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The Science Writer Every Science Nerd Wants You to Read

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Monday, November 21, 2022

On a gray Montana morning, I sat with the science writer David Quammen in the office of his Bozeman home, each of us in opposite corners and wearing masks. Quammen’s rescue python, Boots, who was staring at us from inside his enclosure, arched up and flicked his tongue in my direction. An air filter whirred in the background: Quammen had only just recovered from COVID a couple of days before, and by the next day, he would test positive again in a case of Paxlovid rebound.What a hacky, clickable headline this profile could end up having, I said: “David Quammen, Chronicler of COVID, Gave Me COVID.”Thankfully, our precautions worked. Quammen, 74, is the favorite science writer of many people who don’t usually read science writing. He also happens to be the favorite science writer of many science writers, a foundational figure. Among the kinds of people who cover anything from space telescopes to treatment-resistant bacteria, Quammen is a writer to geek out over. He’s perhaps best known for his globe-trotting adventures, which makes it more than a little ironic that, this time, his subject has tracked him down here rather than the other way around. I scanned the room, jotting down details such as a framed portrait of a white-bearded Charles Darwin and the desk peppered with Post-it Notes. “Smart,” he said, watching me work. “Offices are information-rich environments.”Quammen’s newest book, Breathless, which was recently shortlisted for the National Book Award, is the definitive account of how a little bundle of nucleic acid and protein called SARS-CoV-2 came to so upend our world, and the work of scientists to understand what it is, where it came from, and what to do. It was written almost exclusively in this room.In many ways this new work is a culmination of the kind of books that Quammen has been producing for decades. It’s also a clear break from them: a science story that refused to stay at a safe distance, that has almost all the wonder and joy leached out of it, and that we all lived through and many of us would just as soon forget.Let me come clean: I’m a fan. Quammen’s influence on the entire genre can be felt far and wide. Those viral New York Times stories about wacky animals with punning headlines? There’s some Quammen DNA in there, and in many other places.His first nonfiction book, The Song of the Dodo, which was published in 1996, is seminal: a set of swashbuckling pilgrimages to Madagascar, Mauritius, the Amazon, the Aru Islands, and more, braided with the intellectual history of evolution and extinction and rapacious colonialism; all of it suffused with discovery and tragedy; and pulled together, like the rest of Quammen’s work, by the snarky, conversational tone of a guy who majored in English in New Haven and somehow can name-drop Heraclitus or Absalom, Absalom! without sounding pretentious.The most pressing question I had for him about his new work had a setup like this: Song of the Dodo, like most great science or environmental writing, is propelled by both Oh wow and Oh no. In that case, the origin of awe-inspiring creatures on islands drives us to consider the incipient sixth mass extinction.  [Read: The revolution that rewrote life’s history]Or consider 2012’s Spillover, which introduced popular audiences to the dangers of new diseases crossing over from animal to human populations. There, Quammen braided together detective yarns about mystery illnesses with the Cassandra-esque warning from scientists that encroaching on ecosystems and cramming stressed creatures into markets could lead to the next pandemic. And now, of course, the new Breathless is a sort of Spillover sequel, wringing grim excitement out of the race to understand the SARS-CoV-2 virus, dedicated to its victims' surviving loved ones.To me, though, COVID would seem to threaten the entire format. Perhaps one of the greatest living science writer’s longtime hook—as I started to sketch out to the man himself in his office—was to find enchantment in the places that might feel unknown to most readers, in the jungles and bazaars. Then he would leverage this curiosity and color in order to illuminate evolutionary and ecological cycles with grave importance. Alexis Joy Hagestad / The Atlantic But this virus wasn’t one ounce enchanting. I feel oddly guilty admitting it, but for much of the pandemic, the only feelings driving me to stay informed have been duty, self-protection, and dread. Here was an evolutionary story with almost no wonder left and much less safe distance for the audience to have fun with the intellectual history of remarkable ideas. It came into our homes, even our bodies. Many of us were the story. How could you write about it without breaking the Oh wow, Oh no balance? Or, a variant on the same question: In a year when things are getting so visibly, evidently worse, how could one of biology’s great modern chroniclers write about the bleak outlook for biodiversity? Or about the climate crisis?We went back and forth on this point. Environmental degradation has been happening his whole life, he said. He hadn’t meant the takeaway from his work to be that all of this was out there, at a safe distance, an oddity to be discovered on safari; it had always been under the surface of all of our lives. Yes, he wanted even the ugliest story to read like a “guilty pleasure.” But this had always been about creating literary art out of hard facts for serious ends. If my sense was that the past few years had shattered the affluent science-book reader’s comfortable rationalization that Yeah, but this stuff probably won’t matter for me, Quammen’s answer was to say no: The idea that we were at a safe remove had already been a fantasy.[Read: The pre-pandemic universe was the fiction]He said as much after we left his house and drove out that drizzly morning to do some hiking, both of us wearing masks in his RAV4 with the windows cracked. “You realize that ecology and conservation and evolutionary biology are not small subcategories of the field of biology, which is a small subcategory of human science, which is a small category of human endeavor,” he said. “It’s the other way around.”The haunting first sections of Breathless drift among various disease researchers who had worried that something like this would happen, or who knew enough to start worrying when a mystery pneumonia cluster popped up in Wuhan in the final days of 2019. First, we meet someone smart. Then we watch as they take a tilt at the emerging virus, chipping off some hard-won fact or insight. Understanding builds up piece by piece as we watch over these experts’ shoulders.In theory, it’s hard to imagine anyone better positioned to write this story. In the course of exploring how viruses leap from animals to people, Spillover had devoted an entire section to the original SARS outbreak of the early 2000s, a more fatal, less transmissible coronavirus that got snuffed out by good public policy before escaping into endemicity. Revisiting that reporting is eerie, and good luck getting a visa approved to do it now. He wrangled bats in a cave in southern China with coronavirus-hunting researchers, then visited a farm full of bamboo rats, the kind of market animal that could act as an evolutionary or geographic intermediary between a bat virus and humanity.Toward the end of January 2020, Quammen weighed in on a then-emerging virus for The New York Times with his own uncertainty about how big a story this would be. “Six months from today, Wuhan pneumonia may be receding into memory. Or not.” He left home for a month in Tasmania researching Tasmanian devils beset by contagious face cancers, but spent much of that time answering media requests for commentary on the worsening situation. By mid-2020 he had dropped the devils and committed to a COVID book, he told me. But writing it demanded abandoning his typical approach.