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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Best Outdoor Adventures Near Portland, Oregon: A Guide to the City's Greatest Hiking, Paddling, and Cycling
by
Sawyer, Adam
Michael Barton
, September 30, 2016
Adam Sawyer been back out exploring around the Portland region for his new guide of Best Outdoor Adventures. Most outdoor recreation guides are devoted to single activities, such as hiking or paddling. This new guide aims to provide lovers of nature information for a variety of activities all in one place. Known for its great trails, waterways, and natural areas, the Portland region is a great place for different types of recreation. The guide book first covers cycling, separating routes between Road Rides, Bike Paths, and Singletrack Trails. Hiking is next, divided between In Town/Out of Town trails (most in the Columbia River Gorge). The paddling section is next, split between Flat Water and Whitewater (farther out river adventures). Each adventure includes all the necessary need-to-know information, a detailed description of the adventure, and beautiful color photographs by Sawyer himself. The sections for cycling and paddling also list recommended outfitters/guides to get the gear and perhaps take a lesson or two. Pages at the front of the book provide information on safety/first aid, the ten essentials to take with you, trail etiquette, and advice on hiking with kids or dogs. Also, Sawyer summarizes those adventures (and others not in this book) that provide stunning views. A welcome addition to your bookshelf or backpack. If you’re looking to get off your own two feet and get moving a little faster or experience the city from the water, get a copy of this book!
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How to Raise a Wild Child The Art & Science of Falling in Love with Nature
by
Scott D Sampson
Michael Barton
, March 24, 2015
Last year I had the fortune of reading a draft of a forthcoming book about connecting children to nature. Geared toward mentors - be they parents, teachers, or other adults in a child’s life - this book captured for me a wonderfully blended mixture of nature experience how-tos, succinct overviews of relevant research about nature connection, and personal anecdotes about growing up with a love of nature and passing that on to the next generation. The author is none other than everyone’s favorite dinosaur expert, Dr. Scott Sampson of PBS Kids’ program Dinosaur Train. While a practicing paleontologist and museum administrator, Sampson also advocates for getting kids outside (and “making their own discoveries”) through the television program, through social media, and now as Nature Rocks’ first Program Ambassador. There are many books on the topic of children and nature - do we really need another? I think so. In his introduction, Sampson lays out the goals of his book: - to raise awareness about the disconnect between children and nature - to explore the process of nature connection - to help parents and educators become nature mentors Through ten chapters Sampson does all this and provides a wealth of stories from his own life and folks across the country who are working to make nature part of the everyday lives of children. Sampson believes that “[m]any more kids need to experience a bootfull of pollywogs.” And I don’t think he means this in a literal sense. While not every kid will have the opportunity to put on some rubber boots and wade into a pond a little too deep so as to let the pond water full of metamorphosing frogs fill up the boots (Sampson did when he was a young child, with his mother and close to home), it is an experience like this - personal, triggering one’s senses, and perhaps a little dirty - that will leave an impression on a young child. As a parent who gets his own two kids outside on a regular basis, trying to instill in my son and daughter a love for nature as much as I can, I know that How to Raise a Wild Child was not written for me. While I have a lot to learn about the natural world myself, it is the act of exploring in nature with a child, asking questions and seeking out answers, that makes a parent, educator, or other adult in a child’s life a successful mentor. This book is for those who wish to become mentors, or perhaps those who have never thought about doing so and just might come across Sampson’s book at a store or library (or even better, receive it as a gift). In chapter 1, Sampson takes on the task of defining nature (wild vs. domestic vs. technological nature) and asking why humans need nature in their lives (what are its natural benefits?). He addresses the lack of nature connection in today’s youth, and describes how, in centuries and decades past, learning about “natural history” and perhaps even being a “naturalist” was part of everyday life for Americans. (As a student of history myself, I appreciated Sampson’s quick romp through the role of nature study in American history.) He notes that while visiting large wilderness places (like national parks) are a great thing to do, more frequent visits to wild places closer to home will leave a deeper impact on kids. The chapter ends, as they all do, with a short list of “Nature Mentoring Tips,” ideas that prospective mentors can do with their children or students to foster nature connection. Chapter 2 looks at the notion of place and living in proximity to nature. Sampson describes traits of humanity that allow for adaptability in different environments: large brains, prolonged childhoods, and ability to collaborate with others. Humans had to know nature in their environments in order to survive. This natural knowledge became ingrained in us as a species (and since lost in a majority of the species). But that connection remains, even if suppressed by modern distractions and responsibilities. Sampson shares his idea for a Topophilia Hypothesis - it proposes that “humans possess an innate bias to bond with local wildlife and landscape, inherited from our foraging forebears.” Again, he stresses that for the development of children, regular experiences in nature near home are more powerful than periodic trips to wilderness areas. And those experiences are often best when accompanied by an adult engaged in “playful, side-by-side exploration” and unstructured time outdoors with an understanding of big ideas about the world we live in. Sampson describes how to be a nature mentor in chapter 3. I don’t want to share too much from this chapter, except that Sampson hits on something I’ve always known when out and about with my kids: mentors “are not the people with all the answers.” I am not a biologist, and although I have a strong passion about science and the natural world, I don’t know everything about what my kids and I see when we’re out exploring. And that’s okay. Asking questions and thinking of the big picture is more important, as well as knowing where to seek out the answers. Chapters 4 and 5 address some of the big ideas that mentors should know about and be able to share with the children they are helping to connect to nature: ecology and evolution. Falling in love with nature depends on “felt encounters,” and Sampson wonders why, growing up in the northwest, learning about the water cycle never involved actually stepping outside of the classroom and feeling part of it. The best place to teach kids about the ecology of the natural world is in it, but Sampson notes that “public education in North America today is still geared toward control, obedience, and self-restraint much more than engagement, inspiration, and empowerment.” We are a part of nature, and connected in a variety of ways to the other life and physical environments around us, and teaching about nature should reflect this embedded relationship. He describes some ways that ecological topics are taught in engaging ways, such as forest kindergartens and school gardens. While ecology is about relationships, evolution provides the story - a multi-billion year narrative of the history of life on our planet, and where humans fit in the tree of life. Not only are we connected to nature through our actions toward it, but by sharing common ancestry with all the other organisms we share this planet with. Going even further, we are connected to the universe because, as Carl Sagan popularized, we are indeed “star stuff” - the atoms in our bodies were forged in stars billions of years ago. Sampson says, “Alongside the horizontal connections viewed through the temporal snapshot of ecology, evolution offers us vertical, transformational roots in deep time. Whereas ecology addresses how nature works at any given moment, evolution focuses on how nature came to be.” About one-third of the book, chapters 6, 7, and 8, covers the differences in connecting different age children to nature - young children (2-6), middle childhood (6-11), and adolescents. Young children are natural born scientists, and play is learning. Open-ended play with loose parts that can be found outside fosters imagination and the use of the body. (Never underestimate the power of a stick for play!) And getting dirty outside actually benefits young children’s health in the long run. For kids in middle childhood, having a sense of independence and freedom in nearby nature, such as a neighborhood creek, is crucial. This is also the age where kids become overscheduled, overprotected, and over-screened, so it becomes difficult to provide kids with the time and freedom to explore on their own. A solution, says Sampson, is to plan for family time in the outdoors, but to allow some freedom on such outings for kids to take some risks. For adolescents, connecting to nature means connecting with peers on riskier and longer outings in nature - rites of passage. Also, volunteering in environmental projects are a great tool for this age group. The topic of technology and nature is addressed in chapter 9. Since technologies will be everywhere - they are not going to disappear - mentors need to know how to best utilize technologies for nature connection. While learning is best when we engage with all of our senses, technologies minimize the number of senses used. So, a balance between technology and nature is needed. Smartphones can be used for geocaching, photography, natural history identification, citizen science projects, or using Google Sky Map to see what that planet showing in the evening sky is. All good things, but crucial to keep it to a minimum. The gadget is a tool, not the experience. Take a picture, look up a bird, then put the phone down. “The quintessential 21st Century digital naturalist may once again carry binoculars in her backpack,” says Sampson. “But the pen and notebook will be long gone, as will the guidebooks. In their place will be a single hand-held digital device with built-in phone, camera, video, magnifying glass, and various field guides, ranging from plants and animals to rocks and stars, making identifications a cinch.” In his final chapter, Sampson discusses connecting to nature in urban environments. From seeding cities with native plants and putting nature back into schools to providing nature programs to the underserved and putting parks within an easy walk from peoples’ homes, the idea of rewilding cities is growing. And the folks behind such efforts will be nature mentors of all varieties. Want to connect kids to nature, and not sure how to go about it? Picking up How to Raise a Wild Child is a great start. Read it under a tree. And take Sampson’ advice: “Get used to dirt.”
