Stages of Rot

 
 
Stages of Rot
by Linnea Sterte
Peow

2017, reprinted 2023
 
 
Stages of Rot is a deeply enigmatic comic that depicts the decomposition of a dead whale, not at the bottom of one of Earth's oceans, but on an alien world where all manner of sea life fly through the air instead, the undersea biome coexisting with and layered on top of the surface. And because the whalefall is on the surface, humans are now one of the scavengers that feasts on the giant carcass. 
 
Artist Linnea Sterte divides the process into chapters based on which human group is present and what they're doing, but we're only one small part of the process. Sterte shows us the fish, the fungus, the macroscopic single-celled organisms that arrive to play their own roles. You get a sense that you're seeing a series of close-ups on a larger picture, a whole functioning ecology that remains mostly out of focus and even out of sight. 
 
Successfully communicating that feeling, of watching one step in the functioning of a larger machine, without ever zooming out to show the whole, is no simple task, I suspect. Done incorrectly, and I think it would seem too simple, or else like chaos, with no sense that it's guided by an invisible order. Keeping you, as the reader, with that tip-of-your-tongue feeling in your mouth the whole time, without ever telling you the word or making you feel like you simply don't know it, is kind of an incredible accomplishment. Scavengers' Reign was rightly hailed for doing something similar, and it had the benefit of animation, being able to show its processes in motion.
 
We watch as the flesh-eaters come to collect blood and meat, and to slay the 'pilot' who we're told is a human-looking homunculus who lives in the whales heart and guides its flight. Fungus begins to cover the whale and form the heart of a forest. 
 
The bone-cutters arrive to collect their materials. One carves a diatom, which we're told live in the upper atmosphere where humans rarely see them, so that perhaps the statue represents a memory in the bone as much as in the mind of the carver. 
 
The barbarians are next; called to the whalefall by a vision or dream. For them the journey into the whale represents something hard to define, perhaps the passage into adulthood, though I might be wrong. The forest expands ever outward. 
 
The last humans to arrive, the entomologists, collect specimens of every kind of life that visits or emerges from the fallen whale. They catalog it all and fill a museum. They even resurrect the pilot, who lives in the museum for awhile, before flying away, to the highest part of the sky, to join with another living whale. The cycle is complete and begins again.
 
Sterte uses a limited color palette to give each chapter its own feeling, distinct from the others. The flesh-eaters and barbarians both have more pink and red, the bone-cutters and entomologists more yellow and green. The alternation feels like a cycle, like the turning of seasons, and feeds back into the sense of hidden order propelling the book. This is not an especially long comic, and it has very little dialogue, but it's very effective at communicating the mystery of the way bodies are reclaimed by the world after death. 

The Bathysphere Book

 
The Bathysphere Book
Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths
by Brad Fox
Astra

2023 
 
 
I think there's some value in allowing your friends' interests to influence you. At one time, my sister was very interested in oceanography, so I still like to read about it from time to time. The Bathysphere Book is a history of the first really successful deep-sea diving vehicle, the bathysphere, and a biography of the explorer who rode in it, William Beebe.
 
The bathysphere was built by Otis Barton. When the door was screwed on, it was a hermetically sealed metal sphere, with only three quartz windows to see out. It was raised and lowed by a metal cable, and this was paired with a phone line so Beebe could report what he saw up to his research partner (and girlfriend) Gloria Hollister for transcription. The bathysphere carried its own compressed oxygen, had internal air conditioning, and used a chemical reactant to neutralize the carbon dioxide its occupants exhaled. It was only used a few times, mainly in 1933 and 1934, and Hollister never got to go on a real dive. Bebee and seasick Barton dove together each time, with Barton not even looking out, just monitoring the machines.
 
The purpose of the dives was to find out what the ocean was actually like, below the depths you could reach in diving helmet. As you descend, more and more light is absorbed by the water above you, first reds and oranges, then yellows and greens. Before it becomes black, the ocean glows blue-violet. Many of the deep sea creatures are also partially bioluminescent. There is more life down there than scientists had believed possible before Beebe's dives.
 
The other famous collaborator on this project was artist Else Bostelmann. She also never dove in the bathysphere, and based all her paintings on Hollister's transcripts and direct conversation with Beebe. I actually got this book because I'd seen some of Bostelmann's fantastically dark, haunting watercolors before. My favorite anecdote is that on a few occasions, she donned a diving helmet, dropped a canvas and a metal music stand, and was actually able to oil paint fish and coral, from life, at a depth of 20 or 30 feet.
 