[Read: The dragon autopsy]For one, he needed to do his reporting over Zoom. His operating principle since The Song of the Dodo had been to hop on a plane. “If you’re writing about Komodo dragons, go to Komodo,” he said. The pandemic precluded travel, though, and he couldn’t see himself getting to the scrubbed, shut down Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market anytime soon. But perhaps he didn’t need to. Readers could be assumed to know much of the background and the dramatis personae already; no need to spend much time introducing Tony Fauci.Then there was the science itself, which refused to stay still. New variants kept evolving into existence as he wrote. (The book ends with the rise of the original Omicron strain, for example.) Scientists, journalists, and politicians battled over whether COVID came from “a natural” origin or a lab leak, a debate that consumes Breathless’ s penultimate section. And considering that the virus had touched so many people and places—and with his reader’s confidence in institutional authority likely shaken—Quammen has difficulty finding a single trustworthy point of view to put at the center of the narrative.Eyeing these constraints, Quammen settled on a reporting structure he hadn’t tried before: what he called a “Greek chorus” of Zoom interviews with 95 experts across the world, who are dutifully listed and credited in the back of the book. “More than fifty years ago, when I first read Faulkner and fell under his spell, the single impression that struck me most,” he writes on the book’s final page, “was that the truth of any event or person is fragmented.”The result is a gripping, first-draft-of-history account of a virus’s first two years on Earth, pieced together from various lines of scientific evidence and then enlivened by metaphor. Quammen seems to know exactly how far into the weeds he can go—pretty far—before offering a change of pace. A few images hit me especially hard, none more so than an excursion into the conservation woes of pangolins, another possible intermediary mammal for coronavirus spillover. Quammen quotes a paper that described an illness in pangolins as rendering the animals “mostly inactive and sobbing,” before dying in custody “despite exhausting rescue efforts.” His response:  “Sobbing might be taken as a metaphor for respiratory struggle, but then again, sometimes a sob is just a sob.”Breathless, like the virus it depicts, is a dramatic culmination of an idea that Quammen introduced many of us to in Spillover: that the science story of viral ecology could very easily become the biggest story on planet Earth. Once that happened, though, it wasn’t just a science story, a complexity that Quammen acknowledges while still mostly sticking to technical matters. Politics and public health and a zillion other dimensions came into play, as did a new, forced intimacy that almost all of us bring to the subject matter. A subtle refrain echoes throughout the book, typically after a flourish of scientific detective work. “Meanwhile,” Quammen will write, “people were dying.”On the way to Montana with my advance copy of Breathless, another gimmick had occurred to me. Here I was flying out to Quammen in much the same way Quammen might approach a Komodo dragon: as a larger-than-life character who might shed insight on an underlying reality. In this case, the matter of What It Means to Write and Read Science Today.Of course, this necessitated seeing him in his natural habitat, not just in the office. After our chat in his office, we drove south of town to the Gallatin River and pulled into a turnout by the side of the highway. Then we stood on the riverbank, trucks roaring behind us. This was an important place from his old white-water-kayaking days, he told me. When I asked him to annotate what he saw, he responded with three sequential stories about a boulder in the water named House Rock.The first was embodied, kinetic, personal. As you move through a calm stretch of water toward this rock and the surrounding white water in a kayak, tension builds, like a roller coaster inching past the apex of the track. But long ago, a veteran kayaker had helped him thread a safe route through. This sealed what would be a 20-year passion for white-water kayaking, even though he’s since aged out of it, and it may explain why he had brought the city-slicker youngster writing his profile out here.The second story was grim but memorable. One time, as he reached this spot, he saw a search team in orange vests pulling out the skeleton of a college student who had been killed about a year earlier in a drunken misadventure. Then, a little while later, a friend of Quammen’s spilled out of his boat right nearby. The friend caught himself in the rocks, and seemed to be rooting around before he joined the rest of their regular kayaking gang with a “gruesome smile.” In his hand, the friend held the college student’s missing jawbone, which they took back to town and gave to the coroner.“And all that was probably more than you asked for,” he said, but of course we were also in Montana in fall with the forests already reddening, and in his head he held a browsable library of optional ecological context. “I also see, you know, these cottonwoods, and there’s an ouzel, a bird, working underwater here,” he said, pointing.Quammen was using his old formula. Here the world had worn a little thin and we could see hidden things showing through. Here, adventure, raw narrative, and ambient nature were all frothing around a real place governed, like the rest of physical reality, by both contingent circumstance and the laws of science. Writer to writer, I found this and the rest of my time with Quammen inspirational, thrilling. I also thought, later on: I don’t know if there will be another David Quammen.  Science writing as a larger guild is in a tricky spot. It’s needed, yes. Future viral outbreaks are assured, ecosystems are collapsing, and the climate crisis rages on. But conspiracy-minded politics, the ceaseless chaos of social media, and a rising skepticism toward expertise make it harder than ever for anyone to establish themselves as a trustworthy source of information.[Read: Forest animals are living on the edge]“I’m just an English major who has written a bunch of books and magazine articles,” Quammen told me. Any authority he had was only on loan, borrowed from the chorus of actual experts he had spoken with, their data, and their interpretations. “I’ve tried to give people what I think we need, which is thoroughness, respect for scientific expertise, respect for the provisionality of science, a little bit of skeptical humor,” he said. “And respect for a diversity of opinions.”Another threat to the genre, more prosaic but no less consequential, is that the economics of it aren’t quite working out.In quick succession after I left Quammen’s company, a gifted, entrepreneurial freelancer, Marion Renault—maybe the younger science writer I most admire—posted a series of tweets about how financial insecurity and the overall precarity of their work had forced them to step back from the business. Then Gimlet Media laid off the staff of a climate podcast. A few weeks earlier, six editors had been laid off at National Geographic, the outlet that about two decades ago had offered Quammen three round-trip business-class tickets to Africa for the story that spawned the idea that led to Spillover and subsequently Breathless. (He opted to fly coach instead and do more reporting, he said. Learning about that era in journalism felt like learning that in the Carboniferous Period, there had been so much oxygen in the air that dragonflies could have two-foot wingspans, I said.)After the rock, we moved to a nearby parking lot, then started hiking uphill, Quammen testing out a pair of surgically replaced knees. On the way back down he pointed out to me a tiny spruce tree growing, improbably, atop a boulder. It reminded him of a landscape in Yellowstone National Park, a place where he has reported extensively, and where he would have taken me if recent, extreme rains hadn’t washed away parts of the most convenient road.He described it instead. A wide open valley of grass and scattered boulders called “glacial erratics.” Each boulder has one tree nestled up right next to it, as if the rock had slid into a tree and stopped. “What does that represent?” he asked. “It represents the fact that this is such a severe environment that a Douglas fir cannot get started through the sapling phase without a rock to hide behind.”Not to overburden those trees in that valley, but later the idea of the tree nurseries seemed to represent a lot of things, among them both the fragments of wonder still left in the natural world and the persistence of a scattered few good science writers to examine what’s happening out there. The tall, established trees were hanging on; for any new ones to have any chance, though, they needed luck, privilege, shelter. We kept walking. I asked him what he thought the fate of that ecosystem might be.“It may be that you come through there 40 years from now, and you see all these big glacial erratics and standing next to each one of them is a dead snag of a previously living Douglas fir,” he said. We continued down, and I continued to prod him about science writing in a world ruled by more and more unhinged ecological, evolutionary, and environmental cycles, and he gently pushed back.“Things are still funny, and joyous, and wonderful,” he said, turning out to the healthy forest around us. “This day—this day is not sad.”

