The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010 Read online

  Years ago, at about the same time that I was watching the adventures of the first astronauts, I read a fascinating article about "Dyson Spheres." (Look them up; you won't be disappointed.) I never thought I would have a chance to work, however briefly, with the legendary physicist who came up with the idea. A manned Mars landing seemed far more likely. It's a bit of unpredictability that I'm extremely grateful for. Once again this year I'm indebted to Amanda Cook and Meagan Stacey at Houghton Mifflin. And I hope to remain indebted for many years to come to my beauteous wife, Anne Nolan.

  TIM FOLGER

  Introduction

  THE JOB OF EDITING this collection of papers was made easy for me by Tim Folger, who did the hard work of scanning the entire scientific periodical literature for the year 2009 to select 122 articles that he found interesting. My job was only to read his 122 articles, make the final choice of 28 to put in the book, and write the introduction to explain my choices. I am grateful to Tim for doing the lion's share of the work. Unfortunately, the fraction of American magazines that publish science writing is small. The science writing that is published mostly consists of brief news items rather than thoughtful essays. Not many years ago, John McPhee used to publish in The New Yorker wonderful pieces, twenty or thirty pages long, giving readers a deep understanding of geological science. Such pieces no longer appear, in The New Yorker or anywhere else. Science writing has become briefer, sparser, and more superficial. The title of this volume gives equal weight to science and nature. In fact, it is one third science and two thirds nature. Nature is now fashionable among readers and publishers of magazines. Science is unfashionable.

  I have divided the book into six parts, each with a common theme. The first two parts are concerned with science, the last four with nature. The two sciences that receive serious attention are astronomy and neurology. Both are rightly valued by the public as having some important connection with human destiny. Part One deals with astronomy, and its central theme is proclaimed in Steven Weinberg's article, "The Missions of Astronomy." Weinberg paints in four pages a glowing picture of the history of astronomy, the science that for 2,500 years led mankind to a true understanding of the way the universe works. From the beginning, instruments were the key to understanding. The first instrument was the gnomon, a simple vertical post whose shadow allowed the Babylonians and the Greeks to measure time and angle with some precision. The legacy of Babylonian mathematics still survives in the sixty-fold ratios of our units of time, hours, minutes, and seconds.

  After the gnomon came the sundial, the telescope, the chronometer, the computer, and the spacecraft. Now we are living in a golden age of astronomy, when for the first time our instruments give us a clear view of the entire universe, out in space to the remotest galaxies, back in time all the way to the beginning. Our instruments, telescopes on tops of mountains and on spacecraft in orbit, are increasing their capabilities by leaps and bounds as our data-handling skills improve. It takes us only about ten years to build a new generation of instruments that give us radically sharper and deeper views of everything in the sky. Weinberg ends his article by contrasting this ongoing triumph of scientific instruments with the abject failure of the American program of manned missions in space. Our unmanned missions to explore the planets and stars and galaxies have made us truly at home in the universe, while our manned missions after the Apollo program have been scientifically fruitless. Forty years after Apollo, the manned program is still stuck aimlessly in low orbit around Earth while politicians debate what it should try to do next.

  The remaining articles in Part One discuss manned and unmanned activities separately. Andrew Corsello sees a bright future for private manned ventures in space, while Tom Wolfe explains how our public manned ventures failed. Timothy Ferris's articles describe two vivid scenes from the world of modern astronomy, one using instruments on the ground and the other using unmanned instruments in space. All three authors confirm Weinberg's judgment. If you want humans in space, let them go up there to enjoy a human adventure, preferably at their own expense, and do not pretend that they are doing science. If you want to do serious science, keep the humans on the ground and send instruments to do the exploring, a job they can do tirelessly, efficiently, and much more cheaply.

  The view of space activities in Part One is a purely American one. The whole book suffers from the same limitation. By selecting only American writing, we have narrowed the focus of the collection, ignoring more than half of the world's thinking and dreaming. We have missed a great opportunity to broaden our contacts with the rest of the world. If half of the articles in this book had been translated from French or Russian or Arabic or Chinese, its value for our understanding of the world would have been far greater. For practical and economic reasons, it might be difficult to prepare timely translations for an annual publication. But we could at least have included articles from the many countries around the world that publish magazines in English.

  The Americans writing in this book about space all tell us that unmanned exploration is a success and manned exploration is a failure. I was lucky to be exposed to a different view when I was invited to Baikonur in Kazakhstan to observe a Russian space launch. In March 2009, Charles Simonyi took off for his second trip in a Soyuz launcher to spend two weeks on the International Space Station. To qualify as a crew member on the ISS, he had spent three months at the Russian cosmonaut training center near Moscow. My daughter Esther went through the same training and was at Baikonur as his backup, ready to fly in case he came down with swine flu or broke a leg. Charles did not get the flu or break a leg, and Esther did not fly, but my wife and I were there for the launch and got a glimpse of the Russian space culture, which is very different from ours.