Previously Unknown Dragonfish Circling the Bathysphere 
- Else Bostlemann, 1934

 
There are some things from the past that I guess I assumed were more widespread than they actually were. When I watched the film The Automat, I was genuinely surprised to learn there were really only ever in New York and Philadelphia. The bathysphere was unique, not the name for a general type of craft, and outside of Beebe's handful of deep dives in the early 30s, was really only used for test dives and exhibitions.
 
Fox writes in very short chapters that each relay a single thought or incident. His narratives of Beebe's life and the story of the bathysphere dives are interwoven with Bostelmann's sketches and paintings, photos of the expeditions, excerpts from Beebe's and Hollister's diaries, excerpts from the transcripts of the dives and descriptions of the undersea sightings, accounts of what else was going on historically at the same time, and then lots and lots of short biographical sketches of other people tangentially (often very tenuously) connected to Beebe and the dives. So we learn about the famous racist Beebe dedicated one of his books to, but also about Beebe's neighbor's doctor. Who indeed sounds like a fascinating fellow! The proliferation of chapters about people with only the thinnest of connections to the dives is probably meant to help provide context, but also kind of made it feel like Fox didn't really have enough material to fill a book and was padding it out.

Genesis

 
 

Genesis

The Evolution of Biology

by Jan Sapp

Oxford University Press

2003 

 

 

My reading this month got off to kind of a slow start because I was finishing kind of a heavier text, Genesis: The Evolution of Biology by Jan Sapp, which is both a history and a historiography, a look at how others have told this same history, of the science of biology, from the Lamarck and Darwin, through Mendel, and up to the start of the 21st century.
 
Along the way, Sapp describes key experiments and explains the prevailing consensus that governed various eras of research. He tells us what biologists thought, and how they came to be convinced of it, again and again, as the way they understood the natural world changed over the course of about 150 years. He notes major disagreements and competing paradigms alongside times of scientific consensus, and gives a lot of attention to why biologists believed various things, and how they sought to convince one another, both with empirical evidence, and with stories told to one another about other scientists. Sapp looks at not only how scientific ideas changed, but how the reputations and the accounts shared about important scientists changed, as their role in the history of the discipline got reimagined in light of current beliefs.
 
Sapp divides his book into four sections, and the two longest are about Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics. Those were also the two sections where I was already most familiar with the popular, textbook version of the history, and so probably the sections that were easiest to read and that I felt like I got the most out of. The other two sections - about cell biology between Darwin and Mendel, and about the search for a molecular basis for genes after Mendel, plus all the discoveries that became possible once we found DNA - were more new to me, so I was introduced to a lot of ideas, but Sapp's approach makes Genesis not the ideal format for a novice learner.
 
Sapp gives Darwin credit for the thoroughness and quality of his research. The idea that species change over time and new species emerge due to evolution was already a hypothesis by Darwin's time. One thing he provided was a mechanism, natural selection, that would provide a reason why evolution occurs - an idea he got while thinking about Malthus. In turn, social theorists later used Darwin to justify domestic inequality and international colonialism as necessary forms of competition. Throughout the book, I was struck by how conservative (and often racist) biologists have been whenever they've talked about politics. Darwin himself was probably a Social Darwinist too.
 
The other thing Darwin's work provided was a lot of meticulous evidence, combining paleontology and field biology. One of the biggest changes he proposed was that the traits individual are real while 'species' are just statistical averages, as opposed to the older Aristotelian idea that each species had an set ideal form with individuals exhibiting variations due to imperfection. Darwin specifically thought that mutations that gave advantages were the main cause of speciation. By the mid-20th century, the consensus was that each species contains a lot of variation, and that geographic isolation is the main cause of the formation of new species, as each population randomly ends up with a different mix of those variant genes, which then diverge further when they can't remix by interbreeding.
 
Cell theory came later. It holds that cells are the basic unit of life - they're the simplest, smallest thing that can truly be said to be 'alive,' and every living thing is made up of cells. It also holds that every cell that exists came from the division of an earlier cell. (Sapp doesn't say, but it seems to me that you have to believe in evolution to accept that.) Cell biologists wondered how genetically identical cells, all born from the same egg cell, could give rise to all the differentiated tissues of the human body. For generations, they believed it was the cytoplasmic structure of the cell, not the genes in the nucleus, that was responsible for successful cell division. That was another thing I noticed - scientists arguing that their specific object of study was the single most important thing, the ultimate cause that everything else followed from.
 
Amazingly, to me at least, biologists theorized 'genes' as things that hold and transmit information before they knew any of the physical basis of genetics. A gene was a tiny little black box for a long time before anyone knew what it was made of or how it worked. Which reminds me, at least, of some of the black box concepts in contemporary physics, like dark matter.
 
