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2015 In Books Part 3: Some More Things About The Contents of Books
Okay I lied, here is the third half of the 2015 book reviews post, and then back to business as usual. (...which will probably mean the second half of the book covers post. And then some recovery time.) When I wrote the first half I thought "Huh, I thought I'd read more squishy-sciences type books this year than that"; apparently they were all backloaded into the second half of the alphabet.
Books 1-5 are here
6. The New Wild by Fred Pearce
I picked this up after seeing it on the LT ER list and then having one of the teachers in the naturalist class talk up the topic. This is a book about non-native invasive species, but it is making the argument that non-native invasive species aren't so bad, really. This was an argument I had already mostly sold myself on independently, but Pearce makes the argument even stronger, so while I don't buy everything he says, it's a very convincing book, and I recommend it for anyone who is interested in enviromentalism/conservation. His argument basically has three parts. (He doesn't organize it this way but it's how it organized itself in my memory.)
First, that there is no such thing as a "pristine", "native", "natural", ecosystem. Ecosystems and communities are by their nature always changing, and plants and animals moving to new communities and rebuilding the ecological networks in new and different ways. Even if you postulated a world with no humans on it at all, the earth was currently moving from a glacial period to an interglacial, and we can actually see how plant and animal communities have been moving and reorganizing themselves to take advantage of the changes for tens of thousands of years. Admittedly, humans are increasing that speed of change - but humans are also part of nature, as are the suite of other species they bring with them (from bacteria to dogs) and in most places, we can't get back to the ecosystem that existed before humans, because humans have been part of that ecosystem for longer than it's existed. (As an example, there's increasing evidence that much of the Amazon rainforest has been continually farmed by humans since before it was climatologically rainforest.)
And if you look at the rhetoric used by people who are trying to eradicate "alien invasives", and restore the "pure native ecosystems" they are tapping into exactly the same emotional triggers and prejudices that have always been used in moral panics again human immigrants - fear of the outsider, fear of change, backed up with not much beyond the human moral conviction that change is bad and outsiders are bad, when in fact change is a constant and outsiders often bring as much good as bad.
Which leads into the second part of his argument, which is that if you look at actual evidence, the vast majority non-native species aren't a problem, and nearly any way of trying to analyze what is "good" for an ecosystem - that isn't based on nativist prejudices - has trouble concluding that introduced species are a net negative. Most introduced species don't become established; those that do, usually integrate themselves into the existing communities without a ripple, creating new relationships between organisms, and increasing local biodiversity and resilience of the system.
Even in cases where the introduced species is obviously invasive to the layperson, is exploding in population and causing large declines in native species and widespread panic - think kudzu, zebra mussels, gypsy moths, if you're in North America - the pattern that seems to happen is that the introduced species explodes over the course of a few years to decades, and then the natives figure what to do with it, the ecosystems adapt, and everything settles back down, only with higher biodiversity and more resilience. Because species being introduced to new environments is pretty normal and most ecosystems have dealt with it many times before. This part of the story doesn't hit the human consciousness as much because you can't write panicky headlines about "kudzu not world-devouring monster as previously stated, mostly it just likes roadsides and abandoned pastures and buildings, which are human-created environments already dominated by introduced species anyway, and actually it is really effective at stabilizing land and enriching soil in cases of human-caused land degradation, making it easier for functional ecosystems to naturally reestablish in those locations." So most people just hear panic and then silence, even when the actual pattern is panic and then oh never mind it's not that bad after all. Pearce devotes a large portion of the book to going back to these major scare case-studies and seeing how things are doing once people stop paying attention (usually, they are doing fine.)
Now, in come cases invasives inarguably do things like cause extinctions of native species, which leads into the third part of the argument: in those cases, nearly always, the new invasive species is just the straw that broke the camel's back, and the ecosystems were already under severe threat from pollution, climate change, habitat destruction, or other human-caused stressors. In fact, many examples of invasives that are degrading ecosystems (such as bracken in England, pine beetles in the nearctic, or white-tailed deer in the Northeast megalopolis) are actually natives that suddenly explode in population due to other factors. (In some cases the decline in a native 'due to introduced invasives' turns out to actually be a decline back down to historic numbers after a native had a population boom due to human factors.) In other cases the invasives are responding to polluted environments, moving into human-created habitats after the pre-existing ecosystems have been bulldozed, or joining a community that's already in disarray after humans caused the extinction of a keystone species. Or, sometimes, an introduced species that might otherwise have integrated easily into the existing system starts causing problems because the native species are already under high levels of stress due to human-caused habitat change - many of the pathogens currently causing problems (like white-nose in bats and ash borers in ash trees) seem to fit into this pattern.
So it is definitely true that introduced species can sometimes add to the stress on an already stressed ecosystem. What Pearce argues is that, nearly always, a focus on eradicating the introduced species is the wrong use of resources; that nearly always, trying to take out an introduced invasive species without fixing the underlying problem that allowed it to go invasive will not help the stability of the ecosystem, and will sometimes make things worse (because of the methods used to wipe it out, or because it's actually helping to prop up an severely damaged system.) And nearly always, the non-native species end up as a scapegoat to give humans something to focus on other than the underlying environmental problems, which have much less emotionally satisfying solutions than 'kill all the invaders, burn them with fire', but are what really need the hard work put in.