  American space culture is dominated by the tradition of Apollo. President Kennedy proclaimed the mission as "Get a man to the moon and back within ten years," and so it was done. After that, there were five more missions, but the decision to terminate the program had already been made. The program was unsustainable for longer than ten years. It was affordable as a ten-year effort but not as a permanent commitment. After Apollo, various other missions, manned and unmanned, were undertaken, always with a time scale of one or two decades. American space culture thinks in decades. Every commitment is for a couple of decades at most. A job that cannot be done in a couple of decades is not considered practical.

  Russian space culture thinks in centuries. Baikonur, the original home of the Soviet space program, now belongs to Kazakhstan, but Russia rents it from Kazakhstan on a hundred-year lease, as Britain in the old days rented Hong Kong from China. The lease still has eighty years to run, and Baikonur feels like a Russian town. Historical relics of Russian space activities are carefully preserved and displayed in museums. The three patron saints are the schoolteacher Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who worked out the mathematics of interplanetary rocketry in the nineteenth century; the engineer Sergei Korolev, who built the first orbiting spacecraft; and the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who first orbited Earth. Korolev and Gagarin lived side by side in Baikonur in simple homes, which are open to the public. In a public square is a full-scale model of the Soyuz launcher that Korolev designed. It is a simple, rugged design and has changed very little since he designed it. It has the best safety record of all existing launchers for human passengers. The Russian space culture says, "If it works, why change it?"

  The day of Charles Simonyi's launch was rainy and windy. If the launch had been in Florida in such foul weather, it would certainly have been postponed. At Baikonur, it went up within a second of the planned time. The launch was a public ceremony in which the whole town participated. The cosmonauts paraded through the town at the head of a procession of dignitaries including an Orthodox priest, with townspeople carrying umbrellas on either side. In the main square, the mayor was waiting with other dignitaries. The cosmonauts stood facing the mayor and formally announced that they were ready to fly. Then, after a couple of speeches, they proceeded to the launch site
. The whole performance had the ambience of a religious sacrament rather than a scientific mission. In Russia you do not go into space to do science. You go into space because it is a part of human destiny. To be a cosmonaut is a vocation rather than a profession. Tsiolkovsky said that Earth is our cradle, and we will not always stay in the cradle. It may take us a few centuries to get to the planets, but we are on our way. We will keep going, no matter how long it takes.

  The Russian view of the International Space Station is also different from the American view. The biggest museum in Baikonur contains a full-scale model of the ISS and also a full-scale model of the Mir space station, which the Russians had built twenty years earlier. The Mir was the first space station built for long-duration human occupation. When you look at the two space stations, you can see that the ISS is an enlarged version of the Mir. The Russians are proud that they built the essential parts of the ISS as well as the Mir. The ISS is a part of their culture. They welcome American passengers, who help to pay for it, but they still feel that they own it. American scientists and space experts mostly consider the ISS to be an embarrassment, a costly enterprise with little scientific or commercial value. They regret our involvement with the ISS and look forward to extricating ourselves as soon as our international commitments to it are fulfilled. To an American visitor, it comes as a surprise to see the ISS enshrined at Baikonur together with the Mir, two emblems of national pride.

  I learned at Baikonur that the American space culture as it is portrayed in this book is only half of the truth. The Russian space culture is the other half. If you think as Americans do, on a time scale of decades, then unmanned missions succeed magnificently and manned missions fail miserably. Even the grandest unmanned missions, such as the Cassini mission to Saturn, take only one decade to build and another decade to fly. The grandest manned mission, the Apollo moon landing, ends after a decade and leaves the astronauts no way ahead. The decade time scale is fundamentally right for unmanned missions and wrong for manned missions. If you think as Russians do, on a time scale of centuries, then the situation is reversed. Russian space-science activities have failed to achieve much because they did not concentrate their attention on immediate scientific objectives. Russian manned-mission activities, driven not by science but by a belief in human destiny, keep moving quietly forward. There is room for both cultures in our future. Space is big enough for both.

  Part Two contains three articles about neurology, the science of human brains. For the last fifty years, most popular writing about biology was concerned with molecular biology, the study of the chemical constituents of life. This tradition began soon after the discovery of the double helix by Francis Crick and James Watson in 1953 and rose to a brilliant climax with the publication of Watson's book The Double Helix in 1968. For fifty years, popular writings described how biologists explore genes and genomes and how geneticists identify the molecular machinery that guides the development of an egg into a chicken. For fifty years, the progress of molecular biology was driven by the invention of marvelous new tools, allowing the explorers to handle and dissect individual molecules with ever-increasing precision. But in recent years the tools have become too complicated and the ideas too specialized to be easily explained. Molecular biology has become a mature science with many subdivisions, each with its own jargon. The readers and writers of popular science are moving from molecular biology to neurology.

