Earlier this year, I received an email from a self-declared longtime reader of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. The reader noted that the anthology had been getting more political over the last few years, and he asked me to please keep the selections for 2019 focused on science and nature.
My first thought was: Sorry, guy. Tough luck. (I hadn’t even yet read our guest editor, Sy Montgomery’s, introduction at the time.) My second thought was: Tony Kushner. Yes, the playwright. There are many thinkers who have argued that everything is political, that an apolitical stance is inherently political, too, but Tony Kushner is the one I think of first. In his essay “Notes About Political Theater,” Kushner writes, “In life, as in art, much energy is devoted toward blurring the political meaning of events, or even that events have a political meaning . . . When theater artists assiduously avoid politics, we deny the existence of the political and are making a political statement, committing a political act.”
You can easily swap science in for events, readers of this book for theater artists. Here:
In life . . . much energy is devoted toward blurring the political meaning of [science], or even that [science] has a political meaning . . . When [readers of this book] assiduously avoid politics, we deny the existence of the political and are making a political statement, committing a political act.
We may desperately want science not to be political, because that seems simpler or more pure. But if science teaches us anything, it is that simplicity is an illusion, and that ignorance cannot be a resting place.
Science has not gotten more political in the last few years, and neither has this anthology. What has changed is the sense of urgency, a rechanneling of energy from blurring political meaning to, as a planet and as people, admitting that we are fighting for our lives.
It isn’t only about climate change, although of course that crisis is top of mind (and features in many of the pieces in this book). This is where science is political because politicians hold the power to make meaningful change. We can’t reduce/reuse/recycle our way out of the wildfires so meticulously and vividly evoked in Apricot Irving’s “The Fire at Eagle Creek,” or the looming insect apocalypse described by Brooke Jarvis. All the individual actions in the world can’t save us. Science is political because it demands action from power.
Readers who don’t want science to be political share much with people who say I don’t see race! It is a privilege to be able to live your life in a way that race is not a factor. And it is a privilege to be able to turn off your TV or close your computer and think that politics has no bearing on your life. That means that you feel safe, and it means you’re not worrying about the people who aren’t. Kushner, again: “The act of wishing away the world of political struggle is a deeply reactionary gesture.” It is a privileged ignorance—a privileged ignoring—to think that science is, can be, or ever was apolitical.
Say Science isn’t political to the women profiled in Linda Villarosa’s “The Hidden Toll: Why Are Black Mothers and Babies in the United States Dying at More Than Double the Rate of White Mothers and Babies? The Answer Has Everything to Do with the Lived Experience of Being a Black Woman in America” or to the uninsured patients conjured by Molly Osberg in “How to Not Die in America.” Say Science isn’t political with respect to Jarvis’s insects and the vaquita in Ben Goldfarb’s “The Endling,” the rhinos in Jeremy Hance’s “The Great Rhino U-Turn,” and the cetaceans of J. B. MacKinnon’s “You Really Don’t Want to Know What It’s Like to Be a Right Whale These Days.” MacKinnon’s title supposes you might not want to know, but you do want to, also, because stories like these are elegy and alarm, mourning what we’re too late to save so that we might open our eyes to the next victims, hopefully in time.
I don’t know if the author of the email imploring me to focus on science and nature would say that these stories aren’t political, or if he would rather not read them at all. But they’re not in this book because of political arguments or despite them. They’re in this book because, as some of the best science and nature writing of the year, they each tell the story of a slice of the Earth, a story that, for better or for worse, humanity is writing.
The essential question of politics, I believe, is: What do we owe each other? Or, as the writer Kayla Chadwick titled an essay appearing in HuffPost in 2017, “I Don’t Know How to Explain to You That You Should Care About Other People.” That is the divide in American politics today. Would you, as Chadwick cites in her piece, pay an extra 17 cents for your Big Mac so a McDonald’s employee can earn a living wage, or do you just want your cheap burger? Would you sacrifice an oil company’s profits to preserve a national monument’s untrammeled space? We don’t, individually, get to answer that second question, so we rely on elected officials to care beyond themselves, too.
Science writing is political because it shows us how to care about other people, and the world. In “This Sand Is Your Sand,” Chris Colin illuminates the tensions inherent in the idea of public lands with a paddling trip down a river. Rebecca Mead’s “The Story of a Face” is political not just because it’s about trans people, whose civil rights have been relentlessly politicized and endangered; Mead’s story is political because it draws you, the reader, into empathy. I’m sad that empathy is political, but it obviously is.
It is political to call attention to looming dangers—as Ed Yong does in “When the Next Plague Hits,” highlighting the vulnerabilities in America’s epidemic-response infrastructure. It is also political to celebrate the beauty in the world and beyond it, which Rebecca Boyle does so powerfully in “The Search for Alien Life Begins in Earth’s Oldest Desert.” There are political forces that oppose this view of nature as valuable unto itself, apart from its commodification, or the view of pure scientific research as valuable unto itself apart from applications. Under capitalism, it is political to seek knowledge for its own sake, to wonder with no goal other than to learn.
I want to focus on the political implications of the writing in this book, but I should also mention that scientific research is often funded by the federal government; so are the agencies that would protect our food, water, and natural resources. Politicians are constantly seeking to insert themselves into scientific and medical decisions, imposing their personal beliefs on the lives and bodies of women and trans people. And sexism and racism have gifted us scientific institutions disproportionately dominated by white men.
“Nature” is hardly apolitical, either, considering that our American sense of wilderness was—as environmental historian William Cronon writes in his 1995 essay “The Trouble with Wilderness”—born out of a fantasy sired by romanticism and manifest destiny. From the sublime and the frontier we conjured a vision of pristine nature untouched by humans, where, obviously, indigenous humans had been living before. Every piece of nature writing, every celebration of prairie or park, grapples with this history.
We shouldn’t be embarrassed that writing about science and nature is political. This foreword is neither a defense nor a 1,600-word response to one cranky email (though I thank that writer for the spark of inspiration). If anything, I want this foreword, and this book, to be a celebration of the power of telling stories of research and discovery, of human ingenuity and dedication and wonder and hope. And the possibility of change.
Science has not gotten more political, but politics has changed. Kushner, whose husband, Mark Harris, once joked that his drag name could be Eara Lee Prescient, wrote, back in 1997, “We have entered into an age the politics of which I like to call neobarbaric, in that the previously unassailable fundamentals of civilization, of community, are under attack, and logic, causality, even coherent narrative are gone.” This sounds, to many people, at least to me, a lot like 2019. Politics sucks really bad right now. But there is hope in politics, too, hope for progress and change. What species can we write the story of saving next year?
This is my first year as series editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. It was a gift and a pleasure to spend part of my year reading as widely as I could in this genre. I learned so much. I am so grateful to all of the writers doing the hard work of writing about the world. (I’m also grateful to the writers and editors who nominated these pieces. You can make nominations for future editions at jaimegreen.net/BASN.) Many thanks, also, to Sy for her selections, and to you, reader—as if writing about politics in a science and nature book weren’t enough, I’ve been using the words of a playwright to do so. I realize that’s a big ask.
Allow me one more Kushner quote: “The Dies Irae is looming as the fate of the poor, the marginal, the immigrant, the refugee, the disenfranchised, the vulnerable. We are in terrible trouble. We must watch out.” Reading the pieces collected in this book may not be a grand work of activism, but it is keeping our eyes open. Which is the first step of watching out. Which is the first step of whatever comes next.
Jaime Green