Anyway, it's a super-counterintuitive argument to someone (like me) who was raised on "non-native species bad, native species good!". And inarguably there are cases where the non-natives are a problem that absolutely needs to be solved before we can go deeper - 'it's just a symptom' is fine as far as it goes, but it's often symptoms that kill. But it makes a lot of sense to me that that what we need is not a focus on restoring and preserving "native" ecosystems (which never existed in a stable state anyway) but a focus on stewardship of resilient and diverse ecological communities.
7. The Wild Trees by Richard Preston
This is the story of recent human exploration of deep forests and high forest canopies. Unfortunately, it tells that story via trying to build sympathy around one of the pioneering forest canopy scientists, who built his career by relying on his wife's financial, emotional, and generally being-the-grownup support while she put her career and dreams on hold, then slept with his assistant in a situation of iffy consent, had a breakdown when his wife divorced him after he refused to go to counseling, and then bounced back by marrying a grad student he was mentoring, and the narrative seems to think we should sympathize with him over how hard all of this was, and nope. Nope nope nope. Sorry dude. Nope. You are not the one I sympathized with there. (The secondary lead is another white dude who, according to the book's narrative, had a really hard life because his dad was a millionaire. But at least he was less of a douche to his wife. The tertiary lead is the former-grad-student, who I am sure is actually awesome in her own right, but according to the way the book writes it, her life narrative immediately became subsumed in her husband's once she got married. NOPE.)
Anyway, so that part alternately sucked and made me actively angry. But when he talks about the trees instead of the people, it's amazing, and I don't even really know how to describe how amazing it is, and how it changed the way I look at forests, except that every fantasy writer who ever wants to write about forest elves needs to read this. Also I am very very tempted to take a class on tree-climbing with ropes now even though that would be a super bad idea. Also, I have told multiple people about the Australian leeches that drop on you from above, it is a great Nature Fact.
8. Awakenings; A leg to stand on; The man who mistook his wife for a hat; Seeing voices by Oliver Sacks
This was an omnibus edition so I'm counting it as one. So I know Oliver Sacks is not a perfect person, especially as he got better-known and his tellings of the lives of neuro-atypical people cast an outsize shadow, but I still find his books compulsively readable and deeply compassionate, and I always learn a lot from them, about the ways the brain and the mind interact with each other.
Awakenings was his account of his time working with the last survivors of the encephalitis lethargica epidemic, and what happened when he gave them L-DOPA, which was not a cure, but did give them initiative and will and ability to interact positively with the world for the first time in decades. It gives a really personal look at these people who have effectively "woken up" after a lifetime to find a world moved on without them, and it also gives a view of the inner and outer lives of people who have been severely disabled and institutionalized for much of their lives, and also a clear-eyed view of how little (and how much) even the closest thing medicine has to a "miracle cure" can do for the lives of the people involved.
A Leg To Stand On is his autobiographical account of the time he had a serious accident that nearly killed him, and then had a side effect that all his doctors tried to tell him wasn't actually happening to him, and what happened after; as he's an eminent doctor himself, he does a really good job of both describing the injury, treatment, and recovery, and describing how the medical establishment refused to listen to the patient, and how frustrating and disabling that was to deal with.
The man who mistook his wife for a hat is the first of his anthologies of case studies of neurological patients, and I didn't actually read it this time round because I'd read it before, but they are always thoughtful and thought-provoking.
Seeing Voices is about language and the Deaf, and I was kind of dubious of it going in because there are so many ways Sacks speaking for the Deaf could go wrong, but he spends most of the book talking about all the ways he was wrong and needed to actually let Deaf people speak for themselves, so I ended up liking it quite a lot. The first part is about ASL and nonspeaking deaf people from a neurolinguistic POV and made me think about language in all sorts of new ways; the second part is about Deaf culture and disability history and specifically why hearing people have been so consistently terrible about letting deaf people use their own language. I thought I was reasonably aware of disability history in the US for someone who didn't specialize in it, but until I read this book I hadn't actually realized just how recent the widespread acceptance of Sign as actual languages that Deaf should learn was. I grew up on Sesame Street with everybody conversing with Linda in her native language as naturally as can be; he's writing during the Gallaudet protests in the late 80s - while I was watching Sesame Street - when the idea that Deaf students should be taught in their native language was still considered radical. (Every so often I get hit over the head with just how radical Sesame Street was.)
Anyway, this book made me want to search up some books on Deaf culture by Deaf people. Also reading it while I had bad laryngitis really made me want to finally learn more than a couple words of ASL...
