The Law of Unintended Consequences at work

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ecology, natural history

Many years ago, when I lived in Anaheim, I got up extra early, before first light. Just before beginning my morning shower I opened the window above the tub. The night was very dark and very clear. I could see a few stars. I got the hot water going, and when I next looked out a minute or two later, I saw steam forming in the air outside the window. In seconds, the whole area was socked in with a coastal fog.

I recalled this as I read of a tern flying through the boundary between moist, rising tropical air and colder air above, suddenly initiating cloud formation, which grows into a storm front. This is the opening sequence in the chapter "Set in Motion," of Threads from the Web of Life: Stories in Natural History by Stephen Daubert; the book is illustrated by the author's brother, Chris Daubert. Threads contains sixteen such vignettes and lifeline narratives for some of the creatures involved. To each chapter is appended technical notes on the science behind the stories and a list of references.

The stories span sizes and times, from protozoa to whales, from subsecond twitches to geological eras. Of the latter, the chapter "Sea Green" presents the Ascension Island population of green sea turtles, that migrate thousands of miles farther than their species-mates; they seem to be following a genetic program that developed millions of years ago, when the Atlantic could be swum across in a matter of hours. Ascension has remained an above-surface portion of the mid-Atlantic ridge, while the coast of Brazil was pushed a couple thousand miles to the west by sea-floor spreading. The chapter ends on a Rachel Carsonesque note, when a turtle, having survived migration from Ascension to Brazil to feed, eats some plastic flotsam that will likely kill it.

The author's avowed purpose is to present dramatized narratives that demonstrate some surprising results of ecological study. This he does in fine style. His inner agenda also becomes clear; nearly every story shows the adverse effect of the hand of man, from whaling as the likely cause of the near-extinction of condors to the replacement of most of America's "little brown sparrow-type birds" (my expression) with chestnut-sided warblers, a result of agriculture first, then of the destruction of American Chestnut trees by an introduced fungus—warblers thrive in disturbed forest and will not live in intact forest.

This other agenda does not bother me, it encourages me; we need to be saying these things. We need to be bold enough to say that we are saying these things. No subterfuge is needed.

The stories themselves are enchanting. I knew squid sometimes jump to arc over the water; I didn't know that some can jump thirty feet high and 75 feet long, that they do so by using their water jet mainly in air! Or that they are such artists with light. I knew about the cenotés of Mexico; I had college friends who went "potholing" in some of them over 1,000 feet deep. I didn't know they form a ring centered on the Chicxulub crater.

These stories benefit from the "fictionalizing" approach Daubert uses. They are too good to leave to dry fact.