Mendel is remembered as a virtual hermit, a monk who conducted experiments on pea plants and discovered dominant and recessive genes, only to be ignored at the time and forgotten until he was rediscovered much later. Sapp notes that Mendel was a Lamarckian, and though a monk, he was 'isolated' by the dominance of Darwinism, not because he was at a monastery instead of a university. And he was 'rediscovered' by two competing scientists doing lit reviews only after they'd both independently replicated Mendel's findings. Both were happy to credit the dead guy rather than let their living rival get the glory, but if I understand correctly, we'd still have the finding even if Mendel had never published at all.
 
The last section, about molecular biology, which uses methods borrowed from chemistry and physics to understand what's going on inside cells at the level of proteins, enzymes, and acids, including DNA and RNA. Sapp gives a chapter to the discovery of the double helix, but spends more time on the revolutionary discoveries enabled by these techniques, including figuring out how genes actually cause anything to happen, sequencing the human genome, and a whole host of discoveries made by finally expanding away from mostly studying plants and animals to paying a lot more attention to bacteria.
 
The study of microbial life is really fascinating to me. It was sequencing bacterial genes that revealed the existence of the archaea, extremophiles that thrive in Earth's least hospitable environments; that proved lateral gene transfer; that showed that eukaryotes came into existence when certain bacteria started living inside other cells as permanent internal symbionts, eventually becoming our mitochondria and plants' chloroplasts; and that showed the importance of bacterial and fungal symbionts in the microbiome of every multicellular organism. That last idea really was ignored! Someone thought of it in 1918, and Sapp goes on for about 2-3 pages showing all the times someone else reconsidered the hypothesis and dismissed it, only for it to become orthodoxy 80 years later.
 
I feel like I've had a good overview of the major discoveries and successive theories of the science of biology. I also feel like this was maybe not the best way for me, a non-expert, to try learning these things. I would've gotten more out of Genesis if I were already more familiar with that history, and using Sapp to supplement and enrich my existing knowledge.

The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth

 
 

The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth

Understanding Our World and Its Ecosystems

by Rachel Ignotofsky

Ten Speed Books

2018 

 

 

The Wonderous Workings of Planet Earth is a graphic nonfiction book by artist Rachel Ignotofsky that functions as an introduction to ecology for young readers. Parts of the book are fully accessible to kids, other parts seem designed to supplement what teenagers might be learning in high school biology. Ignotofsky's art is charming, and has a clarity that often resembles an infographic or instructional poster. You could just about use this as a textbook, certainly it could serve as a starting point for other reading to learn more about the topics it introduces.

The heart of Ignotofsky's book, taking up well over half its pages, is a tour through some of the unique, distinctive ecosystems on each continent. In North America, we see the redwood forest, mangrove swamps, and Midwestern prairie. Globally, we take in sights like the Andes, Alps, and Himalayas; the Amazon, Sahara, and savanna; and several that might not've made the shortlist in other books, like the Siberian Taiga, Mongolian Steppes, the Horn of Africa, Great Barrier Reef, and Arctic Circle.

Each system gets a two-page spread with a full-page illustration paired with a page of text. Each illustration depicts the biome inside a terrarium, a motif that's both pretty and emphasizes the way each system is somewhat self-contained. We see terrain, common plants and animals, and diagrams showing how energy moves through the system from the primary producers, though all the consumers, and up to the apex predators. Ignotofsky also discusses the threats that human activity pose to each environment.
 
There are a few more ecosystems too, that fall outside the continental framework - a pond and fallen log, a drop of water, the open ocean and sea floor.
 
Before her tour of these ecosystems, Ignotofsky takes us on a brief tour of introductory biology and ecology, with an emphasis on understanding how each system is made up of multiple populations of plants and animals that fit together in particular ways. After the tour, we learn about the carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, and water cycles. We also learn more about how humans have affected the environment, especially through climate change, and the many consequences of a warming planet. Ignotofsky also talks about steps we can take to help, which includes predictable individual actions, but also advocacy to your legislature, and poverty reduction as climate action.

Dark Archives

 
  

Dark Archives

A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin

by Megan Rosenbloom

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2020

 

 

Dark Archives is a surprisingly chatty account of the author's work to date with the Anthropodermic Book Project, an effort, first to verify through scientific testing, and then to catalog, every book with a human skin binding. It's a pretty morbid topic! But Rosenbloom is an upbeat narrator. And while she's aware of the macabre fascination some people have with these objects, her main interest is learning who made these books, whose bodies were used, who collected them, and most importantly, why?

One thing we quickly learn, as we follow Rosenbloom on her travels, is that there are probably a lot more books rumored to be bound in leather made of human skin than there are actual books bound this way. She doesn't receive permission to test every book she visits, but of the ones she tests, something like ½ to ⅔ are fakes, just animal leather with an aura supplied by salacious rumor. At the time of her writing, only about 50 were verified worldwide, an unknown percentage of an unknown total. But the fakes are all quite old. Often a library, or a series of collectors, has spent over a hundred years thinking something that turned out to be false, usually because someone a century ago wrote a note on the book itself with the claim. You can't tell by looking; the leathermaking process eradicates any visual indicators.

The peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) test that Rosenbloom and her colleagues use was developed at Harvard in the early 2010s, and allows the identification of leather based on a grain-of-rice sized sample, even when DNA testing is impossible. The test doesn't distinguish sex or race, can't even tell humans from other apes, but can definitely determine if something is made of cow, pig, goat, or whatever, or a human. (The one possible source of error would be a false positive generated by a person handling the sample before it was tested.)

When most people guess what sorts of books might be bound in human skin, they think of the occult - books about magic, demons, witchcraft. Historically, people have also sometimes slandered their enemies by claiming that they made books out of human skin. White colonists in America claimed this about Natives, and royalists claimed the French Revolutionaries did no on a factory scale. The most common anthropodermic book though, is a book on human anatomy, owned by a gentleman doctor around the time of the start of modern clinical medicine and surgery, who had access to the skin through his work, and used it on a book he already treasured, probably to make it more valuable as a collectible by using the rarest possible material. The typical current owner is the rare books' section of a medical library.

It's not that there are no occult or 'sexy' books bound in human skin, but there are very few. None of the rumors about Natives or French Revolutionaries that Rosenbloom tested turned out to be true. There are also persistent rumors about the Nazis. And like, there are ways the Nazis commodified the bodies of their victims on an industrial scale, such as collecting gold teeth, and, I learned, making felt from human hair. One SS officer's wife at the Buchenwald concentration camp may have made a lampshade from human skin, though if so, it seems to have been destroyed before the war ended. There are photos and even museum exhibits that use stand-in lamps while repeating this claim, and viewers probably sometimes think they've seen the real thing. One museum owned a particularly grotesque lamp they never displayed, and feared it might be made with human skin. Rosenbloom and the PMF test determined it was cellulose, the plant fiber used to make film for movie cameras, much to the museum's relief.

I'll admit that part of me wishes all the rumors were false, that historically, the desire to do something like that never once coincided with the skill needed to do so. But what Rosenbloom's research so far reveals is that the 'evil geniuses' who turn human bodies into books are just doctors, and the 'evil empires' that facilitated these acts are the US and England. If there's evil here, it's mostly banal, the result of the routine and dehumanizing prejudices of the sort of wealthy White men who mostly became the early doctors colliding with the unfinished norms and anemic ethics of the early days of scientific medicine in the 19th century.

Also, nearly all new books in those days were sold as text blocks that the customer was responsible for having bound into a finished hardback, and rare book collectors routinely rebound old books to suit their own asthetic preferences. Even having the skill and material, and lacking any restraint to stop them, I think even fewer (of the already few) doctors would've done this if the book technology at the time didn't facilitate it too, which is probably why there almost no anthropodermic books from much earlier or later.

So a lot of Dark Archives ends up being about the history of medicine. Dissecting cadavers is an invaluable way to learn anatomy, still used today, and it's one reason scientific medicine is so much more effective than earlier techniques - it's based on direct observation of real human bodies. A lot of the time, getting the bodies involved grave-robbing. In England, dissection after death was an additional punishment added to the sentence of some criminals. Later, poor people's bodies were used instead (which they initially found intolerable.) It's not until well into the 20th century that the prior consent of the deceased became enshrined as an ethical principle. 

Part of learning this way involves a certain amount of emotional detachment and desensitizing. We wouldn't have many surgeons if they all felt like they were committing assault or inflicting torture. But understandable as all that is, the way the rest of us think about the dead and the correct way to honor them means that it's not ethical to take skin from a dead person and use it as a raw material. The laws around this aren't always clear, but the feelings of the public haven't actually changed much over the past 200 years, with the biggest change being a positive one, that fewer of us see any of our fellow humans as being equivalent to animals.

Islands of Abandonment

 
 
Islands of Abandonment

Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

by Cal Flyn

Viking

2021

 

 

In the introduction to Islands of Abandonment, author Cal Flyn explains that she started her project of visiting and reporting on places that humans no longer lived or used expecting to talk only about the devastation. There are good reasons why humans have designated these places as off-limits, and yet what Flyn found, when she looked, was evidence that the absence of humans was more beneficial to life in these places than presence of whatever we're avoiding (the radiation, or toxic spills, or unexploded ordinance, or whatever) was harmful.

The general finding at each site she visited was that slowly, eventually, after humans had been away long enough, diverse plants and animal species moved back in to the place people left behind, and these places often go on to become some of the most biodiverse places the world, providing stopping points for migratory birds, habitat for endangered species. These are some of the most dangerous and polluted places on Earth, and they are also refuges for species that might otherwise be extinct.

The technical name for this process is 'succession.' Pollen and spores blow in. Roots extend. Different kinds of plants jockey for space, then settle into niches. Often, forest regrows. Insects lay eggs. Animals seek temporary shelter, then make homes. Without intervention, a new ecosystem thrives. There are few areas of untouched wilderness left, but these reclaimed spaces represent a kind of feral nature.

Flyn goes to Chernobyl, closed off due to radiation, to the Zone Rouge in France, where forest grows over denuded WWI battlefields, except for a spot where they burned all the unused chemical weapons, and still nothing grows in the toxic ash. She visits the DMZ dividing the island of Cyprus, and to the abandoned collective farms left fallow after the fall of the USSR. She goes to a former colonial botanical garden in Tanzania, to a small island off Scotland where the people left but the cows remained, become feral and de-domesticated along with the land.

Flyn's book is divided into 4 parts. In the first part, she looks at clear success stories of re-wilding. In the second, she focuses on partially-abandoned places where people still live, including depopulated Detroit. As Flyn notes, every place she visited has some human presence, both people who stayed, and people who moved in after the others left. In the third part, she looks at places where the human impact lingers, so that it's not a return to the previous ecology but the birth of something hybrid and new.

And in the last part, she looks at the island of Montserrat, where volcanic ash now buries ⅔ of the land, and the Salton Sea in California, where over the course of the 20th century, suprise flooding turned a desert basin into an inland sea, and then evaporation turned it first toxic, then back to desert. These are places made unlivable by natural processes, but in their scale and scope, Flyn sees premonitions of the effects of climate change and pollution caused by human activity. If most of the book has seemed sort of hopeful (that the Earth can and has recovered from some of the worst we've done to it, just by being left alone) this section reminds us to still fear what human survival will look like as the planet continues to warm and change.

Radial Symmetry

 

Radial Symmetry

by Katherine Larson

Yale University Press

2011

 

 

I'm halfway through a longer novel, but taking a break to read some poetry. Katherine Larson is a working biologist as well as a poet, and Radial Symmetry is so far her only collection.

 
Larson writes about love, about a loved on dying, about a research project on a Mediterranean beach, about loneliness. Her poems tend to refer to a specific moment in time and space, when she felt a particular emotion in response to a certain stimulus. She's very effective at evoking the specifics of both the place and the emotion.

 
When I read Kimiko Hahn's poems earlier this year, they reminded me of little essays. Larson's feel more like single memories - individual moments trapped in glass. For whatever reason, I think I like Larson's work better.

 
Larson uses a lot of oceanic imagery, and also frequently references sea birds, mollusks, insects. They're both real and metaphorical, but not romantic. She writes about the stink of rotting carcasses on the beach, and viscerally describes how an animal's body is turned into a meal.

 
Most of Larson's lines are short. They usually break mid-sentence, creating pauses that interrupt how how you would read it, if it were printed out like prose. Some of her poems are just one long stanza. The others are usually made up of 3-line stanzas. The shortness of the lines fits the mood of someone slowly recounting a memory, adding details as they surface in the mind.

For the Birds

 
For the Birds

Protecting Wildlife through the Naturalist Gaze

by Elizabeth Cherry

Rutgers University Press

2019

 

 

A few years ago, my friend Liz Cherry wrote a book about birdwatchers. For the Birds is an ethnographic study of people who enjoy birdwatching as a hobby. Cherry spent 3 years going on weekly birding walks with several local Audubon Society chapters, attended a number of special birding events during that time, and interviewed about 30 birdwatchers.

 
The first thing I learned is that I should probably say that Cherry studied 'birders' rather than 'birdwatchers,' since that's how the hobbyists prefer to identify themselves. I also learned just how popular a hobby it is, with something like 30% of American adults over the age off 55 participating to some extent. (It's less popular among younger people.)

 
Cherry argues that birders, especially ones who go on weekly Audubon Society walks, develop what she calls the 'naturalist gaze' as a result of their hobby. The naturalist gaze is a way of looking at the world that is attuned to the sight  (and sound!) of birds and their habitat. It incorporates advice about what to pay attention to, knowledge about the meanings of the things seen, and standards for evaluating how things could be better. Cherry describes what the birders learn, how they learn it, and what the consequences are.
 

The initial chapters primarily focus on Cherry's ethnographic observations about what birders do and how they learn to do it. Color photographs taken on bird walks enliven the text by illustrating birds that are mentioned as they appear in nature.

 
In addition to learning how to see and identify birds, birders start learning about birds, which affects the way they think about them. Initially, birders might want to see 'rare' or very brightly colored birds, but as they learn, they start to appreciate the common birds that they're able to see every day, and the plain-looking birds that are at home in their native environment.

 
Birders make moral judgments, scorning 'bad birds' like European Starlings and House Sparrows, which are invasive, non-native species that were brought to North America in the 1800s, and cowbirds, which lay their eggs in other birds' nests.

 
Many birders participate in citizen science efforts, like the annual Christmas Bird Count, initially developed to supplant traditional Christmas bird shoots. Although scientists who don't use citizen data (and birders who don't have scientific training) tend to be instinctively skeptical of the quality of data collected by citizen science, Cherry finds that birders are quite conscientious, and the data they collect is of high quality. And because of their numbers, professional ornithologists could never come close to matching their currently available data without the efforts of citizen scientists.

 
Birders also tend to become interested in environmental conservation as a consequence of their affinity for birds. They often grow native plants and set up feeders and nest boxes in their yards. They also often become interested in habitat preservation and restoration, and may become involved in activism, especially at the local level. One finding that surprised Cherry though, is that relatively few birders are vegetarians, although this dietary change would impact natural habitat.

Life Between the Tides

 
 
Life Between the Tides

by Adam Nicolson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2022

 

 

Life Between the Tides is nonfiction. Primarily it's about the kinds of plants and animals that live in tidal pools, their ecology and how their foodchain works. But it's both more specific and farther reaching. Nicholson constructed his own tide pools on an isolated bit of Scottish coast that previously had none. He writes about the species that come to fill his pools. But he also talks about the history of this part of Scotland, and a variety of scientific and philosophical concepts that emerge from his observations.
Nicolson builds three tide pools - hollow spaces that fill with water when they're covered by the high tide, and retain it during the low. Each seems a better habitat than the one before. 

 
In the first section he talks about prawns, animal consciousness and intelligence, periwinkles (a kind of mollusk,) the fractal nature of shorelines, which seem longer and longer the more precisely you measure them, green crabs, the discovery of crustacean metamorphosis and the related discovery that most (or all?) zooplankton are crustacean larvae, the role of apex predators like green crabs in maintaining complex biodiverse ecosystems, sea anemones that reproduce by cloning, and the vastly different sensory worlds of pre-Cambrian and later forms of life.

 
In the second section, Nicolson describes the folk beliefs that surround the tides and gives a perspective-altering way to think of them - that it is not really the tide that 'comes in' or 'goes out,' but the rotation of the Earth that drags the shoreline through the ocean, as our sphere of stone rotates through a relatively motionless ovoid of water. He also describes the layers of stone at that point in the Scottish coast, and which geologic events produced them, including how the slow wobble of the Earth's axis produces cyclical ice ages.
 

Finally, Nicoloson talks about the Scottish people. How the barren land was settled by fisher-gatherers, who were replaced by Eurasian agricultural peoples. How the clan societies worked, and made war on each other in response to poverty and hunger. How the English mapped them and conquered them. He talks about the folk belief in faeries, who are blamed for troubles and maladies, about Malthus and Spencer, about the philosophical distinction between the physical world our senses can perceive and the invisible, unknowable minds of others.

 
I expected a more straightforward biology book, but I appreciate Nicolson's more intellectually omnivorous approach to his subject, and I like the handful of watercolors, and dozens of photographs, that illustrate the text.

Toxic Flora

 
Toxic Flora

by Kimiko Hahn

WW Norton

2010

 

 

Toxic Flora is another poetry collection by Kimiko Hahn. This time each poem is inspired by a specific article from the New York Times' science section. There's even a bibliographic key at the end, to link each poem to its inspiration.

 
I thought I was going to really like this one based on the premise, but it didn't do much for me. I have a sense that I'd rather have read the original articles, or prose essays inspired by them, instead.

 
Hahn writes about the relationships between plants and insects, about space including exoplanets and dwarf planets in our own system, about extinct birds, and about fish.

 
Each poem also links each topic to human relationships - her dates, her divorces, her fraught connection to her newly adult daughter. Often this link appears only in the final line, attempting to recontextualize what had appeared to be a simple description as a metaphor.

 
I'll probably wait a bit before reading more poetry.

Mushroom Rain

 
Mushroom Rain

by Laura Zimmermann
art by Jamie Green
Sleeping Bear Press

2022

 

 

Mushroom Rain is another children's picture book, this time non-fiction. I first saw it at a bookshop on a trip to Asheville, and I've been wanting to see it again ever since.

 
The majority of the book is written very simply for young readers, and serves as a showcase for Green's beautiful art. The last couple pages provide more information about every mushroom fact stated earlier, maybe for slightly older kids who want to know more, or maybe for parents, to help them answer questions that might come up along the way.

 
It rains, and mushrooms appear, painted simply, and depicted larger than life-size. We learn a bit about the staggering variety of mushrooms, about what eats them, about how the fungal mycelium works and how it persists when no part of it is visible above ground. We learn how mushrooms spread reproductive spores to spread the mycelium. We learn something I didn't know yet, that mushroom spores, lile other particulate, can help to seed clouds, and then we end where we began, the cycle complete, with a mushroom rain.

 
The primary attraction of this book is the art, but Zimmermann's writing is clear and informative, and should help kids understand the basics about an often mysterious branch on the tree of life.

American Zoo

 
American Zoo

A Sociological Safari

by David Grazian

Princeton University Press

2015

 

 

Among sociologists, I think David Grazian is best known for his ethnographies of urban night life. American Zoo is sort of a departure, insofar as zoos are mostly visited by families with children, but metropolitan zoos are a form of leisure, and Grazian approached the ethnographic data collection with his usual zeal, volunteering at two zoos for several years, and visiting another 25 or so.

 
Grazian says that his main theme is the ways that zoos construct an image of nature and draw a boundaries between the idea of nature and idea of culture, although I would say it's actually more about how zoos negotiate competing demands from different constituencies. He also frames a lot of his discussion around the urgency of the current environmental situation.

 
Grazian looks at how zoos design exhibition spaces to both provide animals with enough and the right kind of room and also to look appealing to audiences (and to conceal things like animal sex and carnivore diets.) He discusses the professional identities of the animal keepers and the audience educators. (Both are contrasted with the managers and the guest services staff.) Current zoo employees tend to be educated young women who accept very low wages because of their desire to take care of animals. They are part of a major generational shift away from the working class men who used to do those jobs.

 
Grazian shows how zoos balance a desire to educate the public against a need to entertain them and pressure to avoid sensitive topics like evolution, climate change, and the actions of various corporate sponsors. Apparently a lot of zoos are funded by oil companies.

 
Too much entertainment also threatens zoos' legitimacy as well as their professional identity because of what Grazian calls 'the captivity question' - that is, the question of what gives zoos a right to keep and display their animals. Grazian finds that zoos currently legitimize themselves (both to themselves and outsiders) in terms of both practicing conservation and promoting it among their audiences. Grazian also notes the irony that the captivity of zoo animals is far more controversial than either America's mass imprisonment of humans, or the captivity and slaughter of food animals.

Underland

 
Underland
A Deep Time Journey

by Robert MacFarlane

Norton
2019

 

 

Underland was a Christmas present a couple years ago. It's non-fiction, combining nature writing and travel writing, as MacFarlane travels to a number of underground sites, and both writes about the experience and uses it as a jumping off point to talk about history or climate change or whatever else is relevant.

 
MacFarlane goes caving in the limestone karst sort of near his home in England, visits a dark matter detection lab inside an abandoned salt mine, learns about the 'wood wide web' of fungal mycelia in forests, spends a week in the Paris catacombs, visits an underground river, goes mountaineering around caves and sinkholes in Slovenia where Nazis and Communists hid out from and executed one another during WWII, visits cave paintings, meets a fisherman-turned-environmentalist who opposes off-shore oil drilling in Norway, climbs up a glacier, clumbs down a glacial crevasse, and tours a site being prepared to store nuclear waste.

 
MacFarlane often narrates via a series of images. He gets a bit elagaic in the latter half of the book. A few of his caving and climbing feats seem stupidly dangerous, and he reports feeling fear during them, although he must be a fairly experienced hiker and climber, the way he gets around.

 
There are recurring motifs of him being awed by the size or depth or oldness of something he's encountered, of having no words to describe these unhuman places. There's also a running thread of his awareness of the damage humans are doing to the planet, and the near geoligical scale of our pollution or the effect of global warming. You could easily read just one chapter on a topic that interested you, but I was glad to take the whole tour.

Radioactive

 
Radioactive
Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout
by Lauren Redniss
Dey Street Books

2010, reprinted 2015

 

 

Before reading Radioactive, I would have confidently called it a graphic novel.

