it’s completely rewritten and restructured, it’s going to have some of the same failings; its age was only part of the problem.

I learned a lot of interesting but somewhat disconnected things. No notes! No bibliography!

Like many books about water, there’s a lot of focus on waste. At the end of chapter 26 Pearce finally addresses what happens if everyone “saves” water: “…in many river basins, most of the ‘wasted’ water would actually have moved on through the water cycle, either returning to rivers, from where someone downstream would capture it, or percolating underground, from where the same farmer or his neighbor might later pump it back to the surface.” Nothing on fracking, unfortunately.

In this book I learned

• “Salt cedar, also known as tamarisk, is a nasty and extremely tough shrub, able to withstand fire and drought, flood and searing desert heat. A single plant can drink more than 265 gallons of water a day.”
• Treaties and laws can “allocate more water than actually exists”
• Green revolution crops need more water (kind of makes sense!)
• Mining fossil water described as “farming water” (see quote about Tirupur, below) – classic tragedy of the commons
• dairy “white revolution” in Gujarat: “two districts alone are exporting from the state 1.2 million acre-feet of virtual water a year in the form of milk”
• Libya’s “Great Manmade River”
• arsenic and fluoride (naturally occurring) can make groundwater poisonous
• dams are incredibly inefficient, turning fertile floodplains into dust bowls
• Naga fireballs in the Mekong
• Qanats and ab-anbars – amazing! I want to visit one!
• The history of the Salton Sea encapsulates many of the mistakes people make in trying to control water
• “[The Bon Om Touk] festival has taken place since the twelfth century, always at the full moon in late October or early November. It is a celebration of one extraordinary fact about the river on which it takes place. The Tonle Sap is one of the few rivers in the world that reverses its flow. It does it every year, right in front of the palace.” (Phnom Penh, Cambodia)
• Sussex dew ponds: they use a ‘secret process’ to insulate the clay bottom. “The straw insulated the clay, keeping it colder than the soil beneath at night. The stones, which shed heat quickly at night, lowered the temperature further. Once a successful dew pond was created, it would, in effect, generate its own water from the air.”
• “On a cool, still night, the air can be so saturated with moisture that even modest air movements, such as sound waves, can condense the moisture and produce raindrops. In the mountains of Yunan in southern China, villagers have a tradition of yelling loudly in the hope that it will stimulate rain. The louder they shout, it is said, the more it rains.”
• Stenocara gracilipes: “In Namibia … a beetle in the desert [was discovered] that has evolved a bobbled upper surface to its body with a pattern that is supremely efficient at capturing moisture from passing fogs. The hexagonal pattern of tiny peaks and troughs appears to push tiny droplets together to form larger droplets, which then roll off the beetle’s back and into its mouth.”
• Raj-Samadhiyala, a village in Gujarat where water conservation is a top priority: “…On the paths there were thousands of fruit trees, where most villages are treeless. Under their shade were piles of mangoes and watermelons. And out among the small fields growing wheat and vegetables and groundnuts, there were the ponds—lots of them. … Nobody is allowed to take water directly from the ponds, and farmers are banned from growing the thirstiest crops, like sugarcane.”

