Breaking Through

By: | November 29, 2011

This past summer, I spent two weeks sitting, working and, once, sleeping next to a hospital bed, trying and failing to communicate with my father.

He had called for an ambulance on the evening of July 25 because he couldn’t breathe. With end-stage emphysema, he often couldn’t breathe, but apparently that night he was frightened enough to call for help. At the hospital, the doctors intubated him and doused him with the sedatives one needs to withstand a hard plastic tube down the throat. My sister and I never knew if he had agreed to the intubation, or if he was too weak or panicked to voice a clear opinion. Over the next few days in the ICU, although still heavily sedated, he sometimes acted in ways that seemed deliberate: he would open his eyes wide, or furrow his brow, or nod to a question or squeeze my hand. But I was never really sure. I wasn’t sure if he would have wanted us to agree to the tracheostomy procedure, on August 2, or remove the ventilator, on August 9.

What if I could have been more sure?

I couldn’t help but think about that a couple of weeks ago while having coffee with Jon Bardin at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington, D.C. A few years back, Jon left the science magazine where we both worked to pursue a PhD in neuroscience. He joined the lab of Nicholas Schiff, an expert on the neural basis of consciousness, and began studying the brain activity of people with severe brain injury. And now at the conference, Jon told me, he would be presenting a poster of unpublished data suggesting that brain waves can reveal whether a somewhat conscious person is tuning in when other people speak.

Continue reading →

It’s Not (Always) About the Lorax

By: | November 28, 2011


I’ve spent a lot of time this past year thinking and writing about extinction, which means I’ve also spent a lot of time drinking thinking about the tragic narrative in environmental journalism.

There’s a lot of genuine tragedy on the environmental beat, and it doesn’t take a partisan to see it. There’s not a whole lot to like about water pollution, or crop failures, or mass extinction. But I wonder if environmental journalists, steeped as we are in bad news, reach too quickly for the Lorax narrative. You know how it goes: The Lorax speaks for the trees, the rest of us keep buying thneeds, and for hope all we get is the Once-ler’s last seed.

Are there other ways to tell environmental stories? With Christopher Booker’s Seven Basic Plots as a field guide, I’ve been searching for examples of environmental journalism with other-than-tragic narratives — archetypal frameworks that still fit the facts, but startle the reader out of his or her mournful stupor. I’ve found some good ones, and I’d love to hear about more.

Continue reading →

Black Friday and Dirty Gold

By: | November 25, 2011

Seventeen years ago, Canadian biologist Adrian Forsyth slipped into lyricism as he described the great wilderness known as Tambopata-Candamo in Peru. The cloud forests there, he wrote in an official report, “are dense with every limb matted with fern, orchid and moss and the only trails are those of the secretive spectacled bear and elusive mountain lion…. Along the banks of the Tambopata brilliant flocks of macaws concentrate by the hundreds to feed on mineral-rich soil pockets. Giant otters hunt the rivers for enormous catfish. Vast expanses of forest extend in all directions.”

This untouched paradise lay near the headwaters of the Amazon, and Forsyth and 23 colleagues explored it, charting its biodiversity for Conservation International. (Sadly, two of the CI team died in the line of action, when their small plane crashed in a treetop survey.) But the team persevered, recording 575 bird species and 1200 butterfly species, the second richest documented butterfly community in the world.  Their final report pleaded powerfully for the protection of this vast emerald wilderness.

But the key to Tambopata-Condamo’s fate lay in just four words in that 184-page-long report: “mineral-rich soil pockets.” Today, nearly two decades after Forsyth waxed eloquent, steepling gold prices and a government seemingly paralyzed by corruption are transforming part of this paradise—the Madre de Dios river and its surrounding forest—into an ecological disaster on a grand scale. “It looks like Mordor,” said Alex Chepstow-Lusty, a paleoecologist at the French Institute of Andean Studies in Lima, in an interview I did with him in February. Continue reading →

Science Metaphors (cont.): Degeneracy

By: | November 24, 2011

I was helping an astronomer write a sentence.  It was about disentangling the color a supernova has intrinsically, from the reddening in its color caused by cosmic dust.  He wrote he wanted to “break the degeneracy” between the colors.  Break the degeneracy.  I got so excited.  I’d always thought degenerates were people who didn’t, for instance, take baths.  But intrinsic color and extrinsic reddening could be degenerate? Oh my yes, he said, and so can stars and electrons.  So what’s science doing, not taking baths? Continue reading →

How many victims are there?

