The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 (2 page)

All these stories were chosen by Deborah Blum, one of the best science journalists in the business. I've been a fan ever since I first read her Pulitzer Prize–winning series of articles
The Monkey Wars
more than twenty years ago. I feel privileged to share these pages with her. I try to read widely when searching for articles for this collection, but Blum opened my eyes to a number of wonderful new publications, which I hope will find a wider audience. Now it's time for all the members of that audience to settle into their favorite chairs or curl up in bed and discover twenty-six stories that matter.

I hope too that readers, writers, and editors will nominate their favorite articles for next year's anthology at
http://timfolger.net/forums
. The criteria for submissions and deadlines, and the address to which entries should be sent, can be found in the “news and announcements” forum on my web site. Once again this year I'm offering an incentive to enlist readers to scour the nation in search of good science and nature writing: send me an article that I haven't found, and if the article makes it into the anthology, I'll mail you a free copy of next year's edition. What do you think, Deborah? Can I get you to sign those copies? I also encourage readers to use the forums to leave feedback about the collection and to discuss all things scientific. The best way for publications to guarantee that their articles are considered for inclusion in the anthology is to place me on their subscription list, using the address posted in the “news and announcements” section of the forums.

I'd like to thank Deborah Blum for putting together such a compelling collection this year. If you'd like to keep up with her writing, I encourage you to follow “Poison Pen,” her
New York Times
blog, and “Elemental,” her blog for
Wired
magazine. Once again this year I'm indebted to Nina Barnett and her colleagues at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who make this collection possible. And I'm most grateful of all for my wise and beauteous
khaleesi
, Anne Nolan. Where would I be without you?

T
IM
F
OLGER

L
ET'S BEGIN
with a summer afternoon in Nevada some twenty-five years ago, hot and quiet, except for the faint, sly rustle of the wind in the desert sand.

Back then I was obsessively following a story about flawed designs of nuclear weapons. In the midst of my pursuit, the military scheduled an underground test of one of the warheads in our stockpile of nuclear armaments. The test was to be conducted at the Nevada Test Site (now called the Nevada National Security Site), a well-guarded stretch of rocky desert northwest of Las Vegas.

I wanted to be there. Somehow the bomb testers didn't think that was a good idea. But they did agree to a guided tour before the detonation, a chance to walk the underground tunnel that led to ground zero. My photographer and I had to get FBI clearance to go on the tour. The waiting period led me to neurotically wonder whether my teenage antiwar-protesting days would become an issue. I had skipped high school to attend some remarkably peaceful marches at the University of Georgia. Now suddenly I was a conspiracy theorist. “They used to fly airplanes over the protests to take photographs of the protesters, you know,” I told my husband, a former U.S. Army journalist, in a hissing way. He rolled his eyes. And rolled them again when the clearance sailed through.

The tunnel, as I remember, was quiet, a narrow cave of rough, dark rock, lit by the blue glow of fluorescence. Cables and boxy machinery had been strung down its length to the point where the warhead would wait. They'd dug it deep under one of the mountainous outcroppings that line the Nevada desert, and standing there, you could imagine how the place would shake when the detonation occurred. The rock floor beneath your feet would shatter and the mountain would shimmy, dancing on the desert. But still I was more interested in what lay aboveground, the relics of the far more primitive tests from earlier days.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the United States tested warheads aboveground. A hundred mushroom clouds blossomed, mostly here in Nevada, before we moved everything underground. Tourists in Las Vegas would gather to watch these demonstrations, applauding as the atomic storm flashed upward, lighting the sky, darkening it. They say the clouds were visible a hundred miles away. We might shake our heads today over such nuclear tourism, but people weren't so aware back then of the invisible drift of radioactive particles and the dangers they carried. That awareness would come later, along with a rise in radiation-induced illnesses across a swath of Nevada. In the moment, though, there was mostly a celebratory sense of dominance, pride that we could harness this wild blaze of power.

Meanwhile, scientists continued to calculate, study the extent of that power. In conjunction with those showy explosions, experimenters at the test site built houses and banks, bridges and stores, set at varying differences from ground zero so they could measure the range and power of the bomb's blast furnace.

On the day of our visit, the landscape of the old “bomb towns” was part of the driving tour. Through the car windows we could see the metal supports of a bridge twisted into black tumbleweed, brick houses with doors and windows blown out by the wind. We parked some distance away, not too far from a crater carved in the desert floor by an old impact. The test site is 680 square miles of mostly wild terrain, and it was moonscape quiet as we stepped out of the car.

“What's that yellow tape for?” I asked, pointing to some rough rectangles blocked off by what looked like crime-scene tape.

“Those are radioactive hot spots,” our guide answered.

Only a few minutes later the wind came up in a faint howl, dust wrapped around us like a ground fog, and through this brown-gray mist the guide's voice reassured us: “Don't worry. We'll check you out for radiation levels before you leave.”

 

So there you have the slightly alarmed science writer standing in a dirt cloud. Let's leave her there for the moment. There's a reason those blowing particles still drift through my memory. Who doesn't remember those edgy moments when you really wish you'd been standing somewhere else? But this moment also serves as a different kind of reminder. That everything—including a haze of windblown dust—is something more, holds a story worth telling.

“To see the world in a grain of sand,” wrote the nineteenth-century British poet William Blake in a poem with the lovely title “Auguries of Innocence.” I do not mean to claim anything so grand for the point I am making here. But perhaps I can make a case for a small metaphor. This is the natural world reshaped by our activities—a stretch of desert still radioactive because over this dusty terrain we developed, tested, and demonstrated our theories of atomic destruction. Here in this blowing dust is a story of science with all its human determination and innovation—and its occasional hubris. If told right, it's a great story, one that reminds us of all the unexpected complications that often come with scientific advances. In the best science stories, or so I believe, one often sees the arc of the choices we've made as a species to build and create—and occasionally to destroy.