Short quotes

• Tirupur: “These villagers in this toxic wilderness were buying their water, at the price of a rupee per pot, from the people who sucked dry the precious underground reserves of Mandaba. The same people who were keeping the dye factories in business, producing the effluent that poisoned their fields and wells for miles around, were making a further tidy profit out of the misery caused by their pollution. The tragedy of Tamil Nadu’s disappearing water supplies was complete.”
• “The Colorado is both legally and hydrologically one of the most regulated rivers in the world. But it is becoming clear that the legal and the hydrological no longer mesh.”
• “By trying to turn the complex hydrology of rivers into the simple mechanics of a water pipe, engineers have often created danger where they promised safety and intensified the floods they intended to prevent.”
• “The Six-Day War was… the first modern water war. … Israel today uses far more water than falls on its territory, and it has been able to do so because of its occupation of the West Bank, which gives it control of the western aquifer, and the Golan Heights, which gives it control of the Jordan River.”
•  Africa described as “a continent of haphazard boundaries largely created in the days of imperial rule and maintained because anything else would bring chaos”
• About the notion of sending waters from the north-flowing Ob and Yenisei to water cotton and maybe revive the Aral Sea: “you cannot keep a bad megaproject down”
• “Money thrown at problems often produces the wrong solution.”
• “Attempts to tame [the Rhine] began in earnest in the nineteenth century, with ‘rectification’ works undertaken by the German engineer Johanna Tulla. …Tulla forced the river into a single, well-defined, permanent channel. ‘As a rule,’ he declared, ‘no stream or river needs more than one bed.’ Nature never intended that this should be so, but Tulla’s maxim has become the rule that almost every river engineer follows.”
• “The good news is that we never destroy water. .. [S]omewhere, sometime, it will return, purged and fresh, in rain clouds over India or Africa or the rolling hills of Europe. … Water is the ultimate renewable resource.”

About dams

• “Water, as they say in the American West, flows uphill to money.”
• “If nothing else, dams have proved an exceptionally effective technology for turning the unruly flow of rivers into private or state property.”
• “On rivers like the Colorado, the Volta in West Africa, and the Nile, the big dams can hold two or three times the actual annual flow. And yet they remain an essentially experimental technology. Their hydrological, ecological, and social effects have been huge. But for many years their status as symbols of modernism insulated them from serious appraisal. … Only since the late 1990s have serious steps been taken internationally to establish whether their benefits outweigh the environmental, social, and economic costs.”
• There are few “untamed rivers” left, primarily in empty areas.
• Hydroelectric dam in the Amazon: “The rotting vegetation in the flooded forest is producing huge amounts of methane… The reservoir was created in the 1980s to provide pollution-free electricity for the capital of the Amazon, but by Fearnside’s calculations, it produces methane with eight times the greenhouse effect of a coal-fired power station with a similar generating capacity.”
• “Most dams are built with the promise that they will capture floodwaters from the rivers they barricade. But one of the secrets of dams is how often they make floods. This happens because of the contradictory hydrological requirements of the different uses to which dams are put.”

Water in China

• “Controlling [the Yellow River] floods has always been the single most important activity of Chinese governments. Many historians argue that it is the single most important reason for the creation and survival over the millennia of the vast Chinese state with its draconian powers. The Chinese sum up the relationship in a word: zhi, which means both ‘to regulate water’ and ‘to rule.’”
• “In ancient times, if the river shifted ground, the emperor was thought to have lost the mandate of heaven and could no longer rule.”
• Karl Wittfogel is quoted as calling it a “hydraulic civilization.”
• “The [Loess Plateau] is the source of 90 percent of the silt in the world’s siltiest river. Nowhere on earth loses as much to erosion. This is because the Loess Plateau is not a proper mountain range at all. There is no underlying geology. It is just a huge pile of loose sand, several hundred yards thick and covering an area five times the size of Louisiana.
  The sand blew here from a distant desert thousands of years ago and has been left out in the rain ever since.”
• “The Chinese, brought up on the wisdom of managing the Yellow River, sensibly have an idiom, ‘when the river runs clear.’ It means ‘never.’”

Longer quote

It is too easy to see communities that depend on natural wild resources and the vagaries of untamed rivers as somehow left behind by progress. The truth, quite often, is the opposite. It is they who have unlocked the truth about how to make the maximum use of natural resources. It is the urban sophisticates with their engineering degrees who haven’t got a clue.  … When the rivers run dry, it does not need to be a disaster, provided societies can adapt to cope with it. And the traditional attributes of flexibility associated with communities living on wetlands serve remarkably well. One of the ironies is that we have grown disturbingly good at disrupting river flows while losing our capacity for coping with, let alone prospering from, the consequences.

