Reading, writing, and aestheticism

Last week my daughter turned one, and - as well as celebrating all the fun of her first year - I found myself reflecting on the growing list of ‘things I used to do’, in those dimly remembered days before the arrival of Webbs 2.0 and 2.1. There are the obvious activities - eating (and drinking) out, sport, long walks and lie ins. There are things that have come alarmingly close to making the list. ‘Doing my job properly’ springs to mind (though I think I have that under control again now…). Any parent will bore you with a similar list. But a growing concern this last year has been the fact that ‘reading for pleasure’ has receded from everyday activity to rare treat. I still read, of course, struggling like all academics to ‘keep up’ with the literature (what a laughable idea!) and to acquire some basic understanding of various topics relevant to assorted projects (and side-projects). At the moment, for instance, I am at varying distances through books on palaeobiology, oceanography, moral philosophy, and statistical graphics (and therein, some might claim, lies my problem - focus, man! - but I digress…) However, here’s a stark fact: I didn’t read a novel in 2013 (unprecedented in my literate life) and the stack next to my bed continues to yellow and gather dust. And while the shamefully low frequency of my contributions here has almost relegated ‘writing a blog’ to the list, I probably still write more posts than I read.

All this means that when I do get the chance to read something just for fun, it’d better be good. And by ‘good’ I mean the writing should offer, before anything else, what William Giraldi, in a lovely NYT review of Wendy Lesser’s Why I Read, calls ‘an ecstasy of aestheticism’. There, I’ve said it: I absolutely prize style over content. Which is why, if I get time, I will pick up the Review section from Saturday's Guardian before any science or tech supplement, to read long pieces by the likes of Will Self, Hilary Mantel, Geoff Dyer or Lionel Shriver. Now that's a pretty diverse quartet, but I know I'll get a good read out of any of them, regardless of the actual subject of their piece.

What this means, I’ve come to realise, is that I read very little that could (even loosely) be described as ‘science writing’. This despite the copious output of the many producers of absolutely brilliant science writing. More people are describing more science more clearly than ever before; but the focus (quite rightly) of these pieces is almost always on content (What cool stuff has been found? What’s the fascinating human story behind the discovery?) and much less on that elusive ecstasy of aestheticism. There is a huge public appetite for informative, readable science writing, and it seems perfectly appropriate that most science writing serves to sate this. But - given time constraints - I’m usually content to rely on 140 character chunks for pure information; for longer reads, I’m looking for brilliant writing first, with scientific content a distant second. I’m in search of the stylists of science writing. Who out there shuns the homogenising algorithms of ‘readability scores’, breaks all the rules of SciComm 101, and dares to stretch the reader with an esoteric vocabulary and the kind of (intricicate, recursive (sometimes (seemingly) infinitely so)) sentence structure that made the lamented David Foster Wallace’s essays such a challenging, pleasurable read?

I touched on some of these issues in a very early Mola mola post on Sciencey Fiction  and although that was focused (as you may have guessed) on fiction - largely novels, in fact - it does identify some writers who I think have nicely seasoned their fine writing with science. More recently, I was given a copy of Richard Hamblyn’s The Art of Science and within a paragraph of the introduction I felt I was in good hands. But it’s a long book, and sits, still, in that yellowing, dusty pile…

So then, let’s cut to the chase. Which writers - in any format - ought I at least try to squeeze in to my few spare weekly minutes to lend my recreational reading more of a sciencey flavour?

Life with Attenborough

Christmas day 1981, Horton General Hospital. Superman cloak: check. Grotesquely swollen neck: check. Life on Earth on the table: check.

Christmas day 1981. A six-year-old boy sits on his bed in the Horton General Hospital, Banbury. He feels poorly, no worse, but for now nobody knows quite what’s wrong with him. His parents hide their worry so well that he is only now, a parent himself, starting to appreciate it. But on Christmas day it’s all smiles, with mum, dad and big brother all crowded into the small room. His brother’s main present was a portable radio, and the two boys share the headphones when Adam Ant’s Prince Charming comes onto Radio 1. The boy has his presents to open too, and from mum and dad is a life-changing book: Discovering Life on Earth, by David Attenborough.

Soon enough I was home, neck back to normal after the glandular fever, a little delicate for a few months but happily free of hospitals for the rest of my childhood (until the late teenage rugby years and associated A&E loyalty card). And able to watch Life on Earth as it was repeated, following each episode studiously in my book, the start of my Life with Attenborough that continues to this day. The book has accompanied me throughout, picking up companions on the way as landmark series followed landmark series. I’ve a few of the Attenborough-narrated ones - The Blue PlanetandFrozen Planet stand out - but it’s the Attenborough-written ones I covet, the Life series and various other side projects that have been a thirty year masterclass in natural history broadcasting and inspirational science communication.

A well-travelled book, a constant companion for 32 years.

For instance: an early trigger for my interest in placing people within their ecosystems, The First Eden took on the parallel evolution of civilisation and nature in the Mediterranean.

For instance: as undergraduates in the mid 1990s (my decision to study biology not unconnected to BBC Natural History’s outputs), my housemates and I sat glued to The Private Life of Plants, wowed by the (at the time) phenomenally advanced filming that demonstrated plants growing and behaving in ways I’d never appreciated. Yes, Attenborough makes even plants interesting.

For instance: fresh from my PhD, my first ever DVD boxset The Life of Mammals took familiar beasts and exposed them in all their weird wonder, illuminating the lives of everything from platypusses (I have wanted one as a pet ever since) to people.