9. The lore and legends of Wall Street by Robert Sharp
This is a slim and unprepossessing volume I picked up off a free books table at a street fair in Boston, thinking it didn't look like much but it would probably be a quick read and I like books about folklore, but instead I kept putting off finishing it because I wanted to read it when I had time to absorb it properly. I learned so much about how financial markets work from this book, probably because it was just trying to tell stories (and explain what was required to make the stories make sense) rather than trying to explain the stock market. Because when people try to do that, they always feel the need to sell you on the idea that it makes sense, it's supported by sound economic theory, and it's a net good for society (spoilers: it doesn't, it isn't, and that has yet to be conclusively demonstrated.) But Sharp just wants to tell you how weird and full of strange people and illogical traditions and emotion-driven decisions that screw the economy and bizarre reasoning Wall Street is, and therefore as a side effect he managed to almost make it understandable the way fifteen finance books twisting logic in knots to justify it never could.
10. Naming Nature by Carol Kaesuk Yoon
I started reading this because I was hoping it would give me some of the history of taxonomic nomenclature that I need to figure out the backstory for the AU in the world where Naming A Species means you can thereafter summon it to fight for you and Cope and Marsh are basically rival Pokemon trainers having Camarasaurus vs. Allosaurus duels outside the Smithsonian Castle, but then I didn't get very far because something in the author's narrative voice in the introduction turned me off.
I pushed through eventually, though! And once she moved on from navel-gazing she got way less annoying. Sadly it didn't solve my backstory problem**; it turned out to be more about taxonomy from a cross-cultural linguistic/neurological/anthropological POV than about the history of the ICZN, but what it was actually about was super-fascinating too. It talks about how humans seems to have a separate system in the brain for classifying and recognizing living things - borne up by brain injury cases where people lose their ability to do only that; they can tell a bicycle from a car but not a banana from a cat - and that certain things, such as higher-level classification of living things into larger families, and binomial nomenclature at the "species" level, seem to be inbuilt at a cross-cultural level, as is an awareness that living things seem to fit into a classificatory tree, and a desire to make them all fit. She also talks about how the vast increase in knowledge of living things with the creation of a globally connected society totally upset that system, and that's why scientific taxonomy ever since has been a huge mess and getting ever more unusable even by scientists and incompatible with everyday taxonomy.
But the fact from this book that I keep sharing with people is that if you find a kid from an isolated, subsistence-level society, who is used to living really close to the land and has little knowledge of global popular culture, and ask them to name all the animals they know, you will quickly get a list of about 150 species-equivalent names, with basic classification information; if you give them time to think it over they might be able to come up with twice or three times that many. (This is also about the same number that a professor of zoology can reel off if you put them on the spot, even though theoretically they might know thousands of scientific names of animals.)
If you take a modern kid from a developed society who's never spent much time needing to know about nature, doesn't live close to it, and wouldn't have anyone to teach them the names of the animals even if they wanted to learn, they will be able to come up with maybe a few dozen in the same test, most of them not local to where they live. However, they will be able to get the same number of names of animals as the kid from the subsistence society, with about the same level of detail and classification, if you ask them about Pokemon instead.
Apparently, the classificatory brain will find a way.
**Presumably, it involves Carl Linnaeus doing some dark ritual that combines Western ritual magic of the raising-the-spirits-of-flowers-with-Latin-chanting variety with some misused appropriated Sami shamanic ritual which bound the spirits of all known living creatures to his summons alone, but you'd be surprised how hard it is to find an account of just what happened, taxonomically speaking, between the publication of Systema Naturae and the establishment of the ICZN.
Bonus Round TV Show: Over The Garden Wall
I watched almost no TV this year, so I think this was the only series I actually finished/am caught up on. I have been thinking about it a lot since watching it because I can't figure out what the hell they thought they were doing.
Like, I watched the first couple episodes, and I was like, ok, this is set in an ahistorical fantasy Ye Olde Rural America where everybody is white, ok, I mean it's not ideal but at least they made it explictly ahistorical instead of doing something that's theoretically in the actual past but leaves out all the hard bits, and there were parts of Ye Olde Rural America where basically everybody was white, so okay.
But then they started doing stories that... should have been about race? Like the Nice White Southern Lady who is going to teach these poor subhuman children who nobody else thinks are teachable, so that they can pass in polite society, and then the students save the day by putting on a minstrel show. Or the one where one of the main characters has to go sleep in the stable because they don't serve her kind in the tavern. Or the one where the rich man owns a plantation and has gone mad with guilt over all the terrible things he did in the course of getting rich off the plantation, but somehow what those things are never gets specified. Or the one where the young girl is forced by a cruel mistress to work really hard all day with no rest and obey all her mistress's commands, but it turns out it's OK because if she wasn't forced to work all day she would give in to her subhuman animal instincts as symbolized by a contamination with blackness. I could go on. And of course there's all the jazz and ragtime music that's all out of African American culture.
So at that point I'm just like, okay, did they not notice what they were doing? Were they trying to sneak a show about race past execs who wanted them to avoid serious issues? Is this actually a show that's just retelling foundational American stories but replacing all the black people with talking animals and a formless dark creeping evil speaking in the kind of deep bass that Americans associate with black men, and thinks that's okay? Are they setting up for something deep and amazing that will make all of this not just okay but great?