A visit with David Quammen, who confronted in COVID a story that refused to stay at a safe distance

On a gray Montana morning, I sat with the science writer David Quammen in the office of his Bozeman home, each of us in opposite corners and wearing masks. Quammen’s rescue python, Boots, who was staring at us from inside his enclosure, arched up and flicked his tongue in my direction. An air filter whirred in the background: Quammen had only just recovered from COVID a couple of days before, and by the next day, he would test positive again in a case of Paxlovid rebound.

What a hacky, clickable headline this profile could end up having, I said: “David Quammen, Chronicler of COVID, Gave Me COVID.”

Thankfully, our precautions worked. Quammen, 74, is the favorite science writer of many people who don’t usually read science writing. He also happens to be the favorite science writer of many science writers, a foundational figure. Among the kinds of people who cover anything from space telescopes to treatment-resistant bacteria, Quammen is a writer to geek out over. He’s perhaps best known for his globe-trotting adventures, which makes it more than a little ironic that, this time, his subject has tracked him down here rather than the other way around. I scanned the room, jotting down details such as a framed portrait of a white-bearded Charles Darwin and the desk peppered with Post-it Notes. “Smart,” he said, watching me work. “Offices are information-rich environments.”

Quammen’s newest book, Breathless, which was recently shortlisted for the National Book Award, is the definitive account of how a little bundle of nucleic acid and protein called SARS-CoV-2 came to so upend our world, and the work of scientists to understand what it is, where it came from, and what to do. It was written almost exclusively in this room.

In many ways this new work is a culmination of the kind of books that Quammen has been producing for decades. It’s also a clear break from them: a science story that refused to stay at a safe distance, that has almost all the wonder and joy leached out of it, and that we all lived through and many of us would just as soon forget.

Let me come clean: I’m a fan. Quammen’s influence on the entire genre can be felt far and wide. Those viral New York Times stories about wacky animals with punning headlines? There’s some Quammen DNA in there, and in many other places.

His first nonfiction book, The Song of the Dodo, which was published in 1996, is seminal: a set of swashbuckling pilgrimages to Madagascar, Mauritius, the Amazon, the Aru Islands, and more, braided with the intellectual history of evolution and extinction and rapacious colonialism; all of it suffused with discovery and tragedy; and pulled together, like the rest of Quammen’s work, by the snarky, conversational tone of a guy who majored in English in New Haven and somehow can name-drop Heraclitus or Absalom, Absalom! without sounding pretentious.

The most pressing question I had for him about his new work had a setup like this: Song of the Dodo, like most great science or environmental writing, is propelled by both Oh wow and Oh no. In that case, the origin of awe-inspiring creatures on islands drives us to consider the incipient sixth mass extinction.  

[Read: The revolution that rewrote life’s history]

Or consider 2012’s Spillover, which introduced popular audiences to the dangers of new diseases crossing over from animal to human populations. There, Quammen braided together detective yarns about mystery illnesses with the Cassandra-esque warning from scientists that encroaching on ecosystems and cramming stressed creatures into markets could lead to the next pandemic. And now, of course, the new Breathless is a sort of Spillover sequel, wringing grim excitement out of the race to understand the SARS-CoV-2 virus, dedicated to its victims' surviving loved ones.

To me, though, COVID would seem to threaten the entire format. Perhaps one of the greatest living science writer’s longtime hook—as I started to sketch out to the man himself in his office—was to find enchantment in the places that might feel unknown to most readers, in the jungles and bazaars. Then he would leverage this curiosity and color in order to illuminate evolutionary and ecological cycles with grave importance.

David Quammen
Alexis Joy Hagestad / The Atlantic

But this virus wasn’t one ounce enchanting. I feel oddly guilty admitting it, but for much of the pandemic, the only feelings driving me to stay informed have been duty, self-protection, and dread. Here was an evolutionary story with almost no wonder left and much less safe distance for the audience to have fun with the intellectual history of remarkable ideas. It came into our homes, even our bodies. Many of us were the story. How could you write about it without breaking the Oh wow, Oh no balance? Or, a variant on the same question: In a year when things are getting so visibly, evidently worse, how could one of biology’s great modern chroniclers write about the bleak outlook for biodiversity? Or about the climate crisis?

