The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

One could be excused for mistaking the latest volume of The Best American Science and Nature Writing for a horror collection. We've got articles in here on the rising tides caused by climate change, a future where antibiotics are useless, the return of measles, mass extinctions, people waking up during surgery, and even invincible ants, all raising the hair on one's head. It almost makes me glad I'll be dead before much of this kicks in.

Edited by Deborah Blum, the 2014 edition is lively reading, even for those who are not of a scientific bent, as I am. In fact, I was able to comprehend all of the articles this year--none of them were too heavy on the math. Some of them were quite benign and even poetic, such as David Treuer's "Trapline," in which he spent some time trapping beavers in norther Minnesota, or Bill Sherwont's "Twelve Ways of Viewing Alaska's Whild, White Sheep."

But a large number of the articles are causes for concern, many of them dealing with the repercussions of man's meddling with nature. Two articles mention that we are now in a new age, which is known as the Anthropocene. Elizabeth Kolbert, as part of her book The Sixth Extinction, discusses the very notion of studying mass extinctions, She points out the work of Georges Cuvier, the first scientist to posit the notion of extinctions (this before many fossils of extinct animals were found) and warns of the next one, the sixth. Roy Scranton outlines an even bleaker forecast in "Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene." But fear not! In "Bringing Them Back to Life," Carl Zimmer writes about attempts to bring back extinct species by cloning them, sort of like was imagined in Jurassic Park. But he wonders about the ethics--do we really want the sky clouded with passenger pigeons again?

In medical news, I found the scariest article to be Marilyn McKenna's "Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future." Antibiotics have to be constantly updated, because bacteria keep adapting to them (the easiest proof of evolution that there is). Pharmaceutical companies don't make money on short-use drugs like antibiotics, so aren't eager to pour research dollars into them. Which we means one day we may be back to the day when a mosquito bite, followed by infection, could kill someone. If that doesn't make you scared, maybe "The Return of Measles," by Seth Mnookin, will. It's been in the news--the nutty anti-vaccination crowd are personally responsible for the uptick in measles, which is the most contagious microbe in existence (it has a 90 percent rate of infection) which was completely eradicated. Of, if you have different fears, there's Joshua Lang's "Awakening," about patients who wake up during surgery, but can't move. They then have traumatic memories of the pain. It could make you want to high-tail it into the mountains.

On the other hand, Rebecca Solnit's article on leprosy, "The Separating Sickness," is heartening--leprosy is not quite done with, but can be easily cured, and maybe one day the phrase "treated like a leper" will be obsolete. And "TV as Birth Control," by Fred Pearce, discusses how the impact of television, particularly of strong women characters, has changed birth control rates in third-world countries. When women see fictional versions of themselves with more options than just being incubators, birth rates go down.

I read this book on a Kindle, but there is still a longing for paper, and that might be because of something in the brain, so says Ferris Jabr in "Why the Brain Prefers Paper." "Surveys and consumer reports suggest that the sensory aspects of reading on paper matter to people more than one might assume: the feel of paper and kin; the option to smooth or fold a page with one's fingers; the distinctive sound a page makes when turned. So far digital texts have not satisfyingly replicated such sensations."

When I was a kid in Texas, we knew about fire ants--my sister sat in an anthill when she was two; it was not pretty. Justin Nobel writes in "Ants Go Marching" that's there's just no good way of getting rid of them: "Eliminating fire ants seemed a bit like making cornbread: every Southerner had his own favorite recipe."

I think my favorite article is Corey S. Powell's "The Madness of Planets," which is about how chaos really is the norm in cosmology. For instance, Jupiter, it is thought, was roaming around untethered in the solar system. "Fortunately for us, Earth had not yet formed when Jupiter was on the move; if it had, our planet might have plunged into the sun or spun off into dark oblivion." Jupiter smashed through objects that were there, including "thick swarms of icy comets and asteroids." This sent water-rich objects onto Earth's surface as it was forming. "Whenever you take a swim, or just take a drink, you are benefiting from the solar system's foundational instability."

All of this was news to me. Fascinating news.