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Darwin and His Children: His Other Legacy
by
Tim M. Berra
Michael Barton
, December 12, 2013
There is much to take in on Darwin - a constant barrage of books, journal articles, magazine features, blog posts, podcasts, videos on YouTube, etc. It can be a daunting task to keep up with it all and stay current with what historians and writers are discussing about Darwin: his life, his scientific work, and his legacy which permeates many fields beyond those sciences in which he worked. Sometimes new work takes an unexplored avenue, other times rehashing worn territory. A new book by biologist and previous Darwin biographer Tim Berra explores Darwin’s life from a different angle but with largely familiar subject matter. If you’ve read about Darwin at length before, then you likely know that he and his wife Emma had a large family and that Darwin was very involved in raising their children. In Darwin and His Children: His Other Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013; 272 pp.), Berra describes the lives, careers, and achievements of the Darwin children, who, Berra shares, “were devoted to their father and mother, intensely loyal to the family and to each other, and protective of their father’s reputation.” The book is organized chronologically by their birth years, beginning with a chapter on Darwin’s life and work (a summary, essentially), and a chapter on his marriage to Emma. The following ten chapters cover each child, so there tends to be some repetition of information, but the book is nicely organized. Illness in the family is a thread throughout the chapters, and this was a constant source of anxiety for Darwin (he felt that marriage to his first cousin may have created weakened offspring). Darwin and Emma’s first son, William (1839-1914), “my little animalcule of a son,” he wrote to Captain Fitzroy, became a subject of infant behavior, and information from this was included in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). He was a banker, helped Darwin with mathematical calculations in a botanical study, and was an avid amateur photographer. Anne, or Annie (1841-1851), Darwin’s favorite, died young and this tore her father apart. Mary (1842-1842) only lived for 23 days, her cause of death unknown. Henrietta (1843-1927), or Etty, did much to help her father with his work. She assisted in pigeon breeding experiments, corrected proofs for The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), and edited book manuscripts, including The Descent of Man (1871). She also edited a collection of family letters and biography of Emma. George (1845-1912) was a mathematician and became a world authority on tides. He befriended Lord Kelvin, who disagreed with Darwin on evolution, and defended his father against critique from St. George Jackson Mivart, speaking freely about his views on prayer and other religious matters (as opposed to Darwin’s avoidance of making public his views on religion). Elizabeth (1847-1926), or Bessy, was the Darwins’ eccentric daughter, and was helpful to her mother in household duties and caring for her father during his illnesses, and helped to raise her nephew Bernard. Francis (1848-1925) was an accomplished plant physiologist, was an assistant to his father on plant experiments, helped with his massive daily correspondence, and edited The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887) and, with A.C. Seward, More Letters of Charles Darwin (1903). Leonard (1850-1943) was a military engineer, politician, and economist who is most remembered for his work in eugenics (a term coined by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton). Berra notes: “The negative eugenics advocated by Leonard is shocking to today’s sensibilities, but it was a product of the times.” Horace (1851-1928), their ninth child, was an intelligent child (Darwin wrote in a letter about Horace’s grasp of natural selection when age 11). He was founder and director of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, which succeeded due to World War I, a public servant in a variety of matters, and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (joining his father and brothers George and Francis). Charles Waring (1856-1858), their tenth and last child, was their third to die in childhood. His funeral allowed Darwin to avoid the joint reading of his and Wallace’s papers on natural selection at the Linnean Society in July 1858. However enjoyable this book is, I can’t help but point out the many myths about Darwin that continue to remain in popular treatment of the subject (this is not to blame Berra, of course, for it will be some time before corrections to these myths become mainstream). Darwin was not knighted, because “he was much too controversial for Queen Victoria’s taste (but Darwin did not carry out work in service of the British government, for which knighthoods were given). Darwin kept his ideas private, “except to broach them to his closest scientific colleagues” (Berra lists Lyell, Hooker, and Gray, however the list of who Darwin shared with is much longer). However, Berra rightly notes that Darwin was indeed the appointed naturalist on HMS Beagle, and that the common story of the Huxley-Wilberforce debate in 1860 is exaggerated. Berra’s sources are already published: Darwin’s Life and Letters volumes, his autobiography, reminiscences from some of the children as well as Darwin’s granddaughter Gwen Raverat. Given this, there are no grand revelations here. This is straightforward narrative history, and here Berra provides a charming, detailed narrative that gives due credit to Darwin’s children, whom he loved and shared in their griefs and successes in life. “Darwin” continued to be a very recognizable name in England, if not for Darwin’s own work, but the achievements of his descendants. An important takeaway from Darwin and His Children is how involved they were, from youth to adulthood in the case of some, with Darwin’s science: as editors, experimentalists, subjects of study, ambassadors (George and Francis traveled to the United States in 1871), and a variety of other roles. Several became respected scientists themselves, not too surprising given the nature-rich atmosphere and encouragement in which they were raised. The Darwins were truly a scientific family.
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I Wonder
by
Annaka Harris, John Rowe
Michael Barton
, October 23, 2013
Scan book store and library shelves, and you'll see scores of books for children about scientific topics - space, cool animals, field guides, science experiments, gross science, etc. Yet how many of those books stress the importance of wonder in thinking about science? "I Wonder" does just that, and does so beautifully. As a parent, I strive to introduce my children to the natural side of the world they live in. But doing so can sometimes turn into looking at what we know, and if we don't know something, it feels like we aren't succeeding. But science would not be a human endeavor if scientists had everything all figured out! The exciting thing is that we don't know it all, and reading "I Wonder" helps in recognizing that perhaps most important attribute of living a life that embraces the importance of science: knowing that it is continuous and changing. What I love even more about this book is that in every illustration, Eva and her mother are outside: in the woods, at a beach, in the clouds, and in space (using their imaginations, of course). A first step to instilling an interest in science in a child is to step out the front door. A second step is to read and be read to, and a parent and a child cannot go wrong with getting comfortable under a tree and reading "I Wonder" together.
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The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild
by
Haupt, Lyanda Lynn
Michael Barton
, September 29, 2013
When you live in an urban environment, there are many things to deal with: pollution, traffic, noise, and other people going about their business. Another public nuisance is the ever-growing presence of urban wildlife. Whether birds or mammals, they encroach on our yards, our gardens, in our homes, and threaten our pets. Humans have devised many ways to control these critters, most to no avail. In her latest book, Lyanda Lynn Haupt seeks to turn around our usually negative impressions of urban animals and see them as neighbors and visitors worthy of our attention. The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild is a defense of animals that essentially share our homes with us: from coyotes and moles and raccoons to pigeons and crows and owls (as Haupt describes them, The Furred and The Feathered). Each chapter shares general natural history, worldly mythology, and encourages us to be kind to our "gracious co-inhabitants." She also includes chapters on trees and humans; unfortunately, perhaps due to space, The Scaled and The Segmented are not included. Haupt drives home that urban animals are simply doing what is natural: being animals. And like us, they are only seeking food and shelter and protecting their young. Considering that it is human activity that pushes us into closer proximity with wild animals and that our sacrifices are small, are our wild neighbors really asking for too much? This review originally done for the Portland Book Review.
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Trying Leviathan The Nineteenth Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial & Challenged the Order of Nature
by
D Graham Burnett
Michael Barton
, August 05, 2012
In Trying Leviathan, Burnett, a historian of science at Princeton University and author of Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (UCP, 2000), explores a little known New York trial from 1818, Maurice v. Judd, in which a fish oil inspector (James Maurice) brought a candle maker and oil merchant (Samuel Judd) to court over his refusal to pay fees on whale oil (a law stated that fish oil had to be inspected for quality and purity). Maurice was represented by lawyers William Sampson and John Anthon, who desired to keep the trial about commercial regulation and away from, in Burnett’s words, the “muddy matters of taxonomy” (p. 17). Judd, whose defense included the testimony of the well-respected New York naturalist Samuel Mitchell, was represented by Robert Bogardus and William M. Price, who thought differently ��" they saw this as a taxonomic issue, and were willing to get dirty in the muddy matters (this case is also mentioned in the endnotes of Eric Jay Dolin’s Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America (W.W. Norton, 2007), pp. 384-385). What results is a splendid examination of questions about taxonomic systems, epistemology of natural historical knowledge, semantics, literary references, authority of various classes of New York citizens, and the relationship between science and society. Although the trial centers on the question of whether whale oil is fish oil, and hence if whales are fish, Burnett strives to look deeper into the reasons why the trial came to court at all, and what it meant beyond the straight science of taxonomy; he writes in his introduction: “It is perhaps cliché to assert that all taxonomy is politics, or to insist that epistemological problems are always problems of social order; Maurice v. Judd provides a striking occasion to test the viability (as well as the limits) of such sweeping claims” (p. 10). Burnett organizes his book around three reasons why this case is important to study: the status of “philosophy” and natural history in learned institutions and intellectual culture of New York in the first quarter of the nineteenth century; the importance of whales and other cetaceans that were considered “problems of knowledge” to this period of history in the United States; and the shaky status of zoological classification, surely not one of a “golden age of the classifying imagination” (I do think I should fully read Harriet Ritvo’s The Platypus and the Mermaid: And Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harvard UP, 1997) ��" I read the first chapter for an animal histories course in 2005). These considerations, and the trial’s main question in general (is a whale a fish?), are investigated by chapters devoted to what different categories of people in New York did or did not know about whales: naturalists, sailors and whalemen, artisans, merchants, and dealers in whale products, and regular folk of New York. While Mitchell thought it important to understand the authority of the first three, Sampson added the last category, considering the opinion of everyday citizens as worthy of attention. The everyday citizens are tackled first, with Burnett concluding that a majority of people ��" whose limited contact with whales (textually or physically) included the authority of the Bible and its tripartite taxonomy (fish/water, beasts/earth, and birds/sky), popular natural history texts, the occasional strandings or moorings of whales, and the whale jaw bone of Scudder’s American Museum ��" thought of whales as fish, and it was hard to stomach that whales could be in the same category (mammals) as humans. Whales seemed to sit outside of natural history, more as curiosities than as creatures which could be easily classified. Peculiar examples of animals pointed to exceptions to the rule of classification, which damaged the authority of the new philosophy of taxonomy, brought forth mainly by the comparative anatomy of Cuvier (as being different from the Linnean-style categorization of plants or animals based on external characteristics). Yet the naturalists, “those who philosophize,” would make the case that whales are indeed mammals, the subject of Burnett’s third chapter. Anthon, who represented the oil inspector, stated to the jurors: “Many of us may not have seen a whale,” but this should not cause us to be “led astray by the learning of philosophers” (p. 41). At issue was the authority of the naturalist and ichthyologist Samuel Mitchell, author of “The Fishes of New-York” and star witness of the defense, and in the long run, the authority of the enterprise of science itself. If common sense tells regular citizens of New York that whales are fish (for the Bible says so, and they swim in water like fish), then on what grounds should a naturalist’s erudition and, maybe, mere opinion, tell them otherwise? Since taxonomy was brought to the forefront in the case, the prosecutors sought to show that the current state of taxonomy is in question, and that there is disagreement between the learned. Not only did Mitchell represent the “new philosophy” of classification based on comparative anatomy, but he had big ideas about a program for a patriotic, American natural history, to make New York a scientific center by popularizing the city’s natural history collections and promoting natural history to its citizens through lectures. And it was to this up and coming natural history and scientific culture that Maurice v. Judd may have owed its time in court: “through the trial flowed the strong currents of opposition to the institutions, innovations, and schemes of state-sponsored ‘philosophy.’ Science in the service of the state looked to many New Yorkers suspiciously like the state in the service of the men of science” (p. 207), while there existed an “emerging cultural and intellectual ambitions of a rising community of artisans and merchants, who were seeking support for their own institutions for the advancement of learning” (p. 203). Maurice v. Judd was more about social order in New York than it was about figuring out what a particular type of creature was (such that Burnett could have titled his book Trying Natural History, or Trying Mitchell, but Trying Leviathan sounds better). In Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869), the naturalist Pierre Aronnax, with his apprentice Counsel, and the harpoonist Ned Land at times disagreed over not only their fate aboard Nemo’s Nautilus, but also matters of life in the sea; and while Aronnax showed erudition as to the species of plants and birds (expert knowledge), Ned Land knew how to capture and prepare them for eating (practical knowledge). Naturalists and whalemen had different ways of looking at whales, and in the fourth chapter of Trying Leviathan, Burnett investigates what whalemen knew about their prey. Two whalemen were witnesses in the trial ��" one believed whales were not fish, noting similarities with humans, and the other did, until the trial caused him to possibly think otherwise. Whalers combined physical experience with whales with texts that discussed natural history of marine mammals, which may or may not have contrasted with the views of “cabinet naturalists.” Burnett uses the logs and journals of whalemen to understand how they understood cetaceans. One way whalers thought of whales was in terms of oil; they were not solely animals, but instead storehouses of a money-making product. But they also thought of whales in terms of zoology. Important to Burnett’s look into the whaleman’s natural history is their cutting-in patterns, diagrams which depicted the methods by which a whale would be cut up, a “high-seas butchery,” in which different whales necessitated different cutting-in operations due to different anatomies ��" anatomies different from those of naturalists, an “autonomous domain of natural knowledge” (p. 118). I like Burnett’s observation that a harpoon or shaft is just as much a pointer to anatomical detail as it is a whaler’s fatal tool. But he is quick to note that such anatomical detail represented for whalemen only a “superficial anatomy,” because whalemen learned the anatomy useful to their purpose (whale oil was found in areas near the outer layer, or “blanket,” of the animal), while naturalists learned as much as they could to have as complete a picture of nature as possible. With whales referred to as fish in logbooks, whalers not considering some whales to be “whales” (semantics), and whales as whales in the water yet fish if out of water, I take it that whalers generally considered their catch as fish. In the fifth chapter, Burnett discusses the last group worth studying, those involved in the whale product industries (mainly oil), the “men of affairs.” Although the shortest of the chapters to look at what a group of people knew about whales, it is here that Burnett teases out more motives of Maurice v. Judd. He asks what was really at stake, since the fine put on Judd was only $75. Like the Scopes Trial in 1925, Maurice v. Judd best represented a formal test case for the New York law passed in March of 1818 that authorized “the appointment of guagers [sic] and inspectors of fish oils” (p. 147), to test the scope and interpretations of “fish oil.” Dealers in oil generally understood fish oil and whale oil to be distinct, while Gideon Lee, a leather industry man who drafted the statute, desired to have all oils under the term “fish oils” inspected for purity to clean up a messy oil industry, full of “deceptions and fraud” (p. 162). Plus, fish oils were important for leather manufacture, and for Lee, “money made its own taxonomic distinctions” (p. 161). In the end, Maurice v. Judd really concerned venders of oils (those who were inspected) and purchasers of oils (the leather tanning industry) protecting their commercial interests. Animals were classified differently in this context, in what Burnett calls “taxonomies of craft and trade” (p. 164). In the pages of the penultimate chapter of Trying Leviathan, Burnett reveals the outcome of the trial, and for that reason, I am not going to discuss it. This book was an exciting read, and Burnett brought to life for the reader many characters and their arguments in early nineteenth century New York. I think the reader deserves to find out the outcome for themselves. He pulled from a multitude of sources ��" logbooks, natural history texts, lecture notes, trial transcripts, newspaper articles, letters, and illustrations ��" representing a variety of people concerned with the trial. It’s science history, social history, intellectual history, religious history, economic history, and law history (are there any others?) all brought together to illuminate one small and largely forgotten event in American history. There is much more in this book than I could possibly share, and I am still trying to decide if Maurice v. Judd owes its occurrence to a science vs. artisans issue or a venders vs. purchasers problem in New York.
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Tides of History Ocean Science & Her Majestys Navy
by
Michael S Reidy
Michael Barton
, August 05, 2012
In an essay in William K. Story’s edited volume Scientific Aspects of European Expansion (Varorium, 1996), historian Alan Frost shows how science conducted in the Pacific during European exploration of the late eighteenth century was essentially political in nature. Scientists acted with their respective nations in mind. Michael S. Reidy extends the notion of science for political purposes into the nineteenth century with Tides of History. But while the book’s subtitle, Ocean Science and Her Majesty’s Navy, underscores the connection between advancements in science and the imperial reach of maritime nations (predominantly Britain), Reidy aims for much more than just showing how the British used science to rule the waves. He has other interests in mind, and it is unfortunate that the title of his book misleads the reader of its primary content. Although Reidy does discuss the Admiralty and how tidal science was crucial to military matters, he is more interested in the scientist himself and his role ��" in particular one giant of science (William Whewell) and plenty of rather unknowns. Even larger still is Reidy’s contribution to a growing field of ocean history, a fresh understanding of history understood through looking at the spaces in between the land that most histories are focused with. Much of Tides of History details the history of tidal science ��" of the data collection itself, and the theoretical understanding of the tides (whether or not it was based on data). The narrative of Reidy’s story, told through scientific publications, letters, and the use images (tables and graphs), almost mirrors the flux and reflux of the tides themselves, the ebb and flow of the seas across the globe. Tidal science, and the reasons for studying it, have shifted in importance to various parties through the centuries. Reidy outlines what has gone before, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before focusing on the nineteenth century, the highest period of Britain’s imperial expansion, and the regional and global tide experiments in the mid-1830s. Reidy is fond of metaphors, and they abound in Tides of History. For example, Whewell “helped transform the spatial scope of science while simultaneously expanding the terrain of the scientist” (p. 240). This spatiality is important to Reidy in showing how Whewell transformed the study of tides into a Humboldtian research program, rather than the temporal nature of previous studies. In contrast to earlier and recent works on Whewell, Reidy shows how this evaluator of science in Britain was much more than just a man interested in the work of scientists, but a premier scientist himself. The study of tides, which held Whewell’s interest for more than two decades, also influenced Whewell’s philosophical contributions to science ��" how science should be done and who should do it. Despite Whewell’s insistence that only certain persons could be scientists ��" those who strived for theoretical understanding of phenomena ��" he recognized the efforts and contributions of the often overlooked figures in history. Data collectors, calculators, and computers, doing monotonous and tedious work with ink, provided crucial information for “scientists” to devise their theories with. By looking closely at the role of these “subordinate labourers,” as Whewell referred to them, Reidy gives us a much needed contribution to the history of science, a bottom-up history in a field which too often stresses the importance of the man of science. There were many men (and women) of science, whether or not they were considered “scientists.” While Reidy succeeds in relating the study of the tides to those with economic interests in using that knowledge ��" merchants, traders, etc. ��" what is missing from Tides of History, despite its secondary role to an understanding of the emerging scientist in the early Victorian period, is how the military aspect of the study of the tides was actually used. Examples of how the Admiralty benefited from tidal knowledge, grounded in particular events (if records exist), would surely benefit an understanding of the importance of the study of the tides, and of the relationship of scientists with the larger society. Another mistake in Tides of History, in my opinion, is in the introduction of self-registering tide gauges in Reidy’s narrative. Through reading the text, we know that data collectors observed and marked down numbers concerning the tides. We do not know, however, if and how they utilized technological instruments in carrying out their tasks. So, the invention of the self-registering tide gauge, which made it possible to record data without the hand of a person, becomes not as exciting a turn in the narrative as if the reader truly understood how earlier “subordinated labourers” collected information about the rise and fall of tides. Despite these few problems, Tides of History is a valuable contribution to understanding the culture of science in the early Victorian period, a time when the role of scientists was becoming more connected with commerce and government, in helping to ensure Britain’s imperialistic success and reaping rewards from it. Taken with Richard Drayton’s Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (Yale University Press, 2000), Tides of History offers a more complete picture of the relationship between science and society ��" of the political and economic importance of science and the increasingly important role of the scientist ��" in the nineteenth century. This is a valuable book for those interested in nineteenth-century science, the history of physical sciences, imperialism, environmental history, and maritime history to have on their shelves.