And then I got to the last episode and on the one hand, no, it was not a setup for something great, it just turns out it was All A Dream.
Except... it turns out that not everybody in the show is white, because we finally get to see the girl who was the focus of the obsession that set up the All A Dream, and-- she's not white. We never see her face, and it would be easy to miss, but the small strip of her skin we do get to see is inarguably brown in contrast to the pallid paleness of literally every other human character.
At which point I just go. ???? So annoying overeducated white boy gets a crush on brown-skinned girl, fails to deal, and has elaborate dream sequence in which he lives through bits of African-American history and African-American music but with all the black people replaced by animals who need a (white) savior to defeat the Creeping Corrupting Blackness, and... I still have no idea if they knew what they were doing, or what they thought they were doing, but making Sara darker-skinned, even if it was hard to notice, when everybody else was the color of Wonderbread, had to be a deliberate choice, so, ????. And I am super-puzzled why none of the stuff I saw on Tumblr while it was airing and Tumblr was obsessed by it addressed any of this.
But I am still thinking about it. *shrug*
Books 1-5 are here
6. The New Wild by Fred Pearce
I picked this up after seeing it on the LT ER list and then having one of the teachers in the naturalist class talk up the topic. This is a book about non-native invasive species, but it is making the argument that non-native invasive species aren't so bad, really. This was an argument I had already mostly sold myself on independently, but Pearce makes the argument even stronger, so while I don't buy everything he says, it's a very convincing book, and I recommend it for anyone who is interested in enviromentalism/conservation. His argument basically has three parts. (He doesn't organize it this way but it's how it organized itself in my memory.)
First, that there is no such thing as a "pristine", "native", "natural", ecosystem. Ecosystems and communities are by their nature always changing, and plants and animals moving to new communities and rebuilding the ecological networks in new and different ways. Even if you postulated a world with no humans on it at all, the earth was currently moving from a glacial period to an interglacial, and we can actually see how plant and animal communities have been moving and reorganizing themselves to take advantage of the changes for tens of thousands of years. Admittedly, humans are increasing that speed of change - but humans are also part of nature, as are the suite of other species they bring with them (from bacteria to dogs) and in most places, we can't get back to the ecosystem that existed before humans, because humans have been part of that ecosystem for longer than it's existed. (As an example, there's increasing evidence that much of the Amazon rainforest has been continually farmed by humans since before it was climatologically rainforest.)
And if you look at the rhetoric used by people who are trying to eradicate "alien invasives", and restore the "pure native ecosystems" they are tapping into exactly the same emotional triggers and prejudices that have always been used in moral panics again human immigrants - fear of the outsider, fear of change, backed up with not much beyond the human moral conviction that change is bad and outsiders are bad, when in fact change is a constant and outsiders often bring as much good as bad.
Which leads into the second part of his argument, which is that if you look at actual evidence, the vast majority non-native species aren't a problem, and nearly any way of trying to analyze what is "good" for an ecosystem - that isn't based on nativist prejudices - has trouble concluding that introduced species are a net negative. Most introduced species don't become established; those that do, usually integrate themselves into the existing communities without a ripple, creating new relationships between organisms, and increasing local biodiversity and resilience of the system.
Even in cases where the introduced species is obviously invasive to the layperson, is exploding in population and causing large declines in native species and widespread panic - think kudzu, zebra mussels, gypsy moths, if you're in North America - the pattern that seems to happen is that the introduced species explodes over the course of a few years to decades, and then the natives figure what to do with it, the ecosystems adapt, and everything settles back down, only with higher biodiversity and more resilience. Because species being introduced to new environments is pretty normal and most ecosystems have dealt with it many times before. This part of the story doesn't hit the human consciousness as much because you can't write panicky headlines about "kudzu not world-devouring monster as previously stated, mostly it just likes roadsides and abandoned pastures and buildings, which are human-created environments already dominated by introduced species anyway, and actually it is really effective at stabilizing land and enriching soil in cases of human-caused land degradation, making it easier for functional ecosystems to naturally reestablish in those locations." So most people just hear panic and then silence, even when the actual pattern is panic and then oh never mind it's not that bad after all. Pearce devotes a large portion of the book to going back to these major scare case-studies and seeing how things are doing once people stop paying attention (usually, they are doing fine.)
Now, in come cases invasives inarguably do things like cause extinctions of native species, which leads into the third part of the argument: in those cases, nearly always, the new invasive species is just the straw that broke the camel's back, and the ecosystems were already under severe threat from pollution, climate change, habitat destruction, or other human-caused stressors. In fact, many examples of invasives that are degrading ecosystems (such as bracken in England, pine beetles in the nearctic, or white-tailed deer in the Northeast megalopolis) are actually natives that suddenly explode in population due to other factors. (In some cases the decline in a native 'due to introduced invasives' turns out to actually be a decline back down to historic numbers after a native had a population boom due to human factors.) In other cases the invasives are responding to polluted environments, moving into human-created habitats after the pre-existing ecosystems have been bulldozed, or joining a community that's already in disarray after humans caused the extinction of a keystone species. Or, sometimes, an introduced species that might otherwise have integrated easily into the existing system starts causing problems because the native species are already under high levels of stress due to human-caused habitat change - many of the pathogens currently causing problems (like white-nose in bats and ash borers in ash trees) seem to fit into this pattern.