We went back and forth on this point. Environmental degradation has been happening his whole life, he said. He hadn’t meant the takeaway from his work to be that all of this was out there, at a safe distance, an oddity to be discovered on safari; it had always been under the surface of all of our lives. Yes, he wanted even the ugliest story to read like a “guilty pleasure.” But this had always been about creating literary art out of hard facts for serious ends. If my sense was that the past few years had shattered the affluent science-book reader’s comfortable rationalization that Yeah, but this stuff probably won’t matter for me, Quammen’s answer was to say no: The idea that we were at a safe remove had already been a fantasy.

[Read: The pre-pandemic universe was the fiction]

He said as much after we left his house and drove out that drizzly morning to do some hiking, both of us wearing masks in his RAV4 with the windows cracked. “You realize that ecology and conservation and evolutionary biology are not small subcategories of the field of biology, which is a small subcategory of human science, which is a small category of human endeavor,” he said. “It’s the other way around.”

The haunting first sections of Breathless drift among various disease researchers who had worried that something like this would happen, or who knew enough to start worrying when a mystery pneumonia cluster popped up in Wuhan in the final days of 2019. First, we meet someone smart. Then we watch as they take a tilt at the emerging virus, chipping off some hard-won fact or insight. Understanding builds up piece by piece as we watch over these experts’ shoulders.

In theory, it’s hard to imagine anyone better positioned to write this story. In the course of exploring how viruses leap from animals to people, Spillover had devoted an entire section to the original SARS outbreak of the early 2000s, a more fatal, less transmissible coronavirus that got snuffed out by good public policy before escaping into endemicity. Revisiting that reporting is eerie, and good luck getting a visa approved to do it now. He wrangled bats in a cave in southern China with coronavirus-hunting researchers, then visited a farm full of bamboo rats, the kind of market animal that could act as an evolutionary or geographic intermediary between a bat virus and humanity.

Toward the end of January 2020, Quammen weighed in on a then-emerging virus for The New York Times with his own uncertainty about how big a story this would be. “Six months from today, Wuhan pneumonia may be receding into memory. Or not.” He left home for a month in Tasmania researching Tasmanian devils beset by contagious face cancers, but spent much of that time answering media requests for commentary on the worsening situation. By mid-2020 he had dropped the devils and committed to a COVID book, he told me. But writing it demanded abandoning his typical approach.

[Read: The dragon autopsy]

For one, he needed to do his reporting over Zoom. His operating principle since The Song of the Dodo had been to hop on a plane. “If you’re writing about Komodo dragons, go to Komodo,” he said. The pandemic precluded travel, though, and he couldn’t see himself getting to the scrubbed, shut down Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market anytime soon. But perhaps he didn’t need to. Readers could be assumed to know much of the background and the dramatis personae already; no need to spend much time introducing Tony Fauci.

Then there was the science itself, which refused to stay still. New variants kept evolving into existence as he wrote. (The book ends with the rise of the original Omicron strain, for example.) Scientists, journalists, and politicians battled over whether COVID came from “a natural” origin or a lab leak, a debate that consumes Breathless’ s penultimate section. And considering that the virus had touched so many people and places—and with his reader’s confidence in institutional authority likely shaken—Quammen has difficulty finding a single trustworthy point of view to put at the center of the narrative.

Eyeing these constraints, Quammen settled on a reporting structure he hadn’t tried before: what he called a “Greek chorus” of Zoom interviews with 95 experts across the world, who are dutifully listed and credited in the back of the book. “More than fifty years ago, when I first read Faulkner and fell under his spell, the single impression that struck me most,” he writes on the book’s final page, “was that the truth of any event or person is fragmented.”

The result is a gripping, first-draft-of-history account of a virus’s first two years on Earth, pieced together from various lines of scientific evidence and then enlivened by metaphor. Quammen seems to know exactly how far into the weeds he can go—pretty far—before offering a change of pace. A few images hit me especially hard, none more so than an excursion into the conservation woes of pangolins, another possible intermediary mammal for coronavirus spillover. Quammen quotes a paper that described an illness in pangolins as rendering the animals “mostly inactive and sobbing,” before dying in custody “despite exhausting rescue efforts.” His response:  “Sobbing might be taken as a metaphor for respiratory struggle, but then again, sometimes a sob is just a sob.”

Breathless, like the virus it depicts, is a dramatic culmination of an idea that Quammen introduced many of us to in Spillover: that the science story of viral ecology could very easily become the biggest story on planet Earth. Once that happened, though, it wasn’t just a science story, a complexity that Quammen acknowledges while still mostly sticking to technical matters. Politics and public health and a zillion other dimensions came into play, as did a new, forced intimacy that almost all of us bring to the subject matter. A subtle refrain echoes throughout the book, typically after a flourish of scientific detective work. “Meanwhile,” Quammen will write, “people were dying.”

On the way to Montana with my advance copy of Breathless, another gimmick had occurred to me. Here I was flying out to Quammen in much the same way Quammen might approach a Komodo dragon: as a larger-than-life character who might shed insight on an underlying reality. In this case, the matter of What It Means to Write and Read Science Today.

Of course, this necessitated seeing him in his natural habitat, not just in the office. After our chat in his office, we drove south of town to the Gallatin River and pulled into a turnout by the side of the highway. Then we stood on the riverbank, trucks roaring behind us. This was an important place from his old white-water-kayaking days, he told me. When I asked him to annotate what he saw, he responded with three sequential stories about a boulder in the water named House Rock.

The first was embodied, kinetic, personal. As you move through a calm stretch of water toward this rock and the surrounding white water in a kayak, tension builds, like a roller coaster inching past the apex of the track. But long ago, a veteran kayaker had helped him thread a safe route through. This sealed what would be a 20-year passion for white-water kayaking, even though he’s since aged out of it, and it may explain why he had brought the city-slicker youngster writing his profile out here.

The second story was grim but memorable. One time, as he reached this spot, he saw a search team in orange vests pulling out the skeleton of a college student who had been killed about a year earlier in a drunken misadventure. Then, a little while later, a friend of Quammen’s spilled out of his boat right nearby. The friend caught himself in the rocks, and seemed to be rooting around before he joined the rest of their regular kayaking gang with a “gruesome smile.” In his hand, the friend held the college student’s missing jawbone, which they took back to town and gave to the coroner.

“And all that was probably more than you asked for,” he said, but of course we were also in Montana in fall with the forests already reddening, and in his head he held a browsable library of optional ecological context. “I also see, you know, these cottonwoods, and there’s an ouzel, a bird, working underwater here,” he said, pointing.

Quammen was using his old formula. Here the world had worn a little thin and we could see hidden things showing through. Here, adventure, raw narrative, and ambient nature were all frothing around a real place governed, like the rest of physical reality, by both contingent circumstance and the laws of science. Writer to writer, I found this and the rest of my time with Quammen inspirational, thrilling. I also thought, later on: I don’t know if there will be another David Quammen.  

Science writing as a larger guild is in a tricky spot. It’s needed, yes. Future viral outbreaks are assured, ecosystems are collapsing, and the climate crisis rages on. But conspiracy-minded politics, the ceaseless chaos of social media, and a rising skepticism toward expertise make it harder than ever for anyone to establish themselves as a trustworthy source of information.

[Read: Forest animals are living on the edge]

“I’m just an English major who has written a bunch of books and magazine articles,” Quammen told me. Any authority he had was only on loan, borrowed from the chorus of actual experts he had spoken with, their data, and their interpretations. “I’ve tried to give people what I think we need, which is thoroughness, respect for scientific expertise, respect for the provisionality of science, a little bit of skeptical humor,” he said. “And respect for a diversity of opinions.”

Another threat to the genre, more prosaic but no less consequential, is that the economics of it aren’t quite working out.

In quick succession after I left Quammen’s company, a gifted, entrepreneurial freelancer, Marion Renault—maybe the younger science writer I most admire—posted a series of tweets about how financial insecurity and the overall precarity of their work had forced them to step back from the business. Then Gimlet Media laid off the staff of a climate podcast. A few weeks earlier, six editors had been laid off at National Geographic, the outlet that about two decades ago had offered Quammen three round-trip business-class tickets to Africa for the story that spawned the idea that led to Spillover and subsequently Breathless. (He opted to fly coach instead and do more reporting, he said. Learning about that era in journalism felt like learning that in the Carboniferous Period, there had been so much oxygen in the air that dragonflies could have two-foot wingspans, I said.)

After the rock, we moved to a nearby parking lot, then started hiking uphill, Quammen testing out a pair of surgically replaced knees. On the way back down he pointed out to me a tiny spruce tree growing, improbably, atop a boulder. It reminded him of a landscape in Yellowstone National Park, a place where he has reported extensively, and where he would have taken me if recent, extreme rains hadn’t washed away parts of the most convenient road.

He described it instead. A wide open valley of grass and scattered boulders called “glacial erratics.” Each boulder has one tree nestled up right next to it, as if the rock had slid into a tree and stopped. “What does that represent?” he asked. “It represents the fact that this is such a severe environment that a Douglas fir cannot get started through the sapling phase without a rock to hide behind.”

Not to overburden those trees in that valley, but later the idea of the tree nurseries seemed to represent a lot of things, among them both the fragments of wonder still left in the natural world and the persistence of a scattered few good science writers to examine what’s happening out there. The tall, established trees were hanging on; for any new ones to have any chance, though, they needed luck, privilege, shelter. We kept walking. I asked him what he thought the fate of that ecosystem might be.

“It may be that you come through there 40 years from now, and you see all these big glacial erratics and standing next to each one of them is a dead snag of a previously living Douglas fir,” he said. We continued down, and I continued to prod him about science writing in a world ruled by more and more unhinged ecological, evolutionary, and environmental cycles, and he gently pushed back.

“Things are still funny, and joyous, and wonderful,” he said, turning out to the healthy forest around us. “This day—this day is not sad.”

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

Three MIT-led projects awarded MURI funding for 2023

Through the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative, the US Department of Defense supports research projects in areas of critical importance to national defense.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) recently announced the recipients of its Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) awards for 2023. This year, MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) professors George Barbasthasis and John Hart, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Assistant Professor Pulkit Agrawal, and MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering Associate Professor Rob Macfarlane are principal investigators on projects selected for MURI Awards. Two others from MIT — Professor Ila Fiete of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Director of Strategic Industry Engagement for the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Aude Oliva — will be participating in these projects. In addition, three MURI projects led by faculty at other institutions will be collaborating with other MIT researchers. The 2023 MURI awards total $220 million and will fund 31 research projects at an extensive list of institutions. The MURI program is designed to support research in areas of critical importance to national defense, and brings together teams of researchers from multiple universities to collaborate on projects that are expected to lead to significant advances in science and technology. The program is highly competitive, with only a small fraction of proposals receiving funding each year, and it has a strong track record of supporting research that has led to breakthroughs in fields ranging from materials science to information technology. Fundamental limits of nanoscale X-ray microscopy in radiation-sensitive materials One of the funded projects is titled “Searching for what’s new: the systematic development of dynamic X‐ray microscopy.” This will be led by Professor George Barbastathis of MechE, alongside colleagues from Northwestern University and Stony Brook University, and falls within the Fundamental Limits of Nanoscale X-ray Microscopy in Radiation Sensitive Materials MURI topic. Barbastathis and his team explain that X-ray microscopes offer unique capabilities, but can also be harmful to the small objects they’re taking images of. This team has developed a new approach that puts forward a paradigm shift for higher resolution and the study of dynamics, allowing one to start with knowledge they already have of a specific object, rather than a blank slate. This should allow them to use less harmful X-ray exposures. The team plans to test this approach to study three model systems: small machines, batteries, and cells. This project is sponsored by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research and will help the DoD by providing new insights into the function of batteries used in troop-carried electronics, aircraft, and elsewhere; in the response of micro electronic mechanical systems, which are used in the field as sensors; and in the biological response of cells to external stresses and environmental changes. Spatially programmed material properties via designed mesostructures John Hart and Rob Macfarlane are co-leading a MURI project entitled “Directed assembly of mesoscale architectures in additive manufacturing,” sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research. The project is in collaboration with professors A.J. Boydston of the University of Wisconsin; Randall Erb and Safa Jamali of Northeastern University; and Arthi Jayaraman of the University of Delaware. The team’s expertise spans chemistry, materials science, simulation, machine learning, machine design, and characterization. While additive manufacturing can create complex geometries from a wide variety of materials, it is typically not possible to control the architecture of the material at a length scale smaller than the resolution of the additive process. The MURI team will combine additive manufacturing with “bottom-up” directed assembly, using tailored nanoparticle building blocks and polymers, and by building new instruments to study the process and validate computational predictions. The end goal of the project is to realize materials and structures with emergent thermal electromagnetic, and optical properties that could be used in, for instance, cooling of high-power electronics, next-generation communication systems, and high-performance cameras. Neuro‐inspired distributed deep learning Pulkit Agrawal, assistant professor in EECS and an affiliate of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), leads a third MURI project. Agrawal's team, which includes Ila Fiete and Aude Oliva of MIT as well as researchers from Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley, proposes an alternative to the mainstream machine-learning practice of condensing large datasets into the weights of deep neural network and discarding the training data itself. Such an approach has fundamental limitations when it comes to lifelong learning and the associated questions of generalization, long-term reasoning, and catastrophic forgetting. As such, the proposal suggests avoiding compressing data ahead of time and instead combining data on-the-fly for the environment or task encountered by the agent, using memory retrieval to improve generalization.  The work aims to articulate a set of high-level computational principles for the design of memory systems, leveraging knowledge about how the brain encodes and retrieves information from memory. It aims to determine how these principles can be leveraged to tackle challenging machine learning tasks, understand how biological memory systems represent and retrieve naturalistic inputs, and help in the integration of AI into a wide variety of real-world systems. Ideally, the end result will yield practical algorithms for generalization to new tasks, lifelong learning without catastrophic forgetting, and transfer across sensory modalities.

