Somebody Needs to Write a Book About the Political Economy of the Colorado Potato Beetle

By: | October 15, 2021

The other day, my friend Max — a brilliant aquatic scientist whose work lies at the center of the herpetology/gender studies Venn diagram — tweeted a comment he’d received from an anonymous peer reviewer. Evidently this reviewer had doubted Max’s claim that frogs have political economic histories. Max’s reply: “lolz yes. All critters on Earth have socio-cultural & political economic histories.” (If the reviewer found this tweet convincing, Max didn’t say so.) 

I agree with Max’s assertion — heck, even a creature as obscure and humble as the achoque salamander is deeply embedded in socio-cultural webs of religion, science, and regulatory bureaucracy. That said, I’m skeptical that every species has an equally compelling socio-political history. While one could theoretically write an exhaustive work of political economy about, I don’t know, the red-backed vole, I’m not sure I’d want to read it. (Apologies to all the mammalogists I just mortally offended.)

I’m biased, but I’d argue that the political economy with the most explanatory power in the non-human animal kingdom is that of Castor canadensis, the mighty beaver. How many other species were the subject of a transcontinental trade that spanned centuries and fundamentally restructured European and Indigenous North American cultures? How many species spurred the colonization of a continent, started wars, inspired a real estate transaction as grandiose as the Louisiana Purchase? How many species were so economically important that regional currencies were pegged to the value of its fur? I could go on. Somebody should really write a book about this.

Anyway, Max’s tweet got me wondering: Which other species are crying out for a popular political economic history? Most of the obvious ones, I think, have been written. Mark Kurlansky covered cod (and, in so doing, made the single-species biography a genre). David Montgomery did salmon. Whales have been comprehensively documented, most recently by Rebecca Giggs and Bathsheba Demuth. There’s no shortage of books about influential disease vectors (mosquitos, rats, ticks) and species at the center of management controversies (wolves, bears, spotted owls) and commercially valuable sea creatures (save some fish for the rest of us, Paul Greenberg). 

In short, it’s a crowded market. (Although I do think the world badly needs a prairie dog opus.)

(As a brief aside, I’m aware that I’m defining political economy vis-a-vis species’ interactions with humans, a narrow frame that reveals my anthropocentrism and limited imagination. No doubt many animal societies have endlessly rich political economies of their own, entirely unrelated to their relationship to humans. Imagine the palace intrigue within, say, a naked mole rat colony.) 

All of the above notwithstanding, there’s one deserving critter whose political economy has never, to my knowledge, been thoroughly explicated: the Colorado potato beetle.

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Just Have Lunch

By: | October 13, 2021

I’ve been interviewing women scientists again, younger ones this time. I ask them if they have some kind of semi-official, almost casual way of staying connected with other women scientists. Because, you know, staying connected helps you survive the bullshit. Every time I ask them this question — and the answer is almost always “YES!” — I think of Senator Barbara Mikulski’s lunches which were surely a bullshit-survival mechanism. But they were something more: they were also watched. What happens when a network of women is watched? This first ran January 9, 2017.

I wish I could remember – but I can’t  – the woman who told me a story about how she and other women in her profession had regular lunches, casually, unofficially, no agenda.  Was she a lawyer? A writer? An astronomer?  Just don’t remember.  The thing I’m sure about is that the point was not that the women met for lunch, it was that the men they worked with noticed that they met.  The men didn’t get snippy, didn’t make comments, just noticed:  something like, “saw that you were at one of your lunches.”

Now there’s a thought.  I’ve spent a certain amount of my career writing about women in science and the gender-related issues they deal with, including how to get attention paid to their research, how to get taken seriously, and how to get enough power.  Why even be in a profession unless your voice gets heard and you can do things that you’re good at, things worth doing, the things worth your time on earth?  Even the paleolithics wanted to have the things they made (I stole this idea from Jacob Bronowski, around minute 14:45), show the shapes of their hands. 

And of course women have always and still have trouble being noticed.  One work-around was hilarious: a woman in a meeting says something (“Let’s check the immigrant statistics”), another woman in the meeting repeats it and cites the first woman (“I think we should do what Sarah suggested, check the immigrant statistics”).  They called it “amplification,” as in, boosting the signal, making it louder, spreading it farther, just like a cell phone tower.  Parts of these last two paragraphs are digressions.