So it is definitely true that introduced species can sometimes add to the stress on an already stressed ecosystem. What Pearce argues is that, nearly always, a focus on eradicating the introduced species is the wrong use of resources; that nearly always, trying to take out an introduced invasive species without fixing the underlying problem that allowed it to go invasive will not help the stability of the ecosystem, and will sometimes make things worse (because of the methods used to wipe it out, or because it's actually helping to prop up an severely damaged system.) And nearly always, the non-native species end up as a scapegoat to give humans something to focus on other than the underlying environmental problems, which have much less emotionally satisfying solutions than 'kill all the invaders, burn them with fire', but are what really need the hard work put in.
Anyway, it's a super-counterintuitive argument to someone (like me) who was raised on "non-native species bad, native species good!". And inarguably there are cases where the non-natives are a problem that absolutely needs to be solved before we can go deeper - 'it's just a symptom' is fine as far as it goes, but it's often symptoms that kill. But it makes a lot of sense to me that that what we need is not a focus on restoring and preserving "native" ecosystems (which never existed in a stable state anyway) but a focus on stewardship of resilient and diverse ecological communities.
7. The Wild Trees by Richard Preston
This is the story of recent human exploration of deep forests and high forest canopies. Unfortunately, it tells that story via trying to build sympathy around one of the pioneering forest canopy scientists, who built his career by relying on his wife's financial, emotional, and generally being-the-grownup support while she put her career and dreams on hold, then slept with his assistant in a situation of iffy consent, had a breakdown when his wife divorced him after he refused to go to counseling, and then bounced back by marrying a grad student he was mentoring, and the narrative seems to think we should sympathize with him over how hard all of this was, and nope. Nope nope nope. Sorry dude. Nope. You are not the one I sympathized with there. (The secondary lead is another white dude who, according to the book's narrative, had a really hard life because his dad was a millionaire. But at least he was less of a douche to his wife. The tertiary lead is the former-grad-student, who I am sure is actually awesome in her own right, but according to the way the book writes it, her life narrative immediately became subsumed in her husband's once she got married. NOPE.)
Anyway, so that part alternately sucked and made me actively angry. But when he talks about the trees instead of the people, it's amazing, and I don't even really know how to describe how amazing it is, and how it changed the way I look at forests, except that every fantasy writer who ever wants to write about forest elves needs to read this. Also I am very very tempted to take a class on tree-climbing with ropes now even though that would be a super bad idea. Also, I have told multiple people about the Australian leeches that drop on you from above, it is a great Nature Fact.
8. Awakenings; A leg to stand on; The man who mistook his wife for a hat; Seeing voices by Oliver Sacks
This was an omnibus edition so I'm counting it as one. So I know Oliver Sacks is not a perfect person, especially as he got better-known and his tellings of the lives of neuro-atypical people cast an outsize shadow, but I still find his books compulsively readable and deeply compassionate, and I always learn a lot from them, about the ways the brain and the mind interact with each other.
Awakenings was his account of his time working with the last survivors of the encephalitis lethargica epidemic, and what happened when he gave them L-DOPA, which was not a cure, but did give them initiative and will and ability to interact positively with the world for the first time in decades. It gives a really personal look at these people who have effectively "woken up" after a lifetime to find a world moved on without them, and it also gives a view of the inner and outer lives of people who have been severely disabled and institutionalized for much of their lives, and also a clear-eyed view of how little (and how much) even the closest thing medicine has to a "miracle cure" can do for the lives of the people involved.
A Leg To Stand On is his autobiographical account of the time he had a serious accident that nearly killed him, and then had a side effect that all his doctors tried to tell him wasn't actually happening to him, and what happened after; as he's an eminent doctor himself, he does a really good job of both describing the injury, treatment, and recovery, and describing how the medical establishment refused to listen to the patient, and how frustrating and disabling that was to deal with.
The man who mistook his wife for a hat is the first of his anthologies of case studies of neurological patients, and I didn't actually read it this time round because I'd read it before, but they are always thoughtful and thought-provoking.
Seeing Voices is about language and the Deaf, and I was kind of dubious of it going in because there are so many ways Sacks speaking for the Deaf could go wrong, but he spends most of the book talking about all the ways he was wrong and needed to actually let Deaf people speak for themselves, so I ended up liking it quite a lot. The first part is about ASL and nonspeaking deaf people from a neurolinguistic POV and made me think about language in all sorts of new ways; the second part is about Deaf culture and disability history and specifically why hearing people have been so consistently terrible about letting deaf people use their own language. I thought I was reasonably aware of disability history in the US for someone who didn't specialize in it, but until I read this book I hadn't actually realized just how recent the widespread acceptance of Sign as actual languages that Deaf should learn was. I grew up on Sesame Street with everybody conversing with Linda in her native language as naturally as can be; he's writing during the Gallaudet protests in the late 80s - while I was watching Sesame Street - when the idea that Deaf students should be taught in their native language was still considered radical. (Every so often I get hit over the head with just how radical Sesame Street was.)