By: | November 22, 2011

The case against accused child molester Jerry Sandusky includes testimony about eight victims, and the New York Times is reporting that ten more have stepped forward since the case became public. These allegations present a pattern of abuse that extends over more than a decade, and Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has said he expects more victims to come forward. The allegations against Sandusky seem to validate a common stereotype of child molesters as serial criminals who prey on other peoples’ children. According to a commonly cited statistic, men who molest boys have an average of 150 victims each.

But is that really true? Should we expect that the Penn State case involves another 130 victims, regardless of whether they come forward? Continue reading →

Guest Post: the Monsters of Navajoland

By: | November 21, 2011

A few weeks ago, driving across Navajoland in northeast Arizona, I stopped to see some dinosaur tracks just west of Tuba City. As I pulled into the parking area, on the north side of highway 160, a Navajo man got up from a group sitting in lawn chairs by a hand written “Dino Tracks” sign.

“Hi, my name is Denny,” he said. “Would you like to see the dinosaur tracks?” I said yes and asked if there was a fee and if my dogs could come and he told me he worked for tips, and assured me the dogs were welcome.

The trackway started a short distance from the parking lot: dozens of deep, three toed tracks neatly printed in red sandstone. Dinosaur tracks often look nothing like anything, often just a mud smear solidified in rock. As a lifelong dinosaur buff and an avid traveler in geology, I had visited a lot of tracks all over North America and these were striking, the clearest I’d ever seen, with toes and talons clearly preserved. Continue reading →

Krill Thrill: ‘Happy Feet’ and the end of woodland dominance

By: | November 17, 2011

As far as obscure ecosystems go, the outer edge of expanding sea-ice sheets has got to be near the top of the list. Not algae-living-in-sloth-hairs obscure, I suppose, but then the algae that grow inside the sea ice have a significantly greater impact on just about everything else in the world, other than sloth hair. Sea ice represents a fascinating bit of physical structure in the otherwise largely structure-less surface of the polar seas. And it’s more complex than many people realize. It’s riddled with cracks and fissures, and honeycombed with channels and pockets of super-salty brine, left behind as seawater freezes into largely salt-free ice. For organisms smaller than an inch or two long, the ice edge is a terrain as rich and varied as a coral reef or a tropical rainforest.

For three or four years in the 1990s, I was obsessed with the structure of growing sea ice, and especially with the life that structure supported. My first job in grad school was to figure out a way to capture images of the microbial communities living inside the brine pockets and fissures of Antarctic sea ice—and my last was to plant my feet on that sea ice with a coring augur, and bore down into it to collect samples. I spent countless hours learning about the ice and the organisms that lived in it, and months running thought experiments, tinkering in the lab and racing frostbite to capture untainted samples of the ice’s underside, where all the biological action is. I even deployed plankton nets, many times, with the express purpose of capturing not the giant Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, but its feces.

I immersed so far, I might as well have been living in a brine pocket myself. But I’d never really seen what goes on at the ice edge until Warner Bros. showed me. That’s right—the trailers for Happy Feet Two, opening now, feature what must be the world’s first-ever animated krill. I suppose this is how the clownfish people must have felt when Nemo broke big.

Continue reading →

Lung Cancer: Replacing the Blunderbuss with a Stiletto

By: | November 16, 2011

Van VanderMeer is about to celebrate an anniversary that he’d probably rather forget.

In December 2009, VanderMeer thought he had caught his annual winter cough; for a few years in a row, he’d developed a chest cold around this time of year. But this one lingered. VanderMeer was competing in a mixed doubles tournament in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where he lives, when he realized that he was too short of breath to continue the match.

His wife convinced him to see his doctor. An x-ray showed that VanderMeer’s left lung was almost entirely filled with fluid, prompting this observation from his radiologist: “This could be something not good.”

Continue reading →