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Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science
by
Jim Endersby
Michael Barton
, August 05, 2012
In Pamela Smith’s The Body and the Artisan, we are asked to reconsider assumptions we hold about the Scientific Revolution: that it was a radical change in the acquiring of knowledge about the natural world, and that through texts and experimentation, natural philosophers in Italy and England led the way. For Smith, however, it was within a different place and among different actors that the “Scientific Revolution” actually got its start: artisans, not natural philosophers, in the Lower countries and Germany, not Italy and England, structured their desire to know about the natural world through physical experience, not books, to claim the superiority of embodied knowledge [1]. Those figures commonly associated with the Scientific Revolution, such as Francis Bacon, took up the artisans’ epistemological methodology. This decentering of geographic origins and deemphasizing the role of iconic figures in the history of science has recently became a new analytical tool that has turned upside down long held notions of science as a progressive and strictly Western process. In Imperial Nature, historian of science Jim Endersby asks similar questions about Victorian science. Is it strictly something pouring out of Britain to the rest of the world? Is it run only by iconic men of science? Is the nineteenth century a period that is best understood only as split into pre- and post-Darwinian? Is the primary characteristic of Victorian science the push for professionalization within different disciplines? Endersby, probably more than any other historian working today, has an abiding fondness for Joseph Dalton Hooker. An online resource about Hooker that Endersby put together testifies to this claim, as does the many articles he has published in a variety of journals. But Endersby does more than just inform others about Hooker. Imperial Nature, based on Endersby’s Ph.D. dissertation, analyzes Hooker’s career as a nineteenth-century botanist to reconsider common yet clichéd themes in thinking about Victorian science: “the reception of Darwinism, the consequences of empire, and the emergence of a scientific profession” (3). Important to Endersby, as the subtitle stresses, is an understanding of the practices of nineteenth-century botany, the minutiae of everyday “doing.” This structures his narrative, as each chapter focuses on a particular practice: Traveling, Collecting, Corresponding, Seeing, Classifying, Settling, Publishing, Charting, Associating, and Governing. Some chapters are more engaging than others, particularly the first five and “Charting.” According to Endersby, “a focus on practice serves to overcome a long-standing historiographical tendency to divide the factors and influences that shape science into those which are internal to science (such as objectivity and careful experimentation) and those which lie outside (e.g., political, religious, and economic factors)” (313). Looking at practice ��" what naturalists and collectors were doing rather than focusing on their ideas that developed ��" helps us to understand a complexity of issues at work. Reading through Imperial Nature, Endersby diverts Hooker’s links to Darwin to the conclusion. The impression given is that he does not want his Hooker book, truly a labour of love, to become a Darwin book, as 2008 and 2009 have been flooded with many new works, covering many disciplines beyond science, about Darwin. “I have deliberately chosen to keep Darwin in the background,” Endersby states in the conclusion (316). Darwin’s story is well known, while those of his contemporaries, Hooker included, are not. Yet the conclusion becomes the place for Endersby to bring Darwin in and analyze Hooker’s and other Victorian naturalists’ careers in relation to the “species question.” Endersby argues that it is not the question of whether or not species evolved that was central to Victorian science (we are all familiar with the pre-/post-Darwinian, pre-/post-Origin, pre-/post-1858 markers), but the question of whether or not species were stable in nature. For Hooker, to accept Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was not to become a supporter of transmutation (Endersby argues that natural selection hardly changed the ways naturalists did their work), but to recognize the value of natural selection as a theoretical tool to the practice of botany. Natural selection gave Hooker a way to combat those aspiring botanists who tended to claim many species of plants where Hooker saw one of a few. This tension between “lumpers” and “splitters” in botanical classification helped to shape much more than Hooker’s eventual support for Darwin (Endersby also explores debates around whether or not Hooker actually accepted Darwin’s theory). The lumper/splitter dichotomy was best explained by the imperial context of nineteenth-century botany. Colonial botanists collected plants and sent them back to metropolitan botanists, such as Hooker. Economic botany ��" understanding what plants are where and how best they can be utilized as natural resources ��" was important to imperialism. Endersby, however, stresses that colonial botanists ��" such as William Colenso and Ronald Gunn ��" were not simply passive servants of more powerful botanists in London and at Kew Gardens specifically. Colonial botanists held some autonomy, using their rare positions as skilled collectors in far away places to further their own agendas, whether aspiring to be better botanists or better gentlemen. A constant through Hooker’s career is dealing with colonial botanists and their willingness to agree (or not) to his methods. For Hooker, the colonial botanist should simply collect and send specimens back to the center, while not speculating on theoretical or philosophical matters, such as transmutation, naming, or distribution. To further their own goals, however, colonial botanists did speculate beyond collecting. They tended to be splitters: having more local knowledge of plant varieties in a given location, colonial botanists argued for more distinct species. They wanted to emphasize the diverse floras of the regions they represented while asserting the authority of their local knowledge and in situ experience (they often found European botanical books inadequate). Metropolitan naturalists, on the other hand, minimized the number of species for several reasons. Hooker, as did other metropolitan botanists, constructed herbariums, collections of dried plant specimens ordered by hierarchies of classification and managed within specially built cabinets in drawers with folders. Managing an herbarium became a daunting task as colonial botanists sent in this and that new species of orchid or liverwort. Keeping the number of species to a minimum not only maintained a metropolitan botanist’s authority over peripheral subordinates, but helped in maintaining the physical herbarium (in itself a microcosm of the botanical world). Hooker’s broad species concept ��" that many species across the globe are more generally varieties of a species with a broad geographic range ��" also required broader collections. Arguing against splitters was, in a way, related to the demand for more publicly funded scientific positions to build public funded collections. Colonial botanists, Endersby persuasively argues, were not passive recipients of metropolitan scientific knowledge. “The result was not a one-way flow of plants or authority from periphery to center but a complex negotiation in which each side bartered its assets according to its interests and in the process defined who was central or peripheral and why” (110). Men like Hooker, Darwin, and Huxley depended on colonial botanists. Without their collections, whether botanical or zoological, these “men of science” could hardly have accomplished their work. In turn, their work, is not something to be considered as meaning the same thing in different regions. As Endersby effectively shows, the meanings of botanical illustrations and botanical classifications (think of Bruno Latour’s “immutable mobiles”) did not necessarily transfer from one location to another and hold their intended meanings. Endersby’s time in the archives is apparent. He uses a wealth of primary documents ��" letters and papers mainly ��" that are representative of the “centers” and “peripheries” of his story: America, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. The subsections of many chapters in the book testify to his use of primary documents as well, as they are titled using quotes taken from these documents. Imperial Nature, a reassessment of Victorian science seen through the career of a botanist bent on heightening the status of his discipline to be among geology and astronomy by claiming it “philosophical” and not an amateur pursuit (Hooker made his living from botany), will interest historians of Victorian science, biology (whether of botany, taxonomy, or evolution specifically), biogeography, imperialism, and even those who study the role of objects in history (chapter 2, “Collecting”). This is not a biographical treatment of Hooker (see Ray Desmond’s Joseph Dalton Hooker: Traveller and Plant Collector). Endersby has made a valuable contribution to several historical disciplines, showing how telling history entrenched in ��"isms (colonialism, professionalism, Darwinism) is detrimental to a proper understanding of Victorian science.
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Darwins Dogs
by
Emma Townshend
Michael Barton
, August 05, 2012
In the Darwin anniversary year, more books were published about him than probably in all the years of my life preceding 2009. More biographies, and more treatments of his work. Some books seemed to jump on the Darwin wave by connecting a topic to Darwin because, that year, it just might sell. Surely there is Darwin fatigue in publishing. In a review of new additions of Darwin’s work that appeared in 2009, historian of science Jim Endersby asked whether there can be too much of a good thing, referring to the myriad of scholarly work on Darwin, sometimes called the Darwin Industry (1). It is a reasonable question, as one can easily think that since so much has been written about a historical figure, what can possibly be written about Darwin that is new? Or what refreshing approach can be taken in looking at his life and work? While many books seem to reiterate the standard Darwin story, what I enjoy are those that consider an unexplored or neglected topic. Such is Darwin’s Dogs, a short exposition as to the influence that the many dogs in Darwin’s life, and the group of animals dogs in general, had on Darwin’s thinking. This short book ��" less than 150 pages ��" is very readable, and provides a concise overview of Darwin and his ideas while offering a fresh perspective on the story ��" that “Darwin’s dogs brought evolutionary theory right to the hearth rug of the Victorian home” (9), meaning that using dogs in his writings brought something familiar to his readers. Essentially, Darwin’s proximity to various dogs ��" “some of the most important characters in the story of his thinking” (9) ��" throughout his life taught him several things: 1. That humanity should not feel insulted by its relationship to animal ancestors, 2. That animals have emotions, morals, self-consciousness, and language, too (that human distinctiveness is a myth), 3. About variation, inheritance, and artificial selection through the practice of dog breeding (Darwin’s reliance on “practical men”), 4. The proper treatment of animals (Darwin was an antivivisectionist), 5. The similarities in behavior between dogs and humans (The Descent of Man says a lot about dogs, Townshend notes). While the book is fun and enjoyable, and made me think differently, I feel that the way the book is presented is a bit misleading. In the Preface, Townshend invites the reader “to a rather different account of the life of Darwin, this one told from the canine point of view” (11). The description on the back of the book states “from a uniquely canine perspective.” These statements reiterate one of the purposes of Darwin’s Dogs: the consideration of other actors, even non-humans, in the history of science. I immediately thought of Bruno Latour’s microbes in The Pasteurization of France, Michael Pollan’s plants in The Botany of Desire, and the various organisms in Endersby’s A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology (one reviewer wrote “Science is a collaborative process and by looking at the roles played by unwilling collaborators, from guinea pigs to zebrafish, Endersby provides a new perspective on the history of genetics” [2]). All these works suggest that non-human actors have agency, agendas of their own. It is not simply humans that drive history. So, reading “from the canine point of view” and “from a uniquely canine perspective,” I expected an approach (especially since Endersby is acknowledged in the book) that was lacking in Darwin’s Dogs. The book remains a story about Darwin, from his perspective in how he used dogs in his thinking. It is not told through the eyes, minds, or lives of dogs. Their actions ��" how they fit into the story as useful ��" is dependent on what Darwin is doing. Darwin’s Dogs is indeed “a rather different account of the life of Darwin,” but it is not from the “point of view” of dogs. Furthermore, given this book is written by someone in the history of science, I was disappointed in the lack of citations (no footnotes, no endnotes) except those for the quotes that open each of the five chapters, and the lack of a bibliography or sources section. Throughout the book Townshend utilizes direct quotes from Darwin’s letters, notebooks, and publications. Yet no citations for any of them. Why? Maybe because the publisher did not want it. If I were the author of a book about history, and a publisher said they did not want citations and sources, I would find another publisher. For someone like me, familiar with Darwin’s work, I know where to find the sources (Townshend thanks the Darwin Correspondence Project and John van Wyhe/Darwin Online for “their invaluable help and resources,” [144] but no URLs are given). For a reader unfamiliar with how to track down the sources, not having those materials provided misses the opportunity to explore further than the text of the book. Those problems aside, Darwin’s Dogs is a surprisingly rewarding little book that would be a good introduction to Darwin’s ideas. If you like dogs, all the better. The many anecdotes are informative, while the book is seeded with canine artwork.
