David Quammen’s writing is an amalgamation of science, travel, observation and commentary that is clever, profound, heartwarming, and frequently makes you laugh out loud.
David Quammen’s writing is refreshingly irreverent and surprisingly complex. In his anthology of essays, Natural Acts - A Sidelong View of Science, Quammen veers towards various disciplines, with the natural world as his center of mass. In four neat sections, he weaves stories about plants, animals, people, places and history that are rooted in science, taking a bird’s eye view one moment and zooming into the microscopic the next with seamless ease.
In All God’s Vermin, he points the lens at an animal in each essay. Starting from a piece on the merits of a mosquito (his debut as a magazine writer in 1981), he writes about animals big and small. These range from the history of outrageous records of an anaconda’s size, the evolution of octopus eyes and the deep reflections they may hold, to a blood-sucking moth that busts the stereotype of a soulful butterfly.
The essays in Prophets and Pariahs talk about the people who study the natural world, which also presents an unflinching view of how science is done. It is difficult to pick a favourite among these biographies, but the earnestness of The Excavation of Jack Horner stands out. Here, the journey of a dyslexic dropout turned paleontologist is intertwined with the evolutionary history of dinosaurs and a discovery that fundamentally changes how we think of them. It is also the story of an outsider breaking in.
The last section of Quammen’s writing from the 80s, Eloquent Practices, Natural Acts, has longer narrative pieces. Quammen’s anger and frustration are palpable when he shares an eyewitness account of the cataclysmic effects of introducing alien species into natural habitats. However, the masterpiece is, easily, Yin and Yang in the Tularosa Basin. It has beautiful imagery of a landscape slowly shapeshifting over millions of years. Against this backdrop, Quammen speaks about nuclear testing, ancient rock carvings, and a fragile desert ecosystem.
The book ends with After Thoughts, a collection of long meandering essays, which appear baffling at times but leave you with a well-rounded flavour. In these later essays, one sees a deeper, sustained, and sometimes sombre engagement with the subject. For example, in Planet of the Weeds, he takes a long look at life and death through evolutionary time, imagining what the aftermath of the current extinction crisis may look like. In the adventure of The Megatransect, Quammen walks with a temperamental researcher cutting across Central Africa to record a snapshot of biodiversity that may soon disappear.
What stands out to me, as an ecologist, is how on point Quammen is about emerging themes of research; prophetic even. “Maybe you haven’t heard much about invasive species, but in the coming years you will,” he says in an essay from the nineties. “There is a notable absence of gorillas in the Minkébé forest. Elephants are abundant; duikers and monkeys and pigs, abundant. But the gorillas are missing. He suspects they were wiped out by Ebola,” writes Quammen, fifteen years before the deadly Ebola outbreak.
While it is easy to slide into sermonising when speaking of science, Quammen’s writing is unguarded and free of academic trappings. “You don’t have to be a cop or burglar to cover the crime stories down at the courthouse, and you don’t have to be a biologist to write about biology. My lack of formal scientific training may even have been an advantage in some ways, leaving me with a fresh eye and an ingenious ignorance,” he says.
Quammen’s writing is an amalgamation of science, travel, observation and commentary that is clever, profound, heartwarming, and frequently makes you laugh out loud. His style of swashbuckler meets scientist makes for enormously entertaining reading.
