Best science and nature writing of 2006

by Ray Zimmerman

It’s no secret that millions of native peoples around the world have been pushed off their land to make room for big oil, big metal, big timber, and big agriculture. But few people realize that the same thing has happened for a much nobler cause: land and wildlife conservation. Today the list of culture-wrecking institutions put forth by tribal leaders on almost every continent includes not only Shell, Texaco, Freeport, and Bechtel, but also more surprising names like Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Even the more culturally sensitive World Conservation Union (IUCN) might get a mention.” – “Conservation Refugees,” Mark Dowie
Mark Dowie partnered with Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005 to conduct research that led to his article “Conservation Refugees,” which originally appeared in Orion. He brought to this enterprise a wealth of experiences gained by writing over 200 articles, which won him eighteen journalism awards. He is a former editor of Mother Jones magazine and a seasoned investigative reporter.
As the World Bank and its Global Environmental Facility encourage countries on every continent to set land aside for conservation through such programs as the debt-for-nature swap, Dowie is adamant that conservation organizations begin to respond to the challenge of including indigenous people in the planning process. He quotes Masai Leader Martin Saning’o, who makes the claim, “We are the original conservationists.”
Dowie traces the history of evicting native people for conservation as far back as the creation of Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks in the United States and challenges conservationists to find a better way. He mentions India’s official figure of 1.6 million conservation refugees.
“Conservation Refugees” is only one article appearing in “The Best American Science and Nature Writing: 2006.” His arguments are balanced by an article later in the volume, “Out of Time” by Paul Raffaele, who took readers of Smithsonian on a narrated journey to the land of the Batwa people in Brazil’s Javari Valley, a well protected exclusion zone in the Amazon region. Raffaele introduced readers to Sidney Possuelo, South America’s leading expert on remote Indian tribes. Possuelo researches by helicopter and airplane and rarely makes contact with the groups he is sworn to protect as a government agent. He interprets ‘protect’ to mean interfere as little as possible with the native culture and allow the people to continue their traditional ways.
Possuelo has been threatened and his camp surrounded by those who would enter the exclusion zone for profit or missionary work. Loggers, miners and other entrepreneurs would like to conduct commerce with the Indians or displace them to carry out extractive industry. Church leaders are especially interested in contacting them for the purpose of winning new converts. Interestingly enough, these twin motivations of commerce and conversion first brought Europeans to the American continents.
Possuelo would only allow Raffaele to visit one village. The people lived in a nearly stone-age culture but had wondered so close to the edge of the exclusion zone, contact was inevitable. This gave Raffaele an opportunity to meet and investigate one small sample of the Batwa away from the isolated main village of their tribe.
This pair of articles only hints at the many topics addressed in “Best Science and Nature Writing: 2006.” The editors looked at hundreds of articles to select the best for this volume. Topics range from a description of the Chandra orbiting X-Ray telescope to the source of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Computer aficionados will especially like “The Blogs of War” from Wired and “Torrential Reign” from Fortune. The second of these articles describes the development of Bit Torrent software, the first software for transfer of large files on the internet.
Two articles unmask the pseudoscience of intelligent design. In “Show Me the Science,” from the “New York Times,” Daniel C. Dennett quotes intelligent-design proponent and affiliate of the Discovery Institute, George Gilder, who said, “Intelligent design itself does not have any content.” He proposes a few steps intelligent-design proponents could take to legitimize their claims, including publication in a peer-reviewed journal, conducting experiments with testable hypotheses and investigating genomes or the fossil record.
Articles in “Best Science and Nature Writing: 2006” are both informative and enjoyable. A few articles on physics and astrophysics are highly technical, but most articles in the volume are an easy read. Brian Greene, guest editor, is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University. He has published two books, “The Elegant Universe,” and “The Fabric of the Cosmos.” Tim Folger, series editor, is a contributing editor at Discover and writes science articles for several magazines.