  Neurology is now entering its golden age, with new tools answering simple questions that ordinary readers can understand. The three articles in Part Two describe three basic questions that neurologists are on their way to answering. How do our brains give us rational control over our actions? How do our brains give us rational control over our memories? How do our brains give us rational control over our sensations of physical pain? The tools of neurology are beginning to come to grips with the working of the brain as an organ of rational control. Each of the questions is not only important scientifically but also directly illuminates our personal experiences of thinking and deciding. Within the next fifty years, the tools of neurology will probably bring us a deep insight into our own thought processes, with all the good and evil consequences that such insight may bring. The three stories, about real people with real problems, give us a foretaste of the effects of deeper insight on our lives. The stories are told with a minimum of scientific jargon and a maximum of human sympathy.

  The longest section is Part Three, with seven articles describing wonders of nature. Here the quality of the writing is as important as the subject matter. The pieces are written for nature lovers, not science lovers. There are many other nature articles of equal quality in the thick pile that I discarded. In making my choices, I tried to choose pieces that were as different as possible from one another. I chose some that are outstanding in style and some that are outstanding in subject matter. But I have to confess that for me, "The Flight of the Kuaka" is in a class by itself. It is a celebration of nature's glory, going beyond science and beyond poetry.

  Parts Four, Five, and Six deal with the environment, the most fashionable subject of popular writing in recent years. Environmental ism has now replaced Marxism as the leading secular religion of our age. Environmentalism as a religious movement, with a mystical reverence for nature and a code of ethics based on responsible human stewardship of the planet, is already strong and is likely to grow stronger. That is the main reason why I am optimistic about the future. Environmentalism doesn't have much to do with science. Scientists and nonscientists can fight for the environment with equal passion and equal effectiveness. I am proud to stand with my nonscientist colleagues as a friend of the environment, even when we disagree about the details. The fact that we all share the ethics of environmentalism, striving to step lightly on the Earth and preserve living space for our fellow creatures, is one of the most hopeful features of our present situation. Each of the writers in this collection shares those ethics in one way or another.

  I divided the articles about the environment into three parts: gloom and doom, small blessings, and big blessings, to emphasize the ways in which their authors disagree. Everyone agrees that human activities are having a huge impact on the environment and that the impact could be substantially reduced by various remedial actions. The articles in these three parts emphasize different aspects of the problem. The orthodox belief of the majority of climate experts is "climate alarmism." Climate alarmists say that climate change is mainly caused by humans' burning of fossil fuels and that our present patterns of fuel burning are already leading us to disaster. Elizabeth Kolbert's two pieces in Part Four are strong statements of the climate-alarmist position. The articles in Part Five do not concern themselves with global climate; they describe local environmental problems that may have local remedies. "The Monkey and the Fish" gives us a wonderfully vivid picture of an intractable environmental situation in Mozambique. Finally, Part Six pays attention to climate problems but asks new questions that the orthodox climate alarmists have ignored. Richard Manning's piece, "Graze Anatomy," is to me the most illuminating of the whole collection.

  Before I discuss Manning's piece in detail, I must first declare my own interest in climate and the environment. Thirty years ago, it was already clear that fossil-fuel burning would cause climate change and that this was an important problem. It was also clear that fossil-fuel burning would have large effects on the growth of vegetation. Carbon dioxide is an excellent fertilizer for agricultural crops and for natural forests. Commercial fruit growers were enriching the air in greenhouses with carbon dioxide in order to accelerate the growth of fruit. From the experience of greenhouse growers, we can calculate that the carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere by fossil-fuel burning has increased the worldwide yield of agricultural crop plants by roughly 15 percent in the last fifty years. In addition, when there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, plants will put more growth into roots and less into aboveground stems and leaves. These effects of carbon dioxide on vegetation might in turn
cause large effects on topsoil. After they decay, roots add carbon to the soil, while stems and leaves mostly return carbon to the atmosphere. The plowing of fields by farmers all over the world then exposes topsoil to the air and increases the loss of carbon from soil to atmosphere. The flows of carbon among soil and vegetation and atmosphere may be as important as the flows between fossil fuels and atmosphere.

  Thirty years ago, the place where all these ecological effects of fuel burning were studied was the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. I went to Oak Ridge to work as a consultant, and I listened to the experts. They understood fluid dynamics and climate modeling, but they also knew a lot about forestry and soil science, agriculture and ecology. I learned two basic facts from them. First, the natural environment contains five reservoirs of carbon of roughly equal size: fossil fuels, the atmosphere, the upper level of the ocean, land vegetation, and topsoil. Second, these five reservoirs are tightly coupled together. Anything we do to change any one of them has important effects on all of them. The carbon that we add to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels has major effects on the growth of food crops and forests. The carbon that we subtract from the atmosphere by building up topsoil has major effects on climate.