In the stories we tell, the ones that really do justice to the scientific process, we show our readers that arc—the curving, complicated line that links discovery and development, choice and consequence. It sounds like such a simple thing. But it's when we connect the dots that we can connect with our readers in a richer sense. We remind them of the role that research and its results play in their own lives. And we remind them that scientific exploration of the world around us can reveal a portrait of connected lives on a tiny and far too fragile planet. An essay in this book, “Trapline,” by David Treuer, an Ojibwe writer, makes that point eloquently. There's a moment in the story when he's holding down an unconscious fox: “I felt the quickness of his breath as I knelt on him with one knee. With one hand on his head and the other on his chest, I felt his heart and the life in it.” And even unconscious, the fox's fear knocks against Treuer's hand. “Who knew that a heart could beat that fast?” And he goes on to recognize that in such a place, his own heart might do the same.

The science writers whom I admire bring such connections to singing, stinging life. They remind us that this is ever a human exercise—that scientists, like the rest of us, are just people trying to understand the world around us. They never forget that, as with any human enterprise, mistakes are made and opportunities lost. But they also remind us that at its best, the community of science is one that works to correct its errors, that seeks to make the world right and even better. In today's best science writing you find all of that—the stumbles and the hopes, the unexpected ideas and unexpected beauty. And you find it across an almost limitless spectrum of hard questions, fascinating ideas, sometimes unexpected answers. Even within the limits of this anthology, I can promise you stories that range from the shimmer of deep space to the wayward nature of a wild sheep.

It's been both a pleasure and a humbling experience to read and select the science stories for this anthology. I want to thank
The Best American Science and Nature Writing
's series editor, Tim Folger, for doing the searching and sifting that produced an amazing selection of articles for me to read. Tim has a wonderful eye for a story that matters. The time I spent reading through the selections brightened some ice-gray winter days in my home state of Wisconsin—which will tell you how good they were, because this last winter was very gray and
very
icy.

So it was difficult to winnow down to the twenty-six stories in this book. They are an eclectic mix, on a variety of subjects—yes, ranging from sheep to stars—in publications including well-established magazines, such as
National Geographic
, and newly created digital ones, such as
Nautilus
and
Medium.
For a longtime science writer like myself, it's reassuring to be reminded that such work continues at traditional outlets, and it's equally exciting to see the rise of innovative new outlets. All of them produced stories that challenged me to think in new ways about science and how it changes the world.

I believe the best science writing does exactly that—encourages us to think and rethink, puts us on a path toward change at a time when we need to take such a path, as the landscape itself changes around us. Some of these stories brought a different perspective to a long-standing issue like climate change (think about the appearance of new hybrid species); some startled me with an idea I hadn't considered before, such as the power of television soap operas to influence birthrates in developing countries. But always they made the world more interesting; they made the journeys of the scientists themselves more real. Sometimes, of course, the science writers are themselves scientists. So you'll find here the famed biologist E. O. Wilson, who is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his nonfiction books. In his tale of a national park in Mozambique struggling to recover from the collateral damage inflicted by war, Wilson reminds us to look beyond the poster-child species when we consider the natural world. “People yearn to see large wild animals and I am no exception,” he says. “But wildlife also includes the little things that run the world”—a reminder that I think is exactly right, and a phrase that I love. You'll also find the novelist Barbara Kingsolver, once a science writer herself. (In the 1980s she had a science-writing job at the University of Arizona.) Science and nature still weave their way through many of Kingsolver's novels, and in the small, lyrical essay here, she uses knitting as a metaphor for the shifting seasons and textures of life around us: “the particular green-silver of leaves overturned by an oncoming storm. An alkaline desert's russet bronze, a mustard of Appalachian spring, some bright spectral intangible you find you long to possess.”

There was pleasure too in discovering writers that I didn't know so well. For instance, those sheep I mentioned. In “Twelve Ways of Viewing Alaska's Wild, White Sheep,” Bill Sherwonit weaves together a story of sometimes luminous rock-climbing animals, the hunters who kill them, and the scientists who study them, including the sheep's rather wonderfully shifty response to hunting season. It's a fascinating portrait of a wild animal usually ignored in favor of the region's more dramatic species, like grizzlies—and a portrait of us as well. Both science and self-reflection shine as well in former astronomer Pippa Goldschmidt's essay, “What Our Telescopes Couldn't See,” and in Sarah Stewart Johnson's lovely “O-Rings,” a story that travels from the frozen Antarctic to the catastrophic launch of the space shuttle
Challenger.
As she makes that journey, Johnson threads through it a meditation on life, death, physics, and the reasons we make daredevil choices.

In many ways, these and the other pieces gathered here are stories of choices and of consequences. You'll see that in Seth Mnookin's “The Return of Measles.” Measles is a formidable virus. Its transmission rate can be 90 percent, and it's durable enough to survive outside the body for some hours, meaning that everything touched by a carrier—even tables and chairs—can harbor the infection. Mnookin counts, in meticulous detail, what the ill-informed antivaccine movement may cost us in hospitalizations, deaths, and the consumption of those increasingly scarce public health dollars. You'll see choice and consequence in Kate Sheppard's “Under Water,” another meticulous accounting, this time of building and rebuilding on floodplains. Sheppard's story, for
Mother Jones
, is about the politics and money involved in coastal building. It simmers with the frustration of scientists who keep warning about the costs of building the same homes over and over again—homes that are increasingly likely to be washed away. One study found that homes rebuilt more than once because of flood damage accounted for some 40 percent of National Flood Insurance Program payouts. “No surprise then,” Sheppard writes, “that the federal insurance program is now $25 billion in the hole.”