The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016 by Amy Stewart
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"The Arctic is shouldering the wounds of the world, wounds that aren't healing. Long ago we exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet, with its seven billion humans all longing for some semblance of First World comforts. The burgeoning population is incompatible with the natural economy of biological and ecological systems."

A major disappointment! I liked and recommended here two earlier installments of the series, The Best American Science Writing 2006 and The Best American Science Writing 2005 , but the publisher decided to "improve" the series and added 'nature' to 'science' in the title. Alas, the title is quite misleading. Not much science remains in the book that supposedly features the best American essays in the field written in 2016. In fact, the book does not contain a single essay from the basic science area. Do the publishers really think that science is too hard for people to read about? More whining later, now about some good stuff.

The main theme of the collection is, of course, the destruction of our environment, the climate change, and the fate of the planet whose inhabitants happily ignore the crisis that may now be unavoidable. Rotten Ice is probably the most interesting essay in the set: we learn how the climate change affects Greenland and the lives of its people. Their livelihood depends on the thickness of ice. An essay about an environmental manager of a coalfield in India is pretty grim: we are told that

"India's carbon output [...] is growing faster than any other country's."

On the other hand, a piece about Germany's successes in converting to energy from renewable sources is somewhat optimistic, despite the obvious obstacles and growing pains.

One of the environmental essays is sort of close to science: we learn about bark beetles that have killed billions of trees, but the author presents a hypothesis that the beetles and the trees have mutually adapted to the climate change. The passages about symbiosis between beetles and fungus sound actually like science. On the other hand, in an essay that begins very promisingly with the story of how individual wolves migrated from Oregon to Northern California where their offspring can now be found, the tone suddenly changes and we have to read about celebrities and their dogs. I really am unable to understand why writing about nature and science has to be polluted by names like Christina Aguillera or Renee Zellweger.

I was happy to find a piece about mathematics (even if math is obviously not a science): an essay about rewriting the so-called "enormous theorem" in the finite simple group theory. For a text about math it is relatively accessible. Some readers may be interested in an article ridiculing the "non-scientific gospel" of the 12-steps philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous and criticizing the abstinence-only approach. Others may be amused by a piece that calls prescribing bed rest for pregnant women a hoax. An article about burning the bodies of victims of Ebola pandemic in Liberia is interesting at the beginning before it degenerates into pornography of death.

The very first piece, Back to the Land is truly bad: it hits the reader with histrionic, pompous, stilted writing. The Modern Moose is unfortunately similar: the author tries to convey lyricism and ends up with silly and pretentious stuff. In contrast with these two failures we find a deeply moving piece by Oliver Sacks, who was close to death at the time of this writing. My Periodic Table illustrates the obvious truth that some people can write well while others - like the authors of the two previously mentioned pieces and also this reviewer - can't.

Two stars.


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