How corporations use greenwashing to win consumers

Many corporations claim their products are “green-friendly.” But how do you know if what they’re selling is truly eco-safe? SciLine interviewed Thomas Lyon, professor of sustainable science, technology and commerce at the University of Michigan, on how to buy environmentally sustainable products, whether carbon credits actually work and the prevalence of greenwashing. WHAT IS GREENWASHING? […] The post How corporations use greenwashing to win consumers appeared first on SAPeople - Worldwide South African News.

Many corporations claim their products are “green-friendly.” But how do you know if what they’re selling is truly eco-safe? SciLine interviewed Thomas Lyon, professor of sustainable science, technology and commerce at the University of Michigan, on how to buy environmentally sustainable products, whether carbon credits actually work and the prevalence of greenwashing. WHAT IS GREENWASHING? How can the consumer avoid falling for it? ALSO READ: Climate change protest: A single radical gets more media coverage than thousands of marchers Thomas Lyon: I still love the old concept of the seven sins of greenwashing. The first and most common is what’s called the sin of the hidden trade-off, where an organization tells you something good they do but neglects to tell you the bad things that go along with it. For example, when you see an electric hand dryer in a public restroom, it may say on it: This dryer protects the environment. It saves trees from being used for paper. But it neglects to tell you that, of course, it’s powered with electricity, and that electricity may have been generated from coal-fired power, which might actually be more damaging than using a tree, which is a renewable resource. That’s the most common of the seven deadly sins. Other ones include the sin of irrelevance. For example, telling people that “this ship has an onboard wastewater recycling plant,” when all ships that go to Alaska are required by law to have exactly that kind of equipment. It’s no reflection of the company’s quality. GREEN FRIENDLY The sin of fibbing is actually the least common. Companies don’t usually actually lie about things. After all, it’s against the law. One of the increasingly common forms of greenwashing … is a hidden trade-off between the company’s market activities and its political activities. You may get a company that says: Look at this, we invested US$5 million in renewable energy last year. They may not tell you that they spent $100 billion drilling for oil in a sensitive location. And they may not tell you that they spent $50 million lobbying against climate legislation that would have made a real difference. Thomas Lyon: Greenwashing is any communication that leads the listener to adopt an overly favorable impression of a company’s greenness. WHAT ARE CARBON CREDITS (OR OFFSETS)? Thomas Lyon: I think the easiest way to understand these may be to step back a little bit and think about cap-and-trade systems … under which the government will set a cap on the aggregate amount of, say, carbon emissions. And within that, each company gets a right to emit a certain amount of carbon. But that company can then trade permits with other companies. Suppose the company finds it’s going to be really expensive for it to reduce its carbon emissions. But there’s some other company next door that could do it really cheaply. The company with the expensive reductions could pay the other company to do the reductions for it, and it then buys one of the permits – or more than one permit – from the company that can do it cheaply. ALSO READ: Snake rescuer catches 1.8m long black mamba in Durban That kind of trading system has been recommended by economists for decades, because it lowers the overall cost of achieving a given level of emissions reduction. And that’s a clean, well-enforced, reliable system. Now the place where things get confusing for people is that a lot of times the offsets are not coming from within a cap-and-trade system. Instead they’re coming from a voluntary offset that’s offered by some free-standing producer that’s not included in a cap. Now it’s necessary to ask a whole series of additional questions. Perhaps the foremost among them is: Is this offset actually producing a reduction that was not going to happen anyway? CONSUMERS’ DUTY It may be that the company claims, “Oh, we’re saving this forest from being cut down.” But maybe the forest was in a protected region in a country where there was no chance it was going to be cut down anyway. So that offset is not what is called in the offset world “additional.” What should consumers make of companies that offer programs such as planting a tree for every widget they sell? Thomas Lyon: Overall, it’s better that they’re trying to do something than just ignoring the issue. But this is where you, the consumer, have to start doing your homework … and look for a provider that has a strong reputation and that is making claims validated by external sources. Which rating schemes can people trust? Thomas Lyon: There’s a cool little app that I like a lot. You can download it. It’s called EWG Healthy Living. EWG stands for Environmental Working Group. It’s a group of scientists who get together and draw on science to assess which products are environmentally friendly, and which ones aren’t. And they have something like 150,000 products in their database. ALSO READ: City of Cape Town will donate to NSRI annually to assist with towing of marine life You can scan the UPC code when you go to the store, and you just immediately get this information up on your phone that rates the quality of the company’s environmental claims and performance. That’s a really nice little way to verify things on the fly. ENVIRONMENT Are there any examples of business practices that really do benefit the environment? Thomas Lyon: Building is one big area. LEED building standards or Energy Star building standards reduce environmental impact. They improve the quality of the indoor environment for employees. They actually produce higher rents because people are more willing to work in these kinds of buildings. You can look at the whole movement toward renewable energy and companies that produce solar or wind energy. They’re doing something that really is good for the environment. ALSO READ: Climate change almost doubles the risk of wildfires in Cape Town The move toward electric vehicles – that really will be good for the environment. It does raise trade-offs. There are going to be issues around certain critical mineral inputs into producing batteries, and we’ve got to figure out good ways to reuse batteries and then dispose of them at the end of their life. Article by: Tom Lyon. Professor of Sustainable Science, Technology and Commerce and Business Economics, University of Michigan This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ARTICLES BY THE CONVERSATION. The post How corporations use greenwashing to win consumers appeared first on SAPeople - Worldwide South African News.