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Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature
by
Brian Switek
Michael Barton
, August 05, 2012
Birds are descended from dinosaurs. But there is a lot of history to that idea. Paleontologists did not simply uncover fossils of dinosaurs and realize that living birds are a surviving lineage of theropods. Where can one turn to learn of all this? Brian Switek, whose blog Laelaps (in its current evolutionary stage with Wired) I have been reading for several years now, has just published his first book, Written in Stone. Each chapter focuses on a particular group of animals that we now have great fossil evidence showing their evolutionary history: birds, whales, early rodent-like mammals, elephants, horses, and humans, to name a few. We come away with a full understanding of the branching nature of the evolution of life on Earth, as Switek dispels the notion of progressive, ladder-like, and human-oriented evolution. He also gives us the sense of the vast amount of extinct vertebrates (relatives of ours included), for some of what we see on the planet today ��" horses, for example ��" are just a peek of the diversity of forms in the groups in which they are nested. “To focus solely upon our ancestors is to blind ourselvves to our own evolutionary context” (21). Wielding a wealth of science information while attending to historical detail, Written in Stone offers a very-readable narrative of how European and American scientists have understood fossils over the centuries. While not an academic historian ��" he is a freelance science writer and a Research Associate in paleontology at the New Jersey State Museum ��" Switek gives importance to the historical development of ideas in paleontology. Here we are introduced to not only various species of vertebrate animals and the myriad of transitional forms bridging them, but also to their discoverers and the thoughts of those who have studied them (in some cases, this includes indigenous peoples, with a nod to the work of Adrienne Mayor). One of the criticisms Darwin knew he would receive on publishing On the Origin of Species was that the fossil record was incomplete. Maybe so, but move ahead in time a century and a half, and the amount of material evidence for past life on earth is remarkable, thousands upon thousands of specimens across the kingdoms packed away or lining cabinet drawers in museum collections worldwide, a minute percentage on view to the public. Despite what we do have, it will never be complete, and the answers to paleontologists’ questions about what animal is related to another, and how are those in turn related to this group will never be, well, set in stone. Like any field of science, paleontology is an ongoing human process. Ideas are constantly refined based on new evidence or someone coming along and looking at things differently. In Written in Stone, Switek shows us that in paleontology, this is definitely the case. There are generally two ways we could look at the history of paleontology. One, as Switek does, is to tell the story of those involved (we get Darwin, Huxley, Owen, Marsh, and Cope, but we also learn about a lot of relatively unknowns, too, such as Albert Gaudry; and there’s a female paleontologist as well, Jennifer Clack), their ideas, conflicts and competition between figures, and the contingent nature of history ��" this happened, so therefore this happened; or, this only happened because this happened. We receive such history for the early nineteenth century all the way up to, well, now. Just as evolution is contingent (what say you, Gould?), certain events can happen that change the course of paleontological history. For example, Switek tells us about how only when a graduate student dropped a specimen did that act help to understand the evolutionary history of whales. Today, CT scanning is the norm in paleontology for peering into the insides of bones. Before, such were chance opportunities, or, deliberative slicing of specimens. The other, which Switek acknowledges but does to a lesser degree (but he does get some in there!), is to show how factors seemingly beyond the purview of science actually inform it, and vice versa (how culture, politics, economics, geography, etc. play a role in the conduct of science). “The places paleontologists looked for fossils and how those fossils have been interpreted have been influenced by politics and culture, reminding us that while there is a reality that science allows us to approach the process of science is a human endeavour” (23). Covering so much about geology, the age of the earth, and fossils of animals, Switek shows how religion affected the ideas of some naturalists or paleontologists. We learn how politics enabled naturalists to travel, “natural science, pressed into the service of empire” (69, 181, 183); of the public’s thirst for spectacles (145); how national pride pitted Thomas Jefferson against the Comte de Buffon concerning large mammals in North America; and how Philip Henry Gosse attacked evolution because of personal reasons (204-5). And, so what? Does it matter if we understand how life on Earth evolved? Yes, it surely does, since we are part of that story. In the last two pages of the penultimate chapter and in the short final chapter, Switek pulls his thoughts together and unpretentiously puts us in our place. “We are merely a shivering twig that is the last vestige of a richer family tree.” If that saddens you, then: “Life is most precious when its unity and rarity are recognized, and we are among the rarest of things.” Humans are just like any other organism on the planet, and all should be appreciated together. There have been several books over the last few years that look at the evidence for evolution (particularly, Richard Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution and Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True, and another to be published next June, The Evidence for Evolution by Alan R. Rogers). What value, then, is Written in Stone? One, because it is so very well-written by a young writer. And two, for its coverage of the history of science, however limited. Three, it is the perfect antidote to the ignorance of some members of our society [largely creationists; however, Switek does not explicity engage with anti-evolutionists in his book, rather, his text works as "letting the evidence speak for itself," or, as Switek states, "the bones of our distant ancestors... should speak to us from the earth" (18)].
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Bang How We Came to Be
by
Michael Rubino
Michael Barton
, August 05, 2012
There are many books about evolution for children, but Bang! How We Came to Be stands out for its beautiful paintings of ancient life and a detailed yet engaging narrative of “how we came to be.” Written and illustrated by Michael Rubino, and published by Prometheus Books (70 pages, paperback, 2011), the text in this book is geared not for the kindergarten child ��" like my son ��" but for older elementary children. However, anyone with an interest in science and art should take a look. Rubino starts with the oft-quoted “From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved” (Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859). Here it works great because he soon offers almost 30 gorgeous color paintings of endless forms. The first few are astronomical and geological in nature, and then it moves on chronologically to the biological lineage leading to humans. While this may seem to favor humans over other forms of life, Rubino does well to describe what other lineages of organisms were up to at the time. Highly recommended, and I look forward to reading this with my son when he is a little older, but for now we can enjoy the beautiful reconstructions of our ancient ancestors.
