The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005 by Jonathan Weiner, ed. Houghton Mifflin, $14 paperback, 304 pages.

The News & Observer

November 13, 2005

When science and politics collide

By PHILLIP MANNING


Houghton Mifflin publishes nine annual anthologies titled “The Best American ....” Some of them, “The Best American Recipes” for instance, aren’t especially well suited for yearly collections. But other fields lend themselves nicely to this approach. Such is the case with “Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2005.” Its short pieces usually provide a nugget of science, stripped of the supporting details found in longer works, and focus on how new discoveries will affect us. The result is user-friendly science writing that will appeal to readers.

Of course, the selections in this (and any other) anthology reflect the interests of the editor, who changes from year to year. Back in 2001, when the biologist and naturalist E.O. Wilson edited the anthology, it featured articles from National Geographic, Outside, and Audubon magazines. The zoologist Richard Dawkins’s 2003 picks included three pieces from Natural History. This year’s editor, Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Jonathan Weiner, selected no contributions from those sources. In fact, he avoided nature writing altogether. He also avoided specialized science journals and took most of his selections from general interest publications. Over half the pieces came from influential periodicals — the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times. The science articles in these publications often push political agendas, and the increasing number of them exemplifies a growing trend among science writers of exposing science to wider audiences in order to sway public opinion.

Writing guru William Zinsser says short pieces dealing with science should be written “cleanly and without pretense” by writers who “aren’t scared of the immensity of their subject.” Edgar Allen Poe, no slouch with short pieces himself, said that the writer should be striving for “a certain unique or single effect.” And if the writer’s first sentence did not help to produce that effect, “then he has failed in his first step.” This year’s superb collection meets these criteria for excellence.

A good example is Bill McKibben’s take on global warming, originally published in the New York Review of Books. From first sentence to last, he uses plain language to hammer on the problems posed by global warming. He points out that the Bush administration’s policy of ignoring the issue makes our situation more parlous. But McKibben is not just a polemicist; he is also a story teller who builds his case with narrative. One revealing tale recounts how a Republican pollster convinced President Bush to replace the apocalyptic-sounding “global warming” with the gentler “climate change” in White House communications.

McKibben writes that although an overwhelming majority of scientists believe that global warming is largely due to human releases of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the public still has a scintilla of doubt. To convince Americans that Bush’s do-nothing policy was the correct course, the same inventive pollster who came up with “climate change” thought it possible to exploit that doubt by insisting that the case for global warming was not a scientific slam dunk. “The scientific debate is closing [against us],” he wrote, “but not yet closed.” The change-the-languange and cast-doubt-on-the-science strategy worked: Bush did almost nothing about global warming and still got reelected.

Most of this year’s selections cover equally weighty topics. Natalie Angier’s essay, “My God Problem — and Theirs,” originally published in “The American Scholar,” deplores the hypocrisy of some scientists, 90 percent of whom don’t believe in a “personal God.” It disturbs Angier that many scientists hide their irreligious beliefs because of career-related concerns. Angier does not conceal her own atheism, and ends the essay with “I’d like to think that one of these days we’ll leave superstition and delusional thinking and Jerry Falwell behind. Scientists would like that, too. But for now, they like their grants even more.”

Weiner’s concentration on prestigious publications favored blue-chip science writers, such as Oliver Sacks (on consciousness), Malcolm Gladwell (on personality tests), Timothy Ferris (on NASA), and Jared Diamond (on environmental damage). Unfortunately, it weeded out most new voices from this year’s collection, giving it a professional, but uniform, temper. An exception was James McManus’s “Please Stand By While the Age of Miracles Is Briefly Suspended.” This piece was originally published in Esquire, a magazine not known for science writing and one that has never had an article anthologized in this series.

Like McKibben, McManus has a bone to pick with President Bush, but his approach is more personal, more desperate. His daughter suffers from juvenile diabetes, an incurable disease in which the patient relies on never-ending shots of insulin to stay alive. McManus is scared: “The longer you have this disease,” he writes, “the more severe its complications become.” His daughter has endured diabetes for 25 years. “She may go blind,” he writes. “As her circulatory system gets ravaged further, the dainty feet she used to lace into white size-5 1/2 softball spikes may need to be amputated.” After much investigation, McManus has concluded that embryonic stem-cell research offers the best hope for curing his daughter.

For this reason, President Bush’s limiting federal funding of research to existing stem-cell lines distresses McManus. Only nineteen of these lines are available to scientists, he argues, while “researchers will need hundreds — possibly thousands — of lines.” Wracked by thoughts of his slowly dying daughter, the anguished father issues a brutally straightforward statement about Bush’s policy on stem-cell research: “It may be the most unenlightened position, with the most negative and far-reaching human consequences, ever taken by an American president.” Agree or disagree with McManus’s conclusion, we must all concede that he is following Zinsser’s counsel by stating it clearly and fearlessly. McManus is not a science writer but a novelist and a poet, and Weiner’s decision to include his work was an inspired one.
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