The solution of the woman-I-can’t-remember was different from amplification, less in-your-face:  it was just, have lunch.   When I was in academia, I was part of something like this.  A friend in another department, agreeing with everybody that the university’s percentage of women faculty (upper-body strength not a requisite) was pathetic, began reserving a lunch table at the faculty club every few weeks.  She thought that since we were so few, we might like to know each other.  There we sat, at an obviously-reserved table, in the middle of the faculty club dining room, talking not about university politics or the plight of women or the subversion of the patriarchy, just talking to the person across the table about what her research was finding these days or had she travelled somewhere interesting over the summer or how were her classes going.  I loved these lunches; they made me feel more a part of the university’s intellectual candy store.  But that was the view from the inside.  I never thought about the old boys at the next table over, what they might be seeing.  Though I do remember the same comment, something like, “saw you at one of your lunches.”

Turns out Senator Barbara Mikulski had the same idea.  After she announced her retirement, the news media talked all about how she was head of the enormously powerful Appropriations Committee, and how she was 4’ 11” and stood on a stool so she could be seen over a podium, and how she’d been in the Senate for 30 years and was the longest-serving woman senator and when she first got there, she was only the second senator to be a woman and the Senate didn’t have women’s bathrooms and she was supposed to wear skirts.

And in almost all of those news reports was this same piece of information: that every month or so for two decades, Mikulski had held – often at her house – famously private dinners to which only women senators were invited, no men.  Because women senators come in all political persuasions, the discussions were not business meetings, they were just people getting to know each other, listening, talking – you know, the basis on which the human, social world of politics begins its arguments, negotiations, and compromises.

Some news reports said that the dinners were the reason that women senators got an unrepresentative amount of stuff done.

But again, that’s the view from the inside.  Here’s my point: the dinners were private –the rule was no staff, no memos, no leaks — and even then, they were a standard part of the public news reports.  The dinners existed and so the guys watched, they noticed.  Maybe humans can’t help ourselves, when some people sit around in a special group, we pay attention, we wonder what they’re up to.  And even if they seem to be up to nothing special, just sitting around eating, we notice.  We keep an eye on them, see if they do it again.  They do.  They do it for the next twenty years.  They’re a presence now.

All the gender-related inequities still have to be talked about, written about, legislated, enacted, enforced.  But meanwhile, damn, sisters:  to be seen, start with lunch.

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Roundhouse Wipers, 1943 – United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division, via Wikimedia Commons

Senator Barbara Mikulski (guess which one she is) and NASA (part of her professional purview) staff, via Flickr

Mikulski and fellow senators at the 2008 Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the National Women’s Law Center, and the National Partnership for Women and Families: Clarissa Peterson, LCCR, via Flickr

Visitors from Far Away

By: | October 8, 2021

My in-laws are visiting from the East Coast and we’ve had some days to explore. The local bar in our five-hundred-person town is a must-see, its sleek wood and mirrors more than a century old, and the old mountain-mining town of Telluride is forty-five minutes away for window shopping and looking for famous people. The bulk of our days, however, we’ve spent with much older points of interest. If you’re coming all the way from the other side of the continent, I wouldn’t want to be frivolous.

My wife planned most of the tour, a whirlwind of sun-filled valleys and cliffs. The desert of southwest Colorado in October is at its peak, green from summer rains, warm but not searing. We mince our way up canyons, over boulders the size of bedrooms, and follow dry washes and backroads, our truck loaded to take us to the next stop and the next.

A man unlocks a gate near a permanently closed trading post and lets us through. A mile or so down the road, we park under cottonwood shade. Near the outbuildings of a desert ranch, the in-laws spot a boulder across the road pecked with a fifteen-hundred-year old anthropomorph. They’re getting good at spotting images, recognizing the style, Basketmaker Culture. 

The boulder is the size of a cottage and it has rock art on every side, bighorn sheep, lightning-like snakes, and human figures with plumes and lines coming out of their heads. We have the usual conversation, surmising headdresses or hunts, a dialogue that has to happen at rock art panels.

I came to this family saunter fresh off of a teaching gig for Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, CO. This had been a field program in the Utah backcountry, in the contested and soon to be restored lands of Bears Ears National Monument, just over the horizon from where we live. I taught with an Anglo museum curator, a Hopi archaeologist and tribal member, and a scholar from the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. A dozen participants followed along as we walked to rock art and ruins, which the Hopi archaeologist said were not ruins, not abandoned. They were still on the Hopi map, places very much alive. 

The Hopi archaeologist I taught with would say these petroglyphs were spirit people, ancestors, the ones who carried prayers. I’ve also heard them called personifications of clouds, where instead of seeing a rockface of people, you are seeing thunderheads marching toward you, rain bringers.

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Why I Will Never Be A Good Photographer

By: | October 6, 2021

If you study the breeding habits of a stout gray seabird called the rhinoceros auklet on a couple of islands in Washington, a field season typically lasts from May until August. Come fall, then, you have a choice: you can either dive into the data and analysis and statistical whatnot, or you can spend some quality time with the photos you took during the field season, and so try to make it last a little longer.