NASA’s Plant Science is Rooted in Earth and Shoots for the Stars

NASA supports USDA plant science research that benefits life on our home planet and beyond! This image shows the USDA Biotechnology Lab at EPCOT, located within Walt Disney World Resort. The two illuminated white squares stacked one over the other above the Biotechnology Lab sign are plant growing chambers developed by NASA’s Biological and Physical Sciences Division at Kennedy Space Center. (Credit: Mark Sperry/USDA Agricultural Research Service) Since December 2019, NASA’s Biological and Physical Sciences Division (BPS) has partnered with the USDA on joint plant research for the USDA’s Biotechnology Lab. At the lab, horticulturalists study and propagate a range of horticultural crops and under this partnership, BPS-sponsored scientists at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida work to achieve faster growth and better, increased yields for diverse plant varieties.  The key to this process? Microbes. Microbial Magic at Work in Plants The thought of microbes might conjure images of harmful mold or call to mind illness-causing viruses and bacteria. But certain microbes can actually benefit both human and plant health. With this project, scientists study plant-microbial interactions to determine which kinds of microbes enhance plant growth. And they’ve discovered one, the fungus Cladosporium sphaerospermum. “We have a group here at Kennedy that tests what crops can be grown in spaceflight, based on factors including nutritional quality and overall biomass,” said Dr. Anirudha R. Dixit, one of the research scientists contracted at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to conduct research under this partnership. “The focus of this research is to test the growth promotion abilities of this particular fungus on some of these crops to see if exposure to gases produced by the fungus could help increase their total biomass.” USDA and NASA researchers worked together to sequence this fuzzy, powdery black fungus (dubbed ‘Black Magic’) for the first time, allowing them to monitor the genetic changes as it grows and develops. They’ve found that this specific strain does in fact help promote the growth of plants growing nearby and they suspect that these positive effects are due to volatile organic compounds produced by the fungus. Environmental Test Chambers (ETCs) developed through BPS funding could help confirm whether this theory is correct. Versions of the plant growing chambers tested at Kennedy Space Center for use at the USDA Biotechnology Lab. (Credit: NASA Kennedy Space Center) This image shows two plant growing chambers at the USDA Biotechnology Lab. The chambers were developed by NASA’s Biological and Physical Sciences Division at Kennedy Space Center. (Credit: Mark Sperry/USDA Agricultural Research Service) In addition to conducting fundamental research on microbes as well as plant growth and development testing, BPS’s other major role in this partnership was to design and build growth chambers specifically for these studies. The USDA Biotechnology Lab is located at Walt Disney World’s EPCOT theme park and is visible to visitors who embark on the Living with the Land attraction, a boat ride that tells the history of farming and gives a glimpse into the varied research conducted at the lab. In December 2022, two chambers were delivered to the lab at EPCOT. Like those on the ground at Kennedy and similar to the Advanced Plant Habitat and Veggie on the International Space Station, the chambers provide USDA researchers with more active control for growth conditions including temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide (CO2) and lighting. The chambers also provide a more closed atmosphere that enables scientists to examine synergistic effects between microbes and plants. “With these chambers, we’re able to continue studying if these volatile compounds are indeed the cause of these growth promotion effects on the plants or if these effects are caused by the amount of CO2 that the fungus produces,” said Ray Wheeler, plant physiologist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. “If there are volatile compounds, we want to identify what they might be, why they benefit plant growth and the mechanisms behind this.” Plant growing chambers visible at the USDA Biotechnology Lab. (Credit: Mark Sperry/USDA Agricultural Research Service) Scientists at Kennedy have primarily conducted these microbial studies in lettuce and mizuna (a mild-tasting Brassica in the mustard family). These leafy greens were chosen for this research because they grow quickly, which allows scientists to harvest them sooner than they could other plant varieties and therefore repeat experiments more quickly. Stellar Applications on Our Home Planet and Beyond Research conducted under this cross-agency collaboration has potential benefits both in space and on our home planet. “The original objective of this project was to figure out how to increase overall crop productivity in order to benefit terrestrial agriculture,” said Dixit. “We can also apply these methods in the spaceflight environment to maximize the overall productivity of plants grown in the limited space we have aboard spacecraft.” NASA astronaut Jessica Meir harvests leaves from Mizuna mustard greens for analysis and consumption during the Veg-04 experiment, part of a phased research project to address the need for fresh food production in space. Credits: NASA Developing new methods to increase plant yield may not only allow for a greater variety of plants to be grown and eaten in space, as has been done with Veggie experiments on the International Space Station, but these advancements could also contribute to more efficient and productive agricultural methods on Earth. In addition, the joint USDA/NASA plant research could have applications for commercial technologies that support sustainable farming on Earth. “If there’s a way to co-utilize these microbes or fungi where you deliberately inoculate them into the growing media of plants, it could potentially speed up the growth and produce better yields or quicker yields,” said Wheeler. “If we can clearly demonstrate this on the ground, then it would be nice to do a follow-up test in space to see if the same thing occurs in microgravity.” Researchers are working to expand the plant varieties investigated under this partnership to crops including tomatoes. In the future, scientists also aim to test this ground research in space, bringing the microbial magic to the cosmos. Learn more about NASA’s Plant Biology Program Related EFRI ELiS: Bioweathering Dynamics and Ecophysiology of Microbially Catalyzed Soil Genesis of Martian Regolith  Dynamics of Microbiomes in Space (DynaMoS) Surviving Space: Extreme Plant Adaptation News Article Type: Homepage ArticlesPublished: Thursday, May 11, 2023 - 09:53