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Universe from Nothing Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing
by
Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins
Michael Barton
, August 05, 2012
For a book that has a lot to say about nothing, there is quite a lot in it. Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist and Foundation Professor and Director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, and an increasingly recognized spokesperson for atheism, gives a sweeping overview of the state of cosmology, with plenty of historical tidbits and open-ended questions for the curious. The overall argument is that the statement that “something cannot come from nothing” (that is, how can the Big Bang have occurred from nothing?) collapses under recent theoretical and observational research in astrophysics. Beyond providing the science and making it comprehensible to a nonphysicist such as myself, Krauss offers that these new explanations make religious explanations (God, gods, other deities, or what have you) increasingly unnecessary to explain the origin of the universe. This is not a science book, but rather a science and religion book, and Krauss proudly promotes atheism. Fine by me, but it is something readers should be aware of. The book stems from a very successful YouTube video of Krauss’ lecture by the same name (currently, it has over 1,187,000 views). I’ve enjoyed the video several times, and there are great lines from it, so I was excited to hear that Krauss was extending his lecture into a book. I recently read Lisa Randall’s 2011 book Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World (which I reviewed for the Portland Book Review), and she states that recent work in cosmology aims to “ultimately tell us about who we are and where we came from.” Krauss certainly does this in A Universe From Nothing, and here are some quotables: The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not. (xii) One of the most poetic facts I know about the universe is that essentially every atom in your body was once inside a star that exploded. Moreover, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than did those in your right. We are all, literally, star children, and our bodies are made of stardust. (17) Over the course of the history of our galaxy, about 200 million stars have exploded. These myriad stars sacrificed themselves, if you wish, so that one day you could be born. I suppose that qualifies them as much as anything else for the role of saviors. (19) [in the lecture, Krauss stated it this way: “So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”] If we are all stardust, as I have written, it is also true, if inflation happened, that we all, literally, emerged from quantum nothingness. (98) If the universe were any other way, we could not live in it. (136) If we wish to draw philosophical conclusions about our own existence, our significance, and the significance of the universe itself, our conclusions should be based on empirical knowledge. A truly open mind means forcing out imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa, whether or not we like the implications. (139) But no one has ever said that the universe is guided by what we, in our petty myopic corners of space and time, might have originally thought was sensible. It certainly seems sensible to imagine that a priori, matter cannot spontaneously arise from empty space, so that something, in this sense, cannot arise from nothing. But when we allow for the dynamics of gravity and quantum mechanics, we find that this commonsense notion is no longer true. This is the beauty of science, and it should not be threatening. Science simply forces us to revise what is sensible to accommodate the universe, rather than vice versa. (151) A universe without purpose or guidance may seem, for some, to make life itself meaningless. For others, including me, such a universe is invigorating. It makes the fact of our existence even more amazing, and it motivates us to draw meaning from our own actions and to make the most of our brief existence in the sun, simply because we are here, blessed with consciousness and with the opportunity to do so. Bronowski’s point, however, it that it doesn’t really matter either way, and what we would like for the universe is irrelevant. (181) There is much to ponder here for those like me who see wonder and awe in the physical world, whether in nature and its “endless forms” or in the universe. I’ll share one more quote from the book. Krauss provides a quote from Darwin at the beginning of chapter 5, in which he discusses the expanding and accelerating universe and dark energy and its unknown origin: “It is mere rubbish, thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.” This comes from a letter by Darwin to Joseph Dalton Hooker (March 29, 1863). After sharing with Hooker that he regretted using the word “Creator” in the last paragraph of On the Origin of Species, Darwin stated that he meant creator as a “some wholly unknown process.” Darwin never claimed to explain the origin of life itself. Later, Krauss uses this quote again, and unfortunately it is used poorly: The metaphysical “rule,” which is held as ironclad conviction by those whom I have debated the issue of creation, namely that “out of nothing nothing comes,” has no foundation in science. Arguing that it is self-evident, unwavering, and unassailable is like arguing, as Darwin falsely did, when he made the suggestion that the origin of life was beyond the domain of science by building an analogy with the incorrect claim that matter cannot be created or destroyed. (174) This is a rather unfair remark about Darwin. As one might expect from a scientist, here history is being determined by what is known in the present. We may very well know things about the origin of life and origin of matter now, but, as Darwin clearly stated, “thinking at present,” ��" meaning 1863, not 2011 ��" the state of scientific knowledge then did not include such things. The domains of science separated by 150 years would surely be different. This is presentism, and it does a disservice to understanding the past.
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Trees of Life: A Visual History of Evolution
by
Theodore W. Pietsch and Theodore W., PH.D. Pietsch
Michael Barton
, August 05, 2012
Writing “I think” above his 1837 sketch of a tree of life, Charles Darwin likened the evolutionary relationships between species like that of branches on a tree (common ancestry from a central trunk, continued diversity resulting from many new branches forming, extinction when some branches cease). He wrote in On the Origin of Species (1859, p. 130): “The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth… As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.” Darwin also included an evolutionary tree in Origin, and in his transmutation notebook reflected on his studies of coral: “The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead; so that passages cannot be seen. ��" this again offers contradiction to constant succession of germs in progress no only makes it excessively complicated” (Notebook B, p. 25). The idea of branching as characteristic of relationships of organisms did not begin ��" nor end ��" with Darwin. While it has been argued that Darwin’s was indeed the first to show evolutionary relationships, taxonomic and developmental trees appeared long before. This is the subject of a new book by Theodore W. Pietsch, Professor of Aquatic & Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington and Curator of Fishes at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture (both in Seattle). In Trees of Life: A Visual History of Evolution (John Hopkins, 2012), Pietsch shares and provides context for 230 trees of life and similar diagrams (bracketed tables, maps, webs/networks, and other visual representations of the relationships between organisms). They cover the sixteenth century to the present, and range from depictions of single groups of organisms (types of plants, fish, birds, etc.) to larger categories (kingdoms, phyla, or the whole of life on earth). This book is largely, as he notes in the Preface, “a celebration of the manifest beauty, intrinsic interest, and human ingenuity revealed in trees of life through time” (ix). The book is organized chronologically, while some chapters deviate from this because of how a particular tree(s) fit into Pietsch’s categories. Among categories defined by botany, the rule of five, time periods, cladistics, molecular biology, and universality, some chapters are devoted to the trees of individual scientists: Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, Alfred S. Romer, and William K. Gregory. The chapter entitled “The First Evolutionary Tree” deals with the work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Pietsch, as does Wheelis (2009), claim that Lamarck’s 1809 tree (or, as he called it, “table, serving to demonstrate the origin of the different animals”) from Philosophie zoologique predates Darwin’s as the first representing an evolutionary framework. Others disagree, such as biologist Mark Pallen (in a blog post listed below), but I guess that’s what makes this book such a useful resource. It brings together many examples of images of interest to researchers, and provides a worthy bibliography and set of notes for those needing to look deeper into the sources of these images. Each chapter also includes a several page commentary by Pietsch about the images representing that chapter. Trees of Life is a beautiful book, and the diversity of beautiful images within its pages should be of interest to historians of science, biologists, folks working at the intersection of science and art, and, honestly, anyone with a genuine interest in science and the study of the natural world. This is a taxonomy of trees of life, if you will.
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Its a Jungle Out There 52 Nature Adventures for City Kids
by
Jennifer Ward
Michael Barton
, August 05, 2012
When you live in a city like Portland, it is not at all difficult to get outside and explore in nature. Whether one of the major parks, the many smaller pockets of natural areas that dot the landscape, or the river that runs through it, including within downtown and on its edges, Portland is a nature sanctuary. In other cities, however, it can be a challenge for parents to find places to explore nature. Jennifer Ward, in her latest book geared toward children and nature - It’s a Jungle Out There! 52 Nature Adventures for City Kids - provides a year’s worth of activities for parents to do with their children. Just because one lives in an urban setting does not mean that nature isn’t nearby. Nature is abundant in the unlikeliest places. This book is organzied by season, with a fifth section on activities that can be done inside (which I really like). In the spring, be curious about worms and learn to identify local birds. During summer, play with shadows and discover what animals use ponds to drink. In the fall, gaze at the stars and and watch the leaves fall. In winter, seek out previously hidden bird nests and track creatures in the snow. And inside, learn about thunder and lightning and care for a potato. Each activity is offered as a way to promote certain skills or teaching topics, including creativity, artistic expression, wonder, curiosity, observation, discovery, awareness, stewardship, respect, appreciation, bonding, imagination, physical activity, motor skills, concepts, counting, and classification. And deep time. Yes, deep time! Ward does not shy away from evolution and the earth being millions of years old, another topic I love. Also included with each activity ��" in the spirit of connecting children to nature for the hope that they will continue to be connected as decision-making adults ��" is a Plant the Seed suggestion for further inquiry. As an historian married to a librarian, I was delighted to see that many of the Plant the Seed suggestions are for books to read. Well done, Jennifer! It’s a Jungle Out There! is a useful ��" and pocket-ready ��" guide to exploring nature in urban areas, especially in spots where mom or dad might not notice is absolutely teeming with nature. As Ward says, “nature is as nearby as a crack in the sidewalk and a tree on the street, and rewarding experiences in nature can take place in everyday places and spaces.”
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Knocking on Heavens Door
by
Lisa Randall
Michael Barton
, August 05, 2012
Many books look at either the nature of science as a method of knowledge creation or the state of current theories in particle physics and cosmology, Randall, a particle physicist, however, weaves narratives of both into a single book. While at first this may seem like pressing together two different topics, it works well to show science as a human process. The overall strength of Randall’s offering is in her lucid descriptions of the largest experimental machine ever built (the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, operated by CERN), the history of its construction and the many ways that physicists are using it and planning to use it to not only study their immediate scientific interests, but, in Randall’s words, to “ultimately tell us about who we are and where we came from.” Here, then, Randall shares her thoughts about the intersection between science and religion. While physicists are currently debating the recent claim from a lab associated with CERN that neutrinos were recorded exceeding the speed of light, Knocking on Heaven’s Door serves to remind that science is an evolving process, that all ideas in science are not set in stone but tentative to revision based on evidence.
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A More Perfect Heaven
by
Dava Sobel
Michael Barton
, August 05, 2012
Popular history-of-science writer Dava Sobel tells the story of how, in the middle of the 16th century, a young mathematician named Rheticus traveled to Poland and convinced an aging Nicolaus Copernicus to publish his controversial theory that the earth, like all other planets, orbited the sun. Since there is no historical record of what happened during the visit beyond later recollections, the “how” is given to the reader as a fictionalized play, And the Sun Stood Still. This drama is flanked on both sides by six chapters that provide background information on the lives of Copernicus and Rheticus and place this event in the history of astronomy and its religious and political context. While there is nothing new to learn about Copernicus, Sobel’s narrative in the first section of the book is engaging. The play is interesting, but comes across as a history-of-science soap opera full of flat characters. The third part seems too quick an overview of Tycho, Kepler, and Galileo. Overall, A More Perfect Heaven is a suitable introduction for one not familiar with Copernicus, but for those already versed in the history of astronomy, Sobel’s book would not suffice as required reading.