 
But for one thing, it's not a novel, it's non fiction. Redniss tells the biographies of Marie and Pierre Curie leading up to their marriage, tells of their work together and marriage, and continues telling Marie's story after Pierre dies. She also tells a lot about radium and polonium, and interlaces the biography with vignettes of information about different "events" in the history of radioactivity, from the Radium Girls to Hiroshima to Chernobyl, at least a dozen in all. Redniss uses a lot of direct quotes, which makes her writing style feel journalistic.

 
Radioactive is illustrated, but it's also not a comic. There are no panels, and the art isn't sequential. Each page is a full-page illustration with text, like an artist's book. Redniss drew each page by hand, then photocopied it onto a transparency, then used that to develop a cyanotype - a kind of photograph where areas exposed to light turn blue, and the covered parts remain white. Some pages are orange, presumably from using a computer to invert the color, and others employ photographs in collage. Redniss also designed her own font and arranged the text on each page.

 
Marie Curie worked hard and made incredible discoveries about radioactivity, a term she coined. She won two Nobel prizes, one with Pierre in physics, and one alone in chemistry. After Pierre died, she had a love affair with a married scientist. Her children carried on her work, and as adults, her lover's son with his wife ended up marrying Marie and Pierre's daughter, and they also won a joint Nobel. Marie Curie's story is interesting in its own right, and Redniss's book is accessible and visually fascinating.

The Royal Society

 
The Royal Society
And the Invention of Modern Science
by Adrian Tinniswood

Basic Books

2019

 

 

I think I originally saw The Royal Society in a museum gift shop, and decided I wanted to read it based on the catchy cover art.

 
Tinniswood delivers a short (125 page) and just-the-facts style account of the founding and development of the Royal Society of London. We don't go very deep into the psychology or personality of any of the founders, but we do get a succinct overview of the major issues the organization faced in its first 200 years.

 
Okay, so in the early 1600s, Francis Bacon proposes "what if, instead of assuming Aristotle et al were right about everything, what if we try directly observing the world and learning about it that way?" Bacon proposed this around the same time that some astronomers and surgeons were looking at the stars and dissected corpses and beginning to suspect that Aristotle et al were not, in fact, right about everything.

 
In 1660, a dozen college professors started meeting to perform and discuss experimental observations of the world, and by 1662, they had a Royal Charter. The Royal Society had (and in fact courted) a mixed membership of working scientists and rich men with a hobbyist's interest in science.

 
The rich hobbyists provided the money and political connections needed to maintain the existence of the organization, if not its intended spirit. Isaac Newton spent about 25 years as the Society president in the early 1700s, but most of the leaders were aristocrats. The split membership was an ongoing source of conflict until about 1850, when the scientists pushed through some reforms to the nominating process that resulted in it (eventually) becoming an all-professional organization.

 
Apparently the term "gimcrack" comes from a play called The Virtuoso, whose title character, Dr Gimcrack, was a parody of the Royal Society fellows, and his ridiculous experiments in the play are based on the playwright looking for the silliest articles in the Society's journal.

Discarded Science

 
Discarded Science
Ideas that Seemed Good at the Time...
by John Grant
Facts, Figures & Fun
2006

 

 

This is a bit of a cheat, since I checked this one out last year, finished most of it, ran out of time and returned it, and recently got it back out.

 

Discarded Science gives a brief overview of a lot of different hypotheses and beliefs that we no longer accept as true. 

 
Or at least, that scientists working within their field of expertise no longer regard as true. One surprise from reading this was just how many scientists are responsible for these ideas - usually either theorizing outside their field or unwilling to reject their pet theory even after experimental evidence has shown that it's false.

 
The second surprise is that what we might call 'woo' has a long history that parallels science, a history of ideas that are kept around because people want to believe them, even though the evidence shows they're not true, and even though, when applied to medicine, they're often dangerous or fatal.

 
Which kind of leads into my third surprise, which is just how boring this turned out to be. I was hoping for ideas that were fascinatingly wacky, and instead it's mostly just Biblical inerrancy, reincarnation, gold, vibes, and life force energy over and over again.

 
Grant compounds this problem by giving interesting wrong ideas like phlogiston and luminiferous ether pretty short shrift, while going on and on about Creationism and Intelligent Design. The book is organized by broad subject, but has no real throughline within chapters, and sometimes Grant just fires off trivia a sentence at a time. He also has a bad habit of repeatedly referencing an influential idea but not describing it in detail until after all the things it inspired.

 
My one cool discovery was the so-called 'Axial Theory,' which claims that the Earth used to have water-ice rings like Saturn, but in a great disaster, they fell down and melted, causing the Biblical flood. There are countless versions of 'the Bible is literally true, the Earth is 6000ish years old, and the flood really happened' in the book - this was the one that was genuinely fascinating in its strangeness.