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brandonpytel 's review for:
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2022
by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Jaime Green
I continue my annual tradition of reading this book every year, this one from Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, who divided the book into five categories — nature is magnificent, nature is roiled, humans are a part of nature, ways of knowing, and futures we could have — each of which focuses on stories that finds “a place in an arc that offers a directionality from observations to action.”
Each of these collections are biased (the one two years ago was edited by a professor of physics, who favored a number of non-environmental stories: from brain functions to the science of smelling to extraterrestrial exploration), and Dr. Johnson is no different: Leaning toward the “nature” in science and nature, she focuses on surprises and solutions, diversity, and “ecology, evolution, and anthropology.”
While I appreciate the focus on climate and pollution, the book did indeed leaving me wanting more tech-driven and engineering solutions; many of the “ways of knowing” stories instead focused on indigenous perspectives — necessary stories to tell, given their often overlooked place in environmental narratives, but published at the expense of other types of articles (in Johnson’s words, those that explore “technology, medicine, and engineering”).
However, the collection, as it always does, left me with a number of fascinating stories with beautiful prose — from Katherine Wu’s “The body’s most embarrassing organ is an evolutionary marvel,” which traced the evolutionary origins of a taboo organ, to Meera Subramanian, who in “The nature of plastics” traces the prevalence of plastics in our generation, going so far as to call it the “plastiscene,” a fitting name for the “disturbing splendor in the destruction the industrial age has wrought.”
I’m also drawn to stories about water, that essential ingredient of life which is at times overpowering, and at others, disappearing from the lands that need it most. In “How rising groundwater caused by climate change could devastate coastal communities,” Kendra Pierre-Louis explores the oft-overlooked issue of flooding and contamination caused by increased groundwater linked to sea level rise.
And in “In the oceans, the volume is rising as never before,” Sabrina Imbler reports of the noise pollution that’s disrupting marine ecosystems: “the noise can even doom “baby clown fish] to wander the seas without direction, unable to find their way home.”
Perhaps most worthwhile were the stories that explored overlooked solutions — or problems — that often go unexplored in the mass media narrative surrounding climate change: Stories from fertilizer, whose history is tied up with modern agriculture, to lead exposure, which was brilliantly covered in the effortlessly readable article by the Tampa Bay Times.
Such accessible articles as Justine Calma’s “Power shift” and Jane Hu’s “New wind projects power local budgets in Wyoming,” both of which explained how renewables can help communities take ownership of their power supplies, generating power locally, boosting the economy, and minimizing vulnerabilities typically associated with fossil fuels.
I also appreciated the inclusion of a Substack article, Emily Atkin’s “Work from home, save the planet? Ehhh,” published in HEATED.
Overall the writing was beautiful, as always, and these collections continue to produce the wow factor that I love from books like these, bringing to light such fascinating stories as the role of beavers in forest fires, solar panels on farms, indigenous perspectives in climate solutions, and carbon credits in forests.
Each of these collections are biased (the one two years ago was edited by a professor of physics, who favored a number of non-environmental stories: from brain functions to the science of smelling to extraterrestrial exploration), and Dr. Johnson is no different: Leaning toward the “nature” in science and nature, she focuses on surprises and solutions, diversity, and “ecology, evolution, and anthropology.”
While I appreciate the focus on climate and pollution, the book did indeed leaving me wanting more tech-driven and engineering solutions; many of the “ways of knowing” stories instead focused on indigenous perspectives — necessary stories to tell, given their often overlooked place in environmental narratives, but published at the expense of other types of articles (in Johnson’s words, those that explore “technology, medicine, and engineering”).
However, the collection, as it always does, left me with a number of fascinating stories with beautiful prose — from Katherine Wu’s “The body’s most embarrassing organ is an evolutionary marvel,” which traced the evolutionary origins of a taboo organ, to Meera Subramanian, who in “The nature of plastics” traces the prevalence of plastics in our generation, going so far as to call it the “plastiscene,” a fitting name for the “disturbing splendor in the destruction the industrial age has wrought.”
I’m also drawn to stories about water, that essential ingredient of life which is at times overpowering, and at others, disappearing from the lands that need it most. In “How rising groundwater caused by climate change could devastate coastal communities,” Kendra Pierre-Louis explores the oft-overlooked issue of flooding and contamination caused by increased groundwater linked to sea level rise.
And in “In the oceans, the volume is rising as never before,” Sabrina Imbler reports of the noise pollution that’s disrupting marine ecosystems: “the noise can even doom “baby clown fish] to wander the seas without direction, unable to find their way home.”
Perhaps most worthwhile were the stories that explored overlooked solutions — or problems — that often go unexplored in the mass media narrative surrounding climate change: Stories from fertilizer, whose history is tied up with modern agriculture, to lead exposure, which was brilliantly covered in the effortlessly readable article by the Tampa Bay Times.
Such accessible articles as Justine Calma’s “Power shift” and Jane Hu’s “New wind projects power local budgets in Wyoming,” both of which explained how renewables can help communities take ownership of their power supplies, generating power locally, boosting the economy, and minimizing vulnerabilities typically associated with fossil fuels.
I also appreciated the inclusion of a Substack article, Emily Atkin’s “Work from home, save the planet? Ehhh,” published in HEATED.
Overall the writing was beautiful, as always, and these collections continue to produce the wow factor that I love from books like these, bringing to light such fascinating stories as the role of beavers in forest fires, solar panels on farms, indigenous perspectives in climate solutions, and carbon credits in forests.