Strange encounters: Adventures of a renegade naturalist
Ecologist Daniel B. Botkin searches for answers to the simple questions in his most recent book
The simplest of questions are often the most difficult to answer.
Daniel B. Botkin explores this particular irony in his most recent book while giving the reader a firsthand view of the development of ecology from its infancy as a renegade discipline to the legitimate science it is today.
As a young forester on the leading edge of an emerging field, Botkin worked in a Long Island forest slowly being killed from the inside-out by cesium 137 radiation. He created computer models to predict forest growth while at the famous Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And he studied elephants in Kenya. In each of these activities, he uncovered incorrect assumptions held by scientists about the way the world works.
The more than 20 short essays that comprise this book — his fourth following works on Lewis and Clark and Henry David Thoreau — reflect on a career as varied as the ecology field is today.
Botkin asks the first of several simple questions while at Woods Hole: how many hours does a whale sleep? Along his career path, it was simple but never before posed questions like this one that would come to undermine what other scientists thought they knew about the world.
As the Japanese government was requesting permission to increase their yearly harvest of whales for “research purposes,” Botkin received a grant to model whale social behavior. Its purpose was to determine the effect of removing a certain number of whales from a population. He relied on a whale expert for the behavioral aspects of the model only to find out that the expert’s knowledge of whales was based on assumptions from gazelle behavior.
Botkin voiced his frustration at his ill-defined path of study. “Sometime in the future, I thought, this field of whale biology would grow up and people would be able to create useful theory well-connected to legitimate observations. Perhaps I really had gone into the wrong field. Where was the science in ecological science?”
Despite this heavy tone, Botkin also effectively uses dry, self-deprecating humor. This helps keep the prose light, as it often teeters on the edge of the overly serious. The humorous dabbling offsets the reader’s impression of a scolding older relative to one taking the time to pass on the wisdom accrued over a lifetime.
One of the funnier essays points out that we humans are not always the highest link in the “great chain of being,” as Botkin calls it. He observes that raccoons raiding his trash cans aren’t deterred when he steps to the back door and switches on an outdoor light.
After several attempts the outdoor light shines on a cat that’s been attracted to the scene by the commotion. The raccoons quickly disperse and don’t return.
The most profound chapter of the book questions the paradigms under which most of science operates. After losing his wife to a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma a year after being told the cancer was gone, Botkin reconsiders the way doctors approach its treatment. He is talking with a colleague who tells him that the “organic soup theory of life” is implausible because it violates the second law of thermodynamics. Yet, this colleague says, scientists continue approving each other’s grants and papers rather than question the basis for their research.
This sparks an epiphany relating cancer to population ecology: “The way I understand it, the underlying idea about chemotherapy is that it is like hunting all the individuals of a species to try to kill them and cause extinction of the species that way,” he says. “A much easier way is to damage or destroy the habitat.” This leads Botkin to organize cancer workshops to get researchers to rethink their paradigms.
Strange Encounters isn’t as offbeat as the title suggests and the prose often suffers in its simplicity. But where Botkin shines is in his observations, advice and wisdom. While retracing one of Thoreau’s canoe trips through Maine, Botkin questions our technological world and what it’s causing us to miss: “Maybe it was because he had that deeper feeling about nature and sought to experience directly, inner and outer, rather than treat it as a political issue viewed from afar, or an administrative task to be completed as part of a bureaucrat’s assignment.”
The lesson here is that even those most concerned with understanding and protecting the earth can forget why they’ve dedicated their lives to the science. That is, until a canoe trip or a walk in the woods reminds them. Sometimes the simple answers are difficult to find.Daniel B. Botkin. 2003. “Strange Encounters: Adventures of a Renegade Naturalist”. New York: Tarcher/Penguin.
Other New Books this fall:
“The New Humanists,” 2003
John Brockman, editor
Barnes and Noble Books
ISBN 0760745293
This anthology of essays by science writers on the edge of an emerging “third culture” within the community of intellectual thought, explore their own contributions to modern thought. These outsiders are blending science with art and philosophy in ways that seek to add “real world” relevance to scientific discovery. Essays by Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennet, Marvin Minsky, among others.
“Essential Agrarian Reader,” 2003
Norman Wirzba, editor
University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 0813122856
Another collection of essays, this one examining the relationship between people and the earth while sweeping in topics ranging from education to urban planning and ecology to religion. The sum goal of the work is to provide practical ways of creating more sustainable communities. Essays by Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva, Brian Donahue and others. Foreword by Barbara Kingsolver.
“In Defense of Global Capitalism," 2003
Johan Norberg
Cato Institute
ISBN 1930865473
This book argues that globalization is the only way for third world countries to be lifted out of poverty. Norberg seeks to refute every anti-globalization argument and show that capitalism is creating more opportunity and freedom around the world. His book follows another by the same institute that says global warming can’t be proved, so it’s better to do nothing at all.
“Where the Mountain Casts its Shadow," 2003
Maria Coffey
St. Martin’s Press
ISBN 0312290659
Breaking the long-held silence within the world of mountaineering, Coffey gives the families of high-altitude risk-takers a chance to speak about the “dark side” of an obsession with the world’s tallest mountains. In a sport that kills many of its participants, the grief and anxiety of the families left at home can be devastating. Interviews with top climbers and their families, including Conrad Anker, Chris Bonington and Ed Viesturs.
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