And if you want a single snapshot of the Attenborough magic, watch again the scene where he encounters a blue whale, from 1.17 here…

“I can see its tail, just under my boat here. And it’s coming up… it’s coming up… THERE!”

That’s part one of the Attenbourough appeal: he is exhilarated by the sight of the largest ever animal - just as we would be - and he breathlessly communicates that thrill. But without pause, we get part two: in seconds he has enriched that emotional response with three pieces of information, bang bang bang:

Bang: “The blue whale is a hundred feet long - 30 metres.”

Bang: “Nothing like that can grow on land, because no bone is strong enough to support such bulk.”

Bang: “Only in the sea can you get such huge size as that magnificent creature”

For part three, just watch from the beginning of the clip to see how he embraces the potential of technology - remember, this is the man who, as head of BBC2, introduced colour to UK television. But technology is only ever used to supplement - never to replace - the storytelling.

Mine's a signed copy, of sorts…

There we go. My life has been greatly enriched - its course changed - by the work of David Attenborough. So what if there is no conveniently round-numbered anniversary to celebrate? I want to say ‘thank you’, and I want to express my intense admiration of an astonishing oeuvre; and now is as good a time as any. Attenborough is still making fascinating television - although, in the recent When Björk met Attenborough (which, if you have any interest at all in music or nature, you should go to very great lengths to watch) he did, for the first time, look an old man to me, no longer quite so sprightly. Maybe that got me thinking about the profound influence he’s had on my life. Maybe my son’s chickenpox led to some Proustian pondering of my own childhood illnesses. Perhaps it was those UCAS supporting statements I recently read, confirming Attenborough’s influence on yet another generation of biologists.

Or maybe I just needed an excuse to link to this Christmas message…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMYgcBxKx-w

Happy holidays!

New conservation, old conservation

In 1999, at the inaugural Student Conference on Conservation Science in Cambridge, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. I’d just given my first conference talk - something to do with extinction risk and phylogeny in birds - and it seemed to have gone OK. I was meeting lots of interesting people, sharing the cosy impression that our research was on track to make some real difference to conservation efforts. Then Stuart Pimm stood up to give the plenary.

He showed a map of the world’s biodiversity in which Europe was essentially blank; pointing this out he called on us to focus all our efforts on those parts of the world where there actually was some diversity to conserve, and to stop fiddling around with inconsequential bits of so-called ‘conservation biology’ while biodiversity hotspots burned.

This was a bit of a shock, and something to which I have repeatedly returned over the years in an attempt to articulate why it angered me. Of course this demonstrates the success of Stuart’s approach - it has led me to question constantly my motivation for doing the research I enjoy, and not to kid myself that it matters more than it really does. To his credit, too, he has put his money where his mouth is in the form of savingspecies.org, an organisation specifically aimed at preventing extinctions using the most practical means available.

But the total dismissal of Europe as a place worthy of conservation attention still irks me, because it is in this continent that all of my formative experiences of the natural world occurred. I never left Britain until my teens, Europe until my twenties (not until five years after Pimm’s speech, in fact), and yet already by that time I’d developed a keen appreciation of the value of nature even in the impoverished, human-dominated countryside of my native land.

I was reminded of this old grievence recently on reading Michael Soulé’s Conservation Biology editorial, The “New Conservation” (available at michaelsoule.com), which I highly recommend. In this impassioned essay, Soulé lands some hefty blows on the so-called ‘New Conservation’ which, in his definition, “promotes economic development, poverty alleviation, and corporate partnerships as surrogates or substitutes for endangered species listings, protected areas, and other mainstream conservation tools,” its mission “primarily humanitarian, not nature (or biological diversity) protection”. He qestions whether it deserves to be called either new or conservation, and concludes that “conservationists and citizens alike ought to be alarmed by a scheme that replaces wild places and national parks with domesticated landscapes containing only nonthreatening, convenient plants and animals”.

I have a great deal of sympathy with these arguments, and firmly believe that our remaining wildernesses are a priceless universal heritage that must be cherished. And yet a couple of phrases took me back to Pimm’s talk, and to my uneasiness with a total focus on wilderness-based conservation. Soulé asks, “Is it ethical to convert the shrinking remnants of wild nature into farms and gardens beautified with non-native species, following the prescription of writer [Emma] Marris [in her book Rambunctious Garden]? … I doubt that children growing up in such a garden world will be attuned to nature…”

Well, I did grow up in such a world, and as a matter of fact I am pretty attuned to nature.

It’s a cultural thing. Unlike in the vast expanses of the New World, on this crowded island we have become accustomed to coexistence with nature (accepting we have not looked after it as well as we should have, as articulated by Tim Birkhead in another passionate piece you should read). Not only do many of our most valued landscapes, from hay meadows to heather moorland, depend on human intervention - leading us to question the idea of what 'natural' means, or when our baseline should be drawn - but we also know well that nature cares not for prettiness or authenticity. The National Park on my doorstep is beautiful, a source of inspiration to many but a long, long way from uninhabited wilderness, with its agriculture and settlements, abandoned mines and active quarries. The kingfishers I see on the canalised River Don, in the middle of Sheffield remain special despite emerging from banks of Himalayan balsam and Japanese knotweed.

Of course this is not an argument for neglecting wilderness where it does still occur. But rather to acknowledge that people can be profoundly inspired by the semi-natural, the domesticated, the biologically impoverished. Millions of us have been, including many who are now striving to reconcile the wellbeing of people with the continuing prosperity of the natural world, treading the path between old and new conservation that will enable happy and healthy future generations to enjoy and be inspired by nature too.