Anyway, this book made me want to search up some books on Deaf culture by Deaf people. Also reading it while I had bad laryngitis really made me want to finally learn more than a couple words of ASL...
9. The lore and legends of Wall Street by Robert Sharp
This is a slim and unprepossessing volume I picked up off a free books table at a street fair in Boston, thinking it didn't look like much but it would probably be a quick read and I like books about folklore, but instead I kept putting off finishing it because I wanted to read it when I had time to absorb it properly. I learned so much about how financial markets work from this book, probably because it was just trying to tell stories (and explain what was required to make the stories make sense) rather than trying to explain the stock market. Because when people try to do that, they always feel the need to sell you on the idea that it makes sense, it's supported by sound economic theory, and it's a net good for society (spoilers: it doesn't, it isn't, and that has yet to be conclusively demonstrated.) But Sharp just wants to tell you how weird and full of strange people and illogical traditions and emotion-driven decisions that screw the economy and bizarre reasoning Wall Street is, and therefore as a side effect he managed to almost make it understandable the way fifteen finance books twisting logic in knots to justify it never could.
10. Naming Nature by Carol Kaesuk Yoon
I started reading this because I was hoping it would give me some of the history of taxonomic nomenclature that I need to figure out the backstory for the AU in the world where Naming A Species means you can thereafter summon it to fight for you and Cope and Marsh are basically rival Pokemon trainers having Camarasaurus vs. Allosaurus duels outside the Smithsonian Castle, but then I didn't get very far because something in the author's narrative voice in the introduction turned me off.
I pushed through eventually, though! And once she moved on from navel-gazing she got way less annoying. Sadly it didn't solve my backstory problem**; it turned out to be more about taxonomy from a cross-cultural linguistic/neurological/anthropological POV than about the history of the ICZN, but what it was actually about was super-fascinating too. It talks about how humans seems to have a separate system in the brain for classifying and recognizing living things - borne up by brain injury cases where people lose their ability to do only that; they can tell a bicycle from a car but not a banana from a cat - and that certain things, such as higher-level classification of living things into larger families, and binomial nomenclature at the "species" level, seem to be inbuilt at a cross-cultural level, as is an awareness that living things seem to fit into a classificatory tree, and a desire to make them all fit. She also talks about how the vast increase in knowledge of living things with the creation of a globally connected society totally upset that system, and that's why scientific taxonomy ever since has been a huge mess and getting ever more unusable even by scientists and incompatible with everyday taxonomy.
But the fact from this book that I keep sharing with people is that if you find a kid from an isolated, subsistence-level society, who is used to living really close to the land and has little knowledge of global popular culture, and ask them to name all the animals they know, you will quickly get a list of about 150 species-equivalent names, with basic classification information; if you give them time to think it over they might be able to come up with twice or three times that many. (This is also about the same number that a professor of zoology can reel off if you put them on the spot, even though theoretically they might know thousands of scientific names of animals.)
If you take a modern kid from a developed society who's never spent much time needing to know about nature, doesn't live close to it, and wouldn't have anyone to teach them the names of the animals even if they wanted to learn, they will be able to come up with maybe a few dozen in the same test, most of them not local to where they live. However, they will be able to get the same number of names of animals as the kid from the subsistence society, with about the same level of detail and classification, if you ask them about Pokemon instead.
Apparently, the classificatory brain will find a way.
**Presumably, it involves Carl Linnaeus doing some dark ritual that combines Western ritual magic of the raising-the-spirits-of-flowers-with-Latin-chanting variety with some misused appropriated Sami shamanic ritual which bound the spirits of all known living creatures to his summons alone, but you'd be surprised how hard it is to find an account of just what happened, taxonomically speaking, between the publication of Systema Naturae and the establishment of the ICZN.
Bonus Round TV Show: Over The Garden Wall
I watched almost no TV this year, so I think this was the only series I actually finished/am caught up on. I have been thinking about it a lot since watching it because I can't figure out what the hell they thought they were doing.
Like, I watched the first couple episodes, and I was like, ok, this is set in an ahistorical fantasy Ye Olde Rural America where everybody is white, ok, I mean it's not ideal but at least they made it explictly ahistorical instead of doing something that's theoretically in the actual past but leaves out all the hard bits, and there were parts of Ye Olde Rural America where basically everybody was white, so okay.
But then they started doing stories that... should have been about race? Like the Nice White Southern Lady who is going to teach these poor subhuman children who nobody else thinks are teachable, so that they can pass in polite society, and then the students save the day by putting on a minstrel show. Or the one where one of the main characters has to go sleep in the stable because they don't serve her kind in the tavern. Or the one where the rich man owns a plantation and has gone mad with guilt over all the terrible things he did in the course of getting rich off the plantation, but somehow what those things are never gets specified. Or the one where the young girl is forced by a cruel mistress to work really hard all day with no rest and obey all her mistress's commands, but it turns out it's OK because if she wasn't forced to work all day she would give in to her subhuman animal instincts as symbolized by a contamination with blackness. I could go on. And of course there's all the jazz and ragtime music that's all out of African American culture.