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Counting the Rings Stories Testimonials & Photographs of Multnomah Education Service District Outdoor School
by
Karen Nichols
Michael Barton
, August 05, 2012
Counting the Rings is a collection of passionate testimonials about the varying impact that Portland’s Outdoor School Program has had on its students since 1966. Sixth graders from Portland Public Schools spend a week at camp and learn about not only natural history, but about their peers, community, and a sense of place. The importance of the program shows through the testimonials, especially as a crucial moment of development in the lives of Portland’s future decision makers. The program allows students who do not perform well in classroom settings to thrive, and opens up others socially. Most important, it brings students from different socioeconomic backgrounds together. As one student attested about her camp experience, “there weren’t the haves and the have-nots.” Why is there the need for a book of testimonials from students, parents, camp leaders, and program staff? In recent years Outdoor School has shortened to a few days instead of a week for some schools and cancelled altogether for others because of budget cuts. The Friends of Outdoor School, who put this collection together, have raised money and garnered public support to keep the program alive. Every student deserves the opportunity to attend Outdoor School. This review was originally done for The Portland Book Review.
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How the Hippies Saved Physics Science Counterculture & the Quantum Revival
by
David Kaiser
Michael Barton
, August 05, 2012
What do spoon-bender Uri Geller, coed hot tubs on the California coast, the CIA’s interest in Russian parapsychology, Richard Feynman and the book The Dancing Wu Li Masters all have in common? That’s easy: hippie physicists! David Kaiser’s seriously documented history of science book How the Hippies Saved Physics details the at-first surprising notion that some physicists working on quantum information theory in the 1960s and 70s were also devoted followers of “psi” phenomena: telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, remote viewing and much more. They were also interested in the similarities between their scientific work and Eastern religions and mysticism. It was quantum entanglement and Bell’s theorem describing non-locality (“action at a distance”) that convinced many members of the fringe Fundamental Fysiks Group in Berkeley that they were on to something. Despite their efforts in psi research amounting to mostly speculation, Kaiser does well to write seriously about what some may consider pseudoscience. The validity of the science is not of concern here, but rather the academic and cultural context of the New Physics movement, one that stressed theoretical work over pragmatic, post-WWII “number crunching”. These counterculture physicists refused, as a common moniker of the time demanded, “to shut up and calculate”. This review was originally done for The Portland Book Review.
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Where Do Mountains Come From Momma
by
Catherine Weyerhaeuser Morley
Michael Barton
, August 05, 2012
It is natural for children to ask questions. When those questions deal with science and nature, however, uninformed parents and educators can find it difficult to provide answers. From Mountain Press, known for its series of Roadside Geologies profiling many states, Catherine Morley’s Where Do Mountains Come From, Momma? provides a wonderful resource for an introduction to earth sciences. A young girl asks her mother questions about mountains, and the answers unfold. In just 32 pages, readers learn about plate tectonics, continental drift, fossils, mountain building by several mechanisms, volcanoes, erosion and vast amounts of geologic time. The text is perfectly minimal, while the detailed and beautiful full page illustrations provide simple visual answers. More important, one can learn about asking questions and sharing the search for knowledge with loved ones. Where Do Mountains Come From, Momma? also seems to stress two aspects of science education that have been given more attention recently: that parents should be engaged in learning about science with their children, and that young girls interested in science should be supported rather than discouraged. In both its ability to communicate concepts of earth science and encourage kids and adults alike to “wonder” about nature, Morley’s book succeeds. This review was originally done for The Portland Book Review.
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Secrets of the Garden Food Chains & the Food Web in Our Backyard
by
Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld, Priscilla Lamont, Kathleen W Zoehfeld
Michael Barton
, August 05, 2012
Perhaps there is no better place to learn about nature than one’s own backyard. This is one of the takeaways from Secrets of the Garden, a charmingly illustrated romp through a family’s backyard garden. Author Kathleen Zoehfeld leads the young reader through the process of starting, caring for and cultivating a garden, while interweaving throughout information about the relationships between the plants and various animals that make Alice, Pete and their parents’ backyard their home. That these are “secrets” of the garden implies that it is a place for children to explore and discover. The book covers ecology, the seasonal cycle, food chains and food webs, the different parts of vegetables we eat, composting, how people are part of it all and sharing a summer home (the garden) with animal neighbors. Along the way, to help the reader discover the world of gardening are two chickens, providing additional information about the topic being discussed on that page. Warmly illustrated by Priscilla Lamont, Secrets of the Garden is a wonderful introduction to gardening for young kids and a great story to encourage gardening as a family activity. This review was originally done for The Portland Book Review.
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Complete World of Human Evolution
by
Chris Stringer, Peter Andrews
Michael Barton
, August 05, 2012
Despite its soon-to-be misleading title offering a “complete” world of human evolution, as the science of paleoanthropology is constantly under revision, this book does contain a thorough and up to date account of what we know about human origins. In this second edition, human evolution is discussed in three parts. In the first section, “In Search of Our Ancestors,” the authors describe how their science is conducted and the context in which fossils are found, both in the current world and in the geologic past. The second section, “The Fossil Evidence,” covers the many fossils that have been found, both primate and human ancestors, and describes the theories of how they are related to each other and living species of primates, modern humans included. In the last section, “Interpreting the Evidence,” the authors describe what can be learned from studying the fossils, including locomotion, feeding, migration, behavior, tool use, and art. The authors also share that while much has been learned in the 150 years since the first discoveries of fossils humans, there are many puzzles to be solved in paleoanthropology. The Complete World of Human Evolution is a handsome, detailed, and comprehensive reference for the study of human origins. This review was originally done for the Portland Book Review.
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Companions in Wonder Children & Adults Exploring Nature Together
by
Julie Dunlap, Stephen R Kellert
Michael Barton
, June 30, 2012
Companions in Wonder: Children and Adults Exploring Nature Together, edited by Julie Dunlap and Stephen R. Kellert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), is a wonderful collection of essays from various authors about exploring nature, as children, as adults, as families. These are not mere descriptions of the act of exploring in nature, although you will find this in the book. These are thoughtful and engaging reminisces and hopeful thoughts about what it means to spend time outside, away from technology, with someone you love or admire. There are thirty essays that, although sharing a common theme embracing Rachel Carson’s mantra “a sense of wonder,” all bring a unique perspective on parenting, relationships, environmental education, and knowing a sense of one’s place in the world. The editors, in a very detailed overview of the children and nature movement and some of the research that backs up the claim that spending time in nature is beneficial to one’s health, summarize this collection as part of an “increasingly significant literary genre” within the larger category of environmental literature. While recognizing the mounds of data that show the effects of lack of nature exposure, they note that the more difficult task is figuring out how to connect people to nature. One way, they argue, is through environmental literature, and they hope these essays “yield action as much as inspiration.” And their theme is looking at nature connection through generations. We are introduced to parents, children, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and even those who become part of another family without having any genetic connection (except perhaps, through long lines of shared descent from common ancestors). Dunlap and Kellert write in their introductiion, “Even as a walk in the woods can be an antidote for a child’s nature deficit disorder, sharing that walk between generations is a prescription against deforestation, dwindling biodiversity, climate change, and other ills afflicting our planet.” Several barriers to nature connection are mentioned: daily routines, money, distance, computer games and other electronics (what Richard Louv refers to as “thieves of time”), and fear. These barriers conflict with the data that show the benefits of outdoor play and exposure to the natural world, but, the editors note, we cannot wait until science reaches a consensus on all issues to send out kids outside. The essays comprising Companions in Wonder, including ones from notables Richard Louv and Robert Michael Pyle, but also from less known figures involved in researching and communicating about the environment, offer a multitude of perspectives from diverse geographic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. In “The Farm,” Rick Bass reflects on his relationships with both his own mother and his duaghters as seen through time on the family farm. In “My Child’s First Garden,” Michael P. Branch describes his mostly futile effort in starting a garden for his young daughter, much to the delight and cravings of an antelope squirrel. In “Tracking Our Way,” a father and son of the Abekani tribe share their thoughts on what it means to connect with Ndakinna, “our land,” and discuss the native tradition to educate youth about and in nature, noting that other cultures have “lost the way.” How the rhythms of nature coincide with the rhythms of life is explored in Susan A. Cohen’s essay “Tidal: Subtidal.” One’s identity is dependent on place, a “place that triggers one’s imagination has a better chance of setting into on’e identity.” Much to her pleasure, Cohen’s daughter shares her affinity with coastal environments. In “The Toad Not Taken,” Jeffrey S. Cramer decides what values are to be learned by rescuing an injured bird. The young starling was caught in a neighbor’s volleyball net, neighbor not at home. They decided to cut it free, and placed money in their mailbox to replace the net. Rather than let this animal die entangled in a net, it now has potential it would have lost. Cramer writes, “The thing we take with us today is gone for everyone else tomorrow. If it lives, the toad not taken is there for others to observe, for it to mate and give rise to more of its kind or to be eaten by a bird or animal or to return to the earth in an endless cycle. It is a cycle with which we should not interfere.” Janine DeBaise’s “Of the Fittest” shares her family’s annual tradition of playing a Survivor-esque challenge at the family cabin. Pitting family members against each other, the lessons they learned were how hard it is to survive in nature and to not take for granted the simple amenities that some of humanity has everyday. In “A New England Childhood,” Alison Deming reflects on children