I usually opt for the photos. I say this even though I’m not a very good photographer. My portfolio consists mostly of run-of-the-mill landscapes and seascapes. Often those -scapes are filled with dots. (“Are those supposed to be birds?” my daughter asks.) No matter. I just like to look at the auklet’s islands. One, Protection Island, is about two miles off the north coast of the Olympic Peninsula, in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Here are a few of the several hundred shots I have snapped of it over the years.

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Science Poem: Darwin’s Finches

By: | October 4, 2021
A black large ground finch perching on a branch

In regard to the wildness of birds towards man, there is no other way of accounting for it… many individuals… have been pursued and injured by man, but yet have not learned a salutary dread of him.

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
Darwin's Finches

All right, fine, the first few birds
Could not have seen this coming.
They saw only dark shapes—large, lumbering, branch-winged birds
Tipped with tufts of down.
Of course the little birds were curious.
Of course they believed the branch-wings
Were benevolent.

And you’re right: 
Once those first birds had been grabbed,
Necks twisted, 
No, they couldn’t have gone back
To warn the others.

But the finches just kept coming, 
Bird by trusting bird,
And the men kept killing them,
And the flock kept thinning.

You might think at some point
One bird might say to another,
You know, there’s something strange
About that beach—
The birds who go there
Never come back

And maybe
One bird did say this,
And maybe
The warned bird went anyway.

I guess I understand.

*

Image by Flickr user Brian Gratwicke under Creative Commons license

A New Person of LWON

By: | October 3, 2021

What can I say about Kate Horowitz, our newest LWON member, whose debut piece is about to drop on Monday? She’s insanely creative and smart, generous as can be, and has a truly unique voice that draws you in and holds you tight. She’s a science writer, essayist, and poet, for starters; I promise her posts will be like nothing you’ve read before–and just what you need right now. Please jump up and down with us in honor of her arrival!

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Photo from Public Domain Review

It’s 50/50

By: | October 1, 2021

As I’ve moved through life, there are an unimaginable number of things I’ve seen or heard, briefly enjoyed, and then summarily forgotten about. For those of us with awful long-term memory, this is the joy in rereading books: it’s like reading it for the first time. There are things I’d like to remember better, and then there are the insignificant snippets that have inexplicably stuck with me, the things I’ve turned over in my head again and again. (The sign above, for instance, is a rich text I encountered in a former military base bathroom in 2015. I still think about at least quarterly.)

One of those things: a story a friend told me about a statistics class in college. The topic was probability. “I don’t get it,” a classmate said. “Everything is just 50/50; either it happens, or it doesn’t.”

I’d be lying if I said my first instinct wasn’t to laugh. How absurd! Probability is real! We use it all the time! (The assumption that probability is self-evident is why ditzy Karen’s weather forecast in Mean Girls lands: “There’s a 30% chance it’s already raining.”)

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I understand my friend’s classmate. The factors underlying probability are often invisible, murky. Take coronavirus, for instance; it’s not 50/50 whether you’ll get COVID, but whether your risk level is 90% or 10% depends on a whole slew of factors: the rate of transmission where you live, whether you’re wearing a mask, and if you’re vaccinated, among other things. There are calculators that try to quantify that risk; this one says my county’s current risk level is 36%. This type of data is important for researchers, epidemiologists, public health officials, and other people in a position to make decisions about COVID policy, but what, exactly, are citizens supposed to do with this precise percentage? I’m vaccinated, I try to avoid crowds, I wear a mask indoors, and I wash my hands frequently. I’m not sure what else to do. It feels a bit 50/50; either I’ll get it, or I won’t.

I’ve never met the 50/50 person, and probably never will, but I’ve spent a not insignificant amount of time thinking about what they must be like. It is easy to assume the worst of them or what they represent, just as it is always more comforting to find ways to puff yourself up at someone else’s expense. What an indictment of this country’s math and science education! This type of STEM ignorance is exactly what got us into this whole COVID mess in the first place!

But I have grown to admire this person. I never spoke up in college for fear of looking stupid, and it took me another five years to realize it was ok to ask questions about things I thought I should already know, so I’m impressed that they asked this in class at all. I’m also a little envious of their ability to entertain a world view so rooted in the present. Perhaps by now this person has a more robust understanding of probability, but imagine believing everything is 50/50: wouldn’t that be freeing, in some ways? Imagine the mental calculus you’ve expended trying to determine your odds of getting that job, landing that pitch, getting in a run before it starts raining. Some things are unknowable; others are out of your control. Maybe we’d be better off imagining those things are 50/50: either they will happen, or they won’t.