So at that point I'm just like, okay, did they not notice what they were doing? Were they trying to sneak a show about race past execs who wanted them to avoid serious issues? Is this actually a show that's just retelling foundational American stories but replacing all the black people with talking animals and a formless dark creeping evil speaking in the kind of deep bass that Americans associate with black men, and thinks that's okay? Are they setting up for something deep and amazing that will make all of this not just okay but great?
And then I got to the last episode and on the one hand, no, it was not a setup for something great, it just turns out it was All A Dream.
Except... it turns out that not everybody in the show is white, because we finally get to see the girl who was the focus of the obsession that set up the All A Dream, and-- she's not white. We never see her face, and it would be easy to miss, but the small strip of her skin we do get to see is inarguably brown in contrast to the pallid paleness of literally every other human character.
At which point I just go. ???? So annoying overeducated white boy gets a crush on brown-skinned girl, fails to deal, and has elaborate dream sequence in which he lives through bits of African-American history and African-American music but with all the black people replaced by animals who need a (white) savior to defeat the Creeping Corrupting Blackness, and... I still have no idea if they knew what they were doing, or what they thought they were doing, but making Sara darker-skinned, even if it was hard to notice, when everybody else was the color of Wonderbread, had to be a deliberate choice, so, ????. And I am super-puzzled why none of the stuff I saw on Tumblr while it was airing and Tumblr was obsessed by it addressed any of this.
But I am still thinking about it. *shrug*
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(Also, now I really want to test my kids on the animals vs. Pokemon thing, but since they have grown up with a zoologist parent, they're not typical kids in that respect.)
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...bearing in mind that this project is currently very back-burner and may never see the light of day, so no hurry.
And, yeah, I suspect that a kid who's had quite that little exposure to nature education is almost as difficult to find as a kid who's never heard of Pokemon, but I'm pretty sure little my cousins know at least as many Pokemon as they do birds and bugs (And can classify them all by type.) Even if I'm apparently better on fossil pokemon than they are, apparently fossil pokemon aren't cool anymore.
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7: Leeches! They do! It's terrible!
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And North American ecosystems evolved to have mammoths and passenger pigeons all over them, so they're irretrievably fucked-up anyway, whatever they end up being is not going to be anything like what they would have looked like when they had passenger pigeons in them, no matter what we do at this point. Let the ailanthus and fragmites and broom and tamarisk do the best they can.
...The best thing about our leeches here is that if you stay out of the water they won't get on you. D:
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Sacks: I remember reading those when I was... twelve, I think? Except I don't think I did read Seeing Voices. The other two, definitely. I loved his writing voice. Looking back, I wonder how much the Suck Fairy will have visited if I try rereading. I have the feeling that exposure to disability theory plus long years of bad therapy might have spoiled me for books about deeply literate, humane, highly educated medical specialists writing books theorising about their patients and what their conditions ~~mean~~.
Sharpe: *makes a note, this sounds great*
the world where Naming A Species means you can thereafter summon it to fight for you and Cope and Marsh are basically rival Pokemon trainers
*makes frantic gimme hands*
Carl Linnaeus doing some dark ritual
I would definitely buy this novel. Or short story or novella, whatever form it takes.
This is also about the same number that a professor of zoology can reel off if you put them on the spot, even though theoretically they might know thousands of scientific names of animals.
I might just be pattern-matching, but it also sounds suspiciously close to Dunbar's Number.
You're also making me think of Dorothy L. Sayers and what she calls the 'Poll-Parrot' stage in her essay on the Trivium (which I feel about much like I feel about Strunk and White: okay, there's a lot here to disagree with, but in an interesting way.)
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(My vague memory re: rabbits at least is that he claims they're mostly a big problem to farmers and gardeners - that is, people who are actively involved in husbanding non-native species on Australian soil - and that the damage they do to native ecosystems is miniscule compared to the damage they do to non-native crops, and utterly insignificant compared to the damage done to native ecosystems by cattle grazing and monoculture farms, and that in relatively undisturbed Australian ecosystems - no cattle grazing or farming - they don't do much damage even when they're around, it becomes a real problem only when they're on land already damaged by grazing. And similarly that a lot of the panic about insects and pathogens is about the damage they could do to non-native crops, which often do disproportionately well in Australia because they are introduced species, not because of the insects' possible effects on the native ecosystems. But I could be remembering wrong so don't take me up on that without reading the book yourself :P)
Sacks.. IDK. He's a lot better than nearly ever other doctor writing about patients that I've read; he is really careful to center the person he's talking about, and their subjective experiences of their own life, over his own place in the narrative or the ideal of science, he is never hesitant to point out where his own preconceptions were screwing him up, and the lessons he draws are "this is where the medical establishment I am part of gets it wrong too often" and "this is what we can learn about the physical workings of the human brain" rather than, like, "this is the meaning of humanity." (He's a neurologist, and emphatically not a psychologist, so he never goes much into the psychology, except in the sense of 'these are the understandable coping mechanisms these people are using to deal with the shit their brains throw at them'.) And he's compassionate in the sense of "this is a person who should be able to define their own personhood and it sucks when they aren't able to" not in the sense of "isn't this so terrible, we all feel their pain."
