This is why I take care to enumerate the four elements necessary to what I consider “wildness” in the biological sense: scale, connectivity, biological diversity itself, and the processes I’ve just mentioned. Biological diversity is not an ineffable or subjective entity. I do it by considering biological diversity and the ecological processes that interconnect living creatures: predation, competition, herbivory, cooperation (especially in the social creatures, such as lions, hyenas, chimpanzees, ants, and termites), parasitism, photosynthesis, scavenging, and decomposition, among others. And when I define “the wild,” I don’t do it by excluding humanity. We’re relative newcomers.īut these semantic confusions are why I choose my words carefully and try to define them. We humans belong to a species that has existed only for about 200,000 years. What makes you think readers need this reminder now?ĭavid Quammen: You’re correct that some people consider the mere mention of “nature” to cast an illusory distinction between human life and all other forms of living creature, and they deride the discussion of “wildness” or “the wild” (and especially “wilderness”) as contaminated with anthropocentrism and the assumption that wilderness, whatever it is, implies a place without humans, whereas the truth (they argue) is that humans have always inhabited such places.īut I don’t make those assumptions when I use the words and furthermore, humans haven’t “always” lived in such wild places. You wrote The Song of the Dodo, your opus about “island biogeography,” back in 1996. Lucy Jakub: Your essay on wildness strikes me as a very didactic and corrective reminder of what we’re really talking about when we talk about wild nature and its conservation. This week I asked him about the long sweep of his career, which has yielded three novels, one story collection, five essay collections, and nine books and counting on science and natural history. Since 2018 he has revisited mosquitoes, weedy species, and Charles Darwin in our pages. I told him he was my favorite writer, a judgment made after devouring dozens of his magazine essays on natural history, which bring empathy and precision to questions of conservation as quotidian as canned fish (“Who Swims with the Tuna?”) and as darkly dizzying as mass extinction. He was on tour for his book Spillover, a suspenseful and prescient reported chronicle of the contagious pathogens that have leapt from other species into ours. I first met him in 2012, outside the restroom at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Quammen is one of the great science writers of our time. Until the pandemic-when he interviewed ninety-five scientists for Breathless, his book on SARS-Cov-2, over Zoom-a principle of his journalism has always been to trek to the field (or the lab) and meet people and animals face-to-face. For two decades Quammen reported for National Geographic on conservation projects in Africa and South America, features that are collected in his new book, The Heartbeat of the Wild (his essay on wildness is adapted from the foreword and afterword). “Defining wildness is not an easy task,” writes David Quammen in an essay we published online last month, but at the least it “requires living creatures of many different forms entangled in a system of surging and ebbing interactions.” These are the insights of a writer who has spent a great deal of time camping with biologists and who is careful and direct with his words. David Quammen shadowing biologists on an elephant radio-collaring mission, Mozambique, 2016
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |