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Book Reviews REVIEWS  Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man by Dale Peterson The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring by Richard Preston The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch Courage for the Earth edited by Peter Matthiessen Back to Books Index >> |
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REVIEWS |
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The Plural of Anecdote Is Data
Jane Goodall changed our notions of who does science and how. Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man By Dale Peterson Houghton Mifflin, 2006 Reviewed by Florence Williams When 23-year-old Jane Goodall became Louis Leakey's secretary at the Coryndon Museum in Kenya, it's not clear which of her attributes he was most drawn to: her physical beauty, her reverence for him and his work, or her eager, unmolded mind. Ultimately, it was likely a mix of all three that caused the eminent paleoanthropologist to dispatch her to the jungles of Tanzania to study chimps, but not before first declaring his love for her and attempting elaborate seductions. The latter she fended off, eventually convincing the married, graying Leakey to assume a long-lasting paternal role in her life. Goodall was not the first secretary on whom he had similar designs. When an affair with Goodall's predecessor, Rosalie Osborn, ended, Leakey sent her off to Uganda to study mountain gorillas. Rosalie's mother did not approve, however, and after four months she returned to England. Today, Leakey's notions of sending women into the field seem both quaint and yet oddly prescient (he also nurtured the long-running field research of Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas). As Dale Peterson writes, "his intuition suggested that women might prove superior to men at studying animal behavior. They were probably more patient than men, he thought, and perhaps would appear less threatening to wild animals and less likely to provoke male aggression . . . And, as is so often the case, Louis's intellectual biases were happily congruent with his emotional ones." Leakey, although himself a Cambridge PhD, was also skeptical of formal education in the field of animal behavior, finding it all theory and no fact. Up to that time, few researchers had spent extended periods of time in the bush, especially studying primates. In Jane Goodall, who hadn't even attended university, he found a uniquely qualified, if untrained, observer. Independent and eccentric, she was raised by her mother and grandmother in the British countryside. Fascinated by Dr. Doolittle and Tarzan tales, she took earthworms to bed, sat still in the hen house for hours at a time to watch the laying of eggs, and was crazy in love with her dogs, horses, and a stuffed chimpanzee toy. When a former schoolmate invited her to Kenya in 1957, she jumped at the chance. Her mother, far from protesting, joined her for her first months at the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve and later developed a lasting friendship and collaboration with Leakey. Leakey was right: Goodall was patient, unobtrusive, and wholly unaware of scientific censure against anthropomorphizing her subjects. In fact, she was almost childlike in her animism of the natural world, saying things such as "Good morning, tree," "Good morning, rain" as she went about her rounds. Naturally, she not only named the chimps (also verboten among researchers) but freely ascribed to them feelings, motivations, and personalities as complex as those of people. Sometimes she scratched herself and ate leaves and at times walked around half-naked. Her "St. Francis of Assisi" approach was a bit over the top and radical for the times. Remarkably, though, Goodall's humble and casual way of habituating the primates to her presence yielded big dividends: within her first year in the field, she documented chimps not only using but fashioning tools as well as regularly eating meat. These discoveries shocked those in the scientific community who took her seriously enough to believe her. Leakey famously responded, "Now we must re-define tool, re-define Man, or accept chimpanzees as human." But as Peterson ably recounts in his highly readable if somewhat worshipful biography, prominent mid-century ethologist Sir Solly Zuckerman dismissed her findings as unreliable anecdote. At the time, the field of ethology, or animal behavior, was struggling to assert itself as a hard science founded upon dispassionate and concordant data. It was still reacting to the discredited anthropomorphizing style of nineteenth-century naturalists such as Charles Darwin, who once described ants "pretending to bite each other, like so many puppies." It was pretty well assumed by 1962 that attributing human qualities to animals would inevitably lead to sloppiness and errors, not to mention threatening the established thinking of humans as the only species with a thinking mind. It was also assumed that behaviors of animals were knowable and reliable, that one chimp would always act like another, its actions predetermined by heredity and its place on the tree of life. For the sake of credibility, Leakey arranged for, and practically forced, Goodall to earn a Ph.D. from Cambridge, which she did in 1966. That Goodall, over the course of one decade—then two, then three—observed a great variety of behavioral responses among individual chimps was a profound contribution to the field and is today supported by advances in neurobiology. "It is our recognition of these intellectual and emotional similarities between chimpanzees and ourselves that has, more than anything else, blurred the line, once thought so sharp, between human beings and other animals," she wrote in an essay in 1998. It's hard to imagine the emerging and fashionable discipline of "cognitive ethology" existing without her and the generations of succeeding primatologists she helped train. Today, as New York University environmental philosopher Dale Jamieson quips, "the plural of anecdote is data." Of course, the practice of anthropomorphizing is still a professional quagmire, and academicians will likely argue its merits and pratfalls for decades to come. What Goodall knew was that it's an instinctual tendency. Her embrace of it led perhaps to a less-celebrated contribution to the understanding of Man. For our species, anthropomorphism itself is an essential cognitive tool. We anthropomorphize because we are human, and it is how we always have—often successfully—made sense of our world, its predators and prey, and our place in it. Back to Books Index >> |
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Old Limbs, Would-be Explorers A tall tale of maverick naturalists who rediscovered the giant redwood The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring By Richard Preston Random House, 2007 Reviewed by David Rains Wallace All organisms must explore their environments. Exploration acquired a problematic dimension with the rise of civilization, however. It became a progressive sequence of discovery leading to exploitation and colonization, which raised the troubling possibility that we might someday have nothing left to discover. Yet civilization's "been there, done that" attitude is an illusion. No matter how much history accumulates, every generation still has to explore the earth. The Wild Trees is one of the best exploration stories I've read. Its account of maverick naturalists who discovered the world of the giant redwood, the Douglas fir, and the mountain ash (an Australian eucalyptus) forest canopy is an unusually successful blend of the main currents of classic exploration writing—the sublime and the sensational. Like Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, Richard Preston's book inspires with scientific discovery. Like Stanley's In Darkest Africa, it excites with gruesome perils and derring-do (along with mild sex, traditionally rare in the genre). Yet in two important ways, the exploration Preston describes is very different from Darwin's or Stanley's. Because it is inside civilization's traditional frontiers—in touristed parks or, in the case of the mountain ash canopy, in Melbourne's water district—the hidden, ancient world was not noticed by the exploration establishment: the National Geographic Society, National Science Foundation, and others. And the big-tree canopy, although beautiful and scientifically significant, may offer little that civilization traditionally has wanted from exploration. It may be exploitable if its ecosystems—microorganisms, lichens, fungi, ferns, shrubs, small trees, and largely unknown animals—not to mention the treetops themselves, yield useful information. But the canopy frontier is less colonizable than the South Pole. Indeed, it is so dangerous and fragile that the climbers try not to "open it up" but to keep it closed, hiding trees' locations . In response to these differences, the actors in Preston's saga are more ambivalent than earlier explorers. Exhilarated by being the first to enter the throne rooms of the forest gods (they name trees "Zeus," "Rhea," "Helios"), they are also dejected at the possibility that these might be the last giant trees to discover. "In the history of botany in the twentieth century, there was never a day like the Day of Discovery, and there will never be a day like it again," scientist Robert Van Pelt tells Preston, referring to the finding of a "new" tall redwood grove in 1998, "because there is nothing on earth like those trees left to be found." Their ambivalence is understandable, given that the timber industry has cut over 95 percent of the original redwoods. Conservation has been historical discovery's stepchild, an afterthought to exploitation and colonization. If progressive exploration comes to a shocking dead end, then conservation's prospects could be problematic, indeed. But if the tree explorers confront history's exploration dilemma, they also imply alternatives. Their expressed aims differ from Stanley's or Darwin's. They seem to explore more in the spirit of prehistoric vision quests and walkabouts. Although their discoveries have recently wrung some recognition from the exploration establishment, they still don't sound much like National Geographic. "When I first saw the redwoods in the Grove of Titans, I remember feeling a deep physical attraction to them," botanist Marie Antoine tells Preston. "One of the great things about climbing is that it's meditative . . . I have a fairly cynical outlook on so many things in the world today—this insane world. But as long as we have these trees to ask questions about, there's hope for us." "Questioning" trees seems an open-ended, steady-state pursuit, which is how prehistoric cultures apparently regarded exploration. A case in point is the question of the tallest tree, which drove a mostly nonclimbing explorer, Michael Taylor, to find the hitherto unknown groves that Antoine and her associates then scaled. In the historical tradition, there has to exist a tallest tree to discover and record officially. When I was writing part of the Redwood National Park Handbook in the mid-1990s, I duly noted that the park contained the record tree, identified by the National Geographic Society in the 1960s. So I was embarrassed, reading The Wild Trees, to learn that Taylor had found trees as tall or taller in various California state parks in the mid-1990s. Preston's epilogue, however, tells how Taylor and fellow explorer Chris Atkins found an even taller tree in Redwood National Park in 2003. But is it really the tallest redwood? Maybe it is, for now. Even so, its top may die or another tree may grow taller in a few Back to Books Index >> |
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Happy 100th, Rachel Carson The Highest Tide By Jim Lynch Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005 Courage for the Earth Edited by Peter Matthiessen Houghton Mifflin, 2007 Conservation magazine recently asked readers to choose their favorite conservation book from a list of more than 100 titles. Harvesting the most votes, ahead of Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, and Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, was Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Carson's eloquent indictment of America's pesticide industry warrants rereading on this, the centennial of her birth, as do two recent books (one fiction, one nonfiction) that resonate with her crystalline prose and vision. In Courage for the Earth, Peter Matthiessen has assembled a dozen writers, scientists, and activists—including E.O. Wilson, Al Gore, and Terry Tempest Williams—to illuminate Carson's remarkable life, writing, and impact on the natural world. Among Matthiessen's contributors is Jim Lynch, who found in Carson an intellectual and spiritual lodestone for Miles O'Malley, the 13-year-old wunderkind naturalist in his national bestseller, coming-of-age novel, The Highest Tide. Lynch had read Silent Spring and was already inspired to write about "the wonder and beauty of salt water." Then one day he found a used copy of Rachel Carson's The Edge of the Sea in an Olympia, Washington, bookstore. "She just put me over the top and raised the bar for what I was doing," Lynch told Conservation. "When I came up with the idea and put her in the story, it energized me." Back to Books Index >> |
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