That said he's still a mostly-neurotypical white dude famous doctor who is telling other people's stories for them, and even when he's admitting he was wrong he doesn't necessarily get it right, he got some stuff really, really wrong in a way that influenced a lot of other people wrong, and I know a lot of people who are really annoyed by his writings for perfectly good reasons.
If you want to try going back and seeing if you still like his stuff, I'd start with A Leg To Stand On, the much-more-recent Hallucinations, or maybe his book on migraines (that I haven't read) which are to a significant extent case studies with himself as the patient (he has that severe leg injury, a history drug addiction, and chronic disabling migraines to draw on), and if they don't annoy you at all you'll probably be okay with the rest of his writing too.
The Sharp book is not anything spectacular, it's very much a pedestrian collection of historical/folkloric vignettes in the mid-20th-century style, and it's not anticapitalist like I might have made it sound, but it's the first book on the stock market I've read that isn't trying to sell me anything other that 'isn't this weird and interesting'.
...the taxonomy AU wants to be an anthology comic, but there is no way I will ever be able to produce an anthology comic about that (it would require a master scientific illustrator to do the art even a little justice) so it will probably be a series of short stories if anything. (I would love if it could be an open world series, it started as a YT prompt....)
It's possible the number is significant! It's also possible that I misremembered it because it made sense to me that it would be close to Dunbar's number. The upper limit did seem to be less about absolute memory, and more about how many a person could hold in their working memory at once - a RAM limit, not a hard drive one - she said never, ever to try it on a professional biologist, because they will list you their couple hundred, get really frustrated that they got stuck that soon, and then call you at all hours for the next month to name more animals at you.
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My older sister went to a school specialized to also teach deaf and hard of hearing students (she has no hearing problems herself, but had behavioral issues in elementary school and this school was the only one leading to university access starting from grade seven rather than grade five, and the early sorting back then was more rigid than now) and from what she told me no sign language at all was used in teaching. I think these days they use some sign language translation but back then it was all oralism, and afaik that school was the only university track school with any services for the deaf in the whole region.
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(I also think that was one of the things that drew me to Star Wars - the way the characters who physically can't speak each other's languages are around each other - even when that lack of language makes them nonpersons in wider society - always reminds me of that aspect of Sesame Street and makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Also, there are Muppets.)
...and I can understand why people think oralism is a good idea - helping people be more able to interact with more people is good - but not even offering the more functional alternative as well, often explicitly forbidding people to use it, especially when a lot of deaf people will never be able to be good enough at oralism to use it fluently in the hearing world? :/ Parents of Deaf children who never even try to learn basic Sign, while putting their kids through intense oralism training? :/
Right now in the US there's a strong trend toward teaching at least some ASL to hearing people who have other problems with speech - when I would be in special-ed classes, all the kids (none of whom were hard of hearing; most of them were ASD or intellectually disabled) knew more signs than I did and expected all grown-ups to understand them, and there's a lot of stuff happening with teaching it to preverbal babies, too. It's super-weird to think about how recently it wasn't even considered a language. (And to how even while all that is going on, even in the US a lot of Deaf people have to fight for the right to use their own language - there were more protests at Gallaudet just in the past ten years.)
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I just finished After The Ice Age by Pielou, which is also about how the ecology and everything of post-glacial North America has been in a state of constant change, and it goes into lovely detail about what plants move in first and how important forest fires are and what happens when your giant lake suddenly empties all at once. (new favorite word: jokelhlaup.)
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Jokulhlaup is also one of my favorite words. So evocative! Icelandic is a great language.
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Speaking of racial issues, I'm reading a bio of Sophia Duleep Singh, daughter of a deposed maharajah in the Victorian/Edwardian age Who became a suffragette in Britain.
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Also I am very very tempted to take a class on tree-climbing with ropes now even though that would be a super bad idea.
I do a lot of tree-climbing with ropes, and I can tell you that it is SO MUCH FUN. Er, sorry to tempt you if it's a bad idea for you. But if your circumstances change such that it might be a good idea, I very much recommend it.
Also, your taxonomy AU sounds like fun!
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...but apparently one of the community colleges around here gives classes every few years, so, y'know, I'm keeping an eye out.
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Overall tree climbing is a really pleasurable use of technology. I can use technology in different ways depending on my physical abilities to get where I want to be, and it's not even about getting more and more gadgets--it's about how you use the things that you do have, combining them in different ways. So for me it's an intellectual pleasure as well, because I need to keep the whole system of ropes and knots and carabiners and things in my head and decide what are the best ways of using them to achieve what I want. It's a very absorbing mix of physical and intellectual work.
...heh, obviously I am passionate about this.