having a sense of wonder about a natural world that war and militarism seemed to want to destroy, writing, “The cost of letting one’s appetite for the world’s beauty die, of failing to say what one had loved and why, of flagging in sharing one’s admiration [with children, especially] for amazing life would be the ultimate economic failure leaving the human spirit impoverished.” The next essay touches on race and privilege in one family’s experience of nature. Carolyn Finney discusses being able to explore aspects of nature as a child living on a large estate only because her black parents worked on the estate. She compares her experience then with that now of Obama’s daughters living similarly at the White House, yet very differently. ”Do they play outside?” she asks. She notes that although with different backgrounds, of different generations and in different geographic locations, the First Daughters will likewise come away with thoughts about their environment, especially with a mother (the First Lady) who is working to connect kids to nature through gardening and eating healthy. The contribution from one of the editors, Stephen R. Kellert, is “The Naturalistic Necessity.” Here Kellert discusses the role of direct experience in nature as opposed to indirect experience and symbolic experience. Likening his “naturalistic necessity” to Louv’s “nature-deficit disorder” and Robert Michael Pyle’s “the extinction of experience,” Kellert challenges us to engage the real world, and not the virtual or artificiality of the indoors. “Whatever advances might be made in electronic technology and however creative the modern zoo or nature center have become,” he writes, “the naturalistic experience continues to be an unrivaled context for maturation and development.” In “Children in the Woods,” Barry Lopez gives a wonderful string of words: “In speaking with children who might one day take a permanent interest in natural history… I have sensed that an exploration from a single fragment of the whole is the most invigorating experience I can share with them. I think children know that nearly anyone can learn the names of things; the impression made on them at this level is fleeting. What takes a lifetime to learn, they comprehend, is the existence and substance of myriad relationships: it is these relationships, not the things themselves, that ultimately hold the human imagination.” Richard Louv, in “Fathers and Sons,” reminisces on time spent in nature with his sons, fishing. Why is it that mothers, not fathers, are expected to remember those little moments? In “Moving through the Landscape of Healing,” Stephen J. Lyons shares how spending time in nature in the forests of Idaho helps him as a separated dad connect with his daughter. The life of Japanese Americans and World War II relocation camps is discussed in David Mas Masumoto’s “Belonging on the Land.” It does not matter what land one belongs to, as long one works the it, takes care of it, and uses what the land gives you. In “A Field Guide to Western Birds,” Kathleen Dean Moore explores field guides and the rationality of the natural world, noting: “It is important to me that my children can distinguish a vulture from a golden eagle by the cant of its wings. It reassures me to know that they can recognize the evening call of robins and the morning call of doves, that they know from its tracks whether a rabbit is coming or going, that they always know which way is west. I want them to go out into a rational world where order gives them pleasure and comfort, but also an improbable world, wild with sound and extravagant with color, where there is always a chance they will find something rare and very beautiful, something that is not in the book.” In “At Home with Belonging,” Danyelle O’Hara counters the sterotype that blacks are anti-outdoors. Brenda Peterson explores connecting children to nature through imagination in “Animal Allies.” Reverence for a bear in Glacier National Park and thinking about animal divinity comes also from Peterson, in “Grandmother, Grizzlies, and God.” Robert Michael Pyle, well known for his writings about children and nature, explores in “Parents without Children” what it is like being an uncle who instills a love of nature in children that are not his own. “Books, TV, Twitter, Google Earth, environmental ed. classes, and family vacations in national parks are all very fine,” he writes. “But there is no substitute for an elder who has been out there, knows a thing or two from direct experience, and is willing to share hard-earned knowledge with receptive and curious young minds.” In “Raising Silas,” Janisse Ray asks, how can a rural farm, filled with nature, compete with urbanity with all its movies, video games, and other children? Plants as relatives, sharing kinship, is explored in “Grandma’s Bawena,” where Enrique Salmon shares that he was “introduced… not only to plant knowledge but also to a frame through which I place myself into my environment and universe,” where he is bound to everything in a reciprocal relationship. In “Mountain Music I,” Scott Russell Sanders describes an outing into nature with his son to discover the nature of their quarrels, noting that “Every once and awhile the land brought us together over discussions of the fate of the earth and having hope in a miserable world. Chiori Santiago describes a bowl of stones, gathered from beach collecting amid the “archaeology of domestic detritus” that usually cluttered the kitchen table. Given the opportunity by her mother to explore in a seemingly unattractive beach setting along the Bayshore Freeway in San Francisco, Santiago cherishes that her mother allowed her and her siblings “to gaze into an ordinary bowl of stone in order to glimpse grandeur, to see limitless possibility hidden with smoke and trash and concrete.” Lauret Savoy, in “Colored Memory,” explores landscapes as part of her life from California to Washington, D.C., and land as a refuge growing up during the racialized 1960s and 70s. “Metanarratives of the environmental movement and of nature writing seem to have atrophied to a frame primarily defined and limited by Anglo-America,” she writes. “Rock did not spit, that ocean, sky, and mountains did not hate.” Children with ADHD are brought in in Michael Shay’s “We Are Distracted,” while Sandra Steingraber thinks about talking to kids about climate change in “The Big Talk.” Margo Tamez’s “On Being ‘Indian,” Unsilent, and Contaminated along the U.S.-Mexico Border” reflects on how one’s identity is intertwined with the land of their ancestors, noting that indigenous peoples often equate destruction of the environment to colonialism, militarism, and violent death. In “The Prophets of Place,” Stephen Trimble tells stories of his grandparents and father’s connection to lands in the west, noting that “these were the places that make us who we are.” Recounting annual huckleberry hunting trips with his parents and siblings is the subject of Michael Umphrey’s “Huckleberry Country,” noting that “it was wilderness to us, though we parked our car in the middle of it.” Umphrey continued this tradition with his own children. Rick van Noy, in “Scorched Earth,” describes the difficulty in getting out the door for a planned hike with his children and motivating them to go, bringing in some John Muir and offering that before nature becomes sacred, it must first be accessible and then “lain in and walked on, climbed up and run down. It must ooze between fingers and toes. It must be eaten, whole, and again.” And finally, in “Children in the River,” Gretel Van Wieren writes about the power of fishing with children: its “capacity for wonder formation” and the lessons it offers for understanding the life-death-life process. “Children are not always innocent when it comes to experience the natural world,” she writes. “Often they feel emotions more deeply and expansively than many adults, which is one reason they tend to be better wonderers. Children are open to being amazed, uncertain, uncomfortable, and mystified by the admixture of this tragic and beautiful life. When it comes to fishing, they can see and feel it for what it is - not just a pragmatic act of humans killing to eat but a serious engagement with the sacramental aspect inherent in life.” In their Afterword, Dunlap and Kellert offer some advice to parents for connecting children to nature, such as the need for enthusiasm (“no need to master ecology or geology”), resisting over-involvement, and fostering boredom indoors (i.e., limiting technology). For educators, they suggest others, including the encouragement of biophilia, limiting homework, and restoring school grounds to include natural aspects (like gardens). They list a wealth of books and some online material. But most of all, they charge the reader to “Get outside.” This is not a book listing scores of activities one could utilize in teaching children about nature, for there are plenty of those. Companions in Wonder is a book about what nature can teach us, children and adults alike.
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Wild in the City 2nd Edition Exploring the Intertwine the Portland Vancouver Regions Network of Parks Trails & Natural Areas
by
Michael C Houck, M J Cody
Michael Barton
, December 11, 2011
In 2000, the Audubon Society of Portland published a new guide to the natural areas of the Portland region. Edited by Michael C. Houck and M.J. Cody, "Wild in the City: A Guide to Portland's Natural Areas" provided the reader with descriptions of major natural areas in the region, along with short essays about natural history topics appropriate for the area by a variety of local naturalists. When I moved to Portland in 2010, this was one of the first regional books I obtained - along with "The Northwest Nature Guide: Where to Go and What to See Month by Month in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia" by James Luther Davis. Knowing that my young son and I would be exploring most of the places listed in the book, I decided to use it as a guide for my blog Exploring Portland's Natural Areas, checking off each place as we explored it. I never got around to putting the whole list of natural areas on the blog, unfortunately, as some things just get pushed aside and forgotten. I am glad that I had not completed the list, however, because now I have the shiny new edition of "Wild in the City" (OSU Press) to utilize for that purpose, which - subtitled "Exploring the Intertwine: The Portland-Vancouver Region's Network of Parks, Trails, and Natural Areas" - adds over 12,000 acres of natural areas (such as Cooper Mountain and Graham Oaks Nature Parks) to the list since 11 years ago. At the core of Wild in the City is The Intertwine, "the network of parks, trails, natural areas, and special places in the Portland-Vancouver region" that is "about providing people with connections to nature, to their communities, and to one another across urban and rural landscapes." This book is all at once for walker and the hiker, for the paddler and the biker, for the beginning or seasoned naturalist, and most especially, as Richard Louv writes in his foreword, for families with children. Not only does "Wild in the City" describe with great detail the many places one could explore nature in the Portland region (over 90 locations), but it provides many short essays on far-ranging natural history topics, such as salamanders, Great Blue Herons (the city bird), pygmy owls, Peregrine falcons, "urban vermin," coyotes, and salmon, and personal essays about particular spaces and their histories, like Forest Park, Sauvie Island, and the various watersheds. There are essays from the first edition, however, that are not repeated in the new edition, and that will afford both editions space on my shelf. A section of essays at the beginning of the book provides personal windows into the Portland region as a "sense of place." I personally enjoyed Robert Michael Pyle`s essay "No Vacancy," where he looks further into why natural spaces, even "the little places, the corners and crannies and ravines, the urban greenspaces writ small," must be part of our lives. There is no better guide to make those natural spaces - weather a ditch along a trail cutting through your neighborhood or a banana slug-slimed trail at Tryon Creek State Natural Area - part of your regular life then yourself, your family and friends, and a copy of "Wild in the City."
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