NASA supports USDA plant science research that benefits life on our home planet and beyond! This image shows the USDA Biotechnology Lab at EPCOT, located within Walt Disney World Resort. The two illuminated white squares stacked one over the other above the Biotechnology Lab sign are plant growing chambers developed by NASA’s Biological and Physical Sciences Division at Kennedy Space Center. (Credit: Mark Sperry/USDA Agricultural Research Service) Since December 2019, NASA’s Biological and Physical Sciences Division (BPS) has partnered with the USDA on joint plant research for the USDA’s Biotechnology Lab. At the lab, horticulturalists study and propagate a range of horticultural crops and under this partnership, BPS-sponsored scientists at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida work to achieve faster growth and better, increased yields for diverse plant varieties.  The key to this process? Microbes. Microbial Magic at Work in Plants The thought of microbes might conjure images of harmful mold or call to mind illness-causing viruses and bacteria. But certain microbes can actually benefit both human and plant health. With this project, scientists study plant-microbial interactions to determine which kinds of microbes enhance plant growth. And they’ve discovered one, the fungus Cladosporium sphaerospermum. “We have a group here at Kennedy that tests what crops can be grown in spaceflight, based on factors including nutritional quality and overall biomass,” said Dr. Anirudha R. Dixit, one of the research scientists contracted at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to conduct research under this partnership. “The focus of this research is to test the growth promotion abilities of this particular fungus on some of these crops to see if exposure to gases produced by the fungus could help increase their total biomass.” USDA and NASA researchers worked together to sequence this fuzzy, powdery black fungus (dubbed ‘Black Magic’) for the first time, allowing them to monitor the genetic changes as it grows and develops. They’ve found that this specific strain does in fact help promote the growth of plants growing nearby and they suspect that these positive effects are due to volatile organic compounds produced by the fungus. Environmental Test Chambers (ETCs) developed through BPS funding could help confirm whether this theory is correct. Versions of the plant growing chambers tested at Kennedy Space Center for use at the USDA Biotechnology Lab. (Credit: NASA Kennedy Space Center) This image shows two plant growing chambers at the USDA Biotechnology Lab. The chambers were developed by NASA’s Biological and Physical Sciences Division at Kennedy Space Center. (Credit: Mark Sperry/USDA Agricultural Research Service) In addition to conducting fundamental research on microbes as well as plant growth and development testing, BPS’s other major role in this partnership was to design and build growth chambers specifically for these studies. The USDA Biotechnology Lab is located at Walt Disney World’s EPCOT theme park and is visible to visitors who embark on the Living with the Land attraction, a boat ride that tells the history of farming and gives a glimpse into the varied research conducted at the lab. In December 2022, two chambers were delivered to the lab at EPCOT. Like those on the ground at Kennedy and similar to the Advanced Plant Habitat and Veggie on the International Space Station, the chambers provide USDA researchers with more active control for growth conditions including temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide (CO2) and lighting. The chambers also provide a more closed atmosphere that enables scientists to examine synergistic effects between microbes and plants. “With these chambers, we’re able to continue studying if these volatile compounds are indeed the cause of these growth promotion effects on the plants or if these effects are caused by the amount of CO2 that the fungus produces,” said Ray Wheeler, plant physiologist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. “If there are volatile compounds, we want to identify what they might be, why they benefit plant growth and the mechanisms behind this.” Plant growing chambers visible at the USDA Biotechnology Lab. (Credit: Mark Sperry/USDA Agricultural Research Service) Scientists at Kennedy have primarily conducted these microbial studies in lettuce and mizuna (a mild-tasting Brassica in the mustard family). These leafy greens were chosen for this research because they grow quickly, which allows scientists to harvest them sooner than they could other plant varieties and therefore repeat experiments more quickly. Stellar Applications on Our Home Planet and Beyond Research conducted under this cross-agency collaboration has potential benefits both in space and on our home planet. “The original objective of this project was to figure out how to increase overall crop productivity in order to benefit terrestrial agriculture,” said Dixit. “We can also apply these methods in the spaceflight environment to maximize the overall productivity of plants grown in the limited space we have aboard spacecraft.” NASA astronaut Jessica Meir harvests leaves from Mizuna mustard greens for analysis and consumption during the Veg-04 experiment, part of a phased research project to address the need for fresh food production in space. Credits: NASA Developing new methods to increase plant yield may not only allow for a greater variety of plants to be grown and eaten in space, as has been done with Veggie experiments on the International Space Station, but these advancements could also contribute to more efficient and productive agricultural methods on Earth. In addition, the joint USDA/NASA plant research could have applications for commercial technologies that support sustainable farming on Earth. “If there’s a way to co-utilize these microbes or fungi where you deliberately inoculate them into the growing media of plants, it could potentially speed up the growth and produce better yields or quicker yields,” said Wheeler. “If we can clearly demonstrate this on the ground, then it would be nice to do a follow-up test in space to see if the same thing occurs in microgravity.” Researchers are working to expand the plant varieties investigated under this partnership to crops including tomatoes. In the future, scientists also aim to test this ground research in space, bringing the microbial magic to the cosmos. Learn more about NASA’s Plant Biology Program Related EFRI ELiS: Bioweathering Dynamics and Ecophysiology of Microbially Catalyzed Soil Genesis of Martian Regolith  Dynamics of Microbiomes in Space (DynaMoS) Surviving Space: Extreme Plant Adaptation News Article Type: Homepage ArticlesPublished: Thursday, May 11, 2023 - 09:53

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