I was looking forward to reading this for the Nature and Environment group—I’d heard good things about it and I love this kind of book—but although it was good in many ways, it was a bit of a dense slog and also hard going emotionally (early cancer treatments, OMG). The hubris and ego of early surgeons resulted in a lot of excessive suffering, needlessly for those patients, but some of it resulted in actual advances. It’s morally painful and ambiguous.

[Advocates of radical surgery] genuinely believed that they could relieve the dreaded symptoms of cancer. But they lacked formal proof, and as they went further up the isolated promontories of their own beliefs, proof became irrelevant and trials impossible to run. The more fervently surgeons believed in the inherent good of their operations, the more untenable it became to put these to a formal scientific trial. Radical surgery thus drew the blinds of circular logic around itself for nearly a century.

It was fascinating and disheartening also to see how the mistaken mental frames around cancer (one disease, on which a coordinated “war” can be waged) delayed understanding and treatment. That’s one of the simplistic ideas that have been a problem for medicine: the body is so so so much more complicated that the imagery of pumps/fluid mechanics/contamination allows for. And it makes sense that patients are quick to demand treatments that haven’t been fully tested, resenting what can seem like (and maybe it) foot-dragging, but then the opportunity to really test is lost.

It’s well written but sometimes a little purple. Mukherjee for example describes a person as “brackish”—I kind of like it but it’s on the edge of too showy. There’s a plates section which feels a bit arbitrary. Also, the framing autobiographical bit (his treatment of one particular patient) is very small in comparison with the dense mass of the rest.

• The modern-sounding clinical descriptions of Imhotep (2625 BC), under the description of breast cancer: treatment “There is none”
• Autopsy literally means “to see for oneself;” Vesalius vainly looking for Galen’s “black bile”
• Music and surgery: “The professions still often go hand in hand. Both push manual skill to its limit; both mature with practice and age; both depend on immediacy, precision, and opposable thumbs.”
• “Dogs, humans, and lions are the only animals known to develop prostate cancer”
• “Hefty Brunsviga calculators, the precursors of modern computers, clacked and chimed … ringing like clocks each time a long division was performed.”
• “The iconic Marlboro man, with his hypermasculine getup of lassos and tattoos, was an elaborate decoy set up to prove that there was nothing effeminate or sissy about smoking filter-tipped cigarettes.”
• “Normal cells are identically normal; malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways.”

He’s widely read and has a great ear for quotes; a surprising number of the passages I flagged are from other writers:

• Howard Skipper: “A model is a lie that helps you see the truth.”
• Mukherjee names Bernard Fisher as the source for the fantastic “In God we trust. All others [must] have data;” the great Quote Investigator says it can’t be attributed to him, but I’m thrilled to have been introduced to it.
• Paul Brodeur: “Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off”
• Richard Avedon: “All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”
• David Rieff in his memoir of his mother Susan Sontag’s illness: “Like so many doctors, he spoke to us as if we were children but without the care that a sensible adult takes in choosing what words to use with a child.”
• Alfred Knudson saying he inferred the existence of anti-oncogenes “as one might infer the wind from the movement of the trees.”

The Laskers were professional socialites, in the same way that one can be a professional scientist or a professional athlete; they were extraordinary networkers, lobbyists, minglers, conversers, persuaders, letter writers, cocktail party–throwers, negotiators, name-droppers, deal makers. Fund-raising—and, more important, friend-raising—was instilled in their blood, and the depth and breadth of their social connections allowed them to reach deeply into the minds—and pockets—of private donors and of the government.

We are chemical apes: having discovered the capacity to extract, purify, and react molecules to produce new and wondrous molecules, we have begun to spin a new chemical universe around ourselves. Our bodies, our cells, our genes are thus being immersed and reimmersed in a changing flux of molecules—pesticides, pharmaceutical drugs, plastics, cosmetics, estrogens, food products, hormones, even novel forms of physical impulses, such as radiation and magnetism.