Science writing, in context

I’m a slow eater. By the time I’m nearly done with my first helping at dinner, my husband is busy polishing off thirds. I’m also a slow thinker. I like to chew on things a bit and pick them apart before expressing my opinion openly to others. Last week, I attended Science Online 2012 in Raleigh for the third year in a row. As always, it provided plenty of fun and engaging things to ruminate on. In most of the sessions, the audience contributed openly; but shy and slow to process as I am, I don’t tend to speak up. Like I said, I’m a s-l-o-w thinker. (Me and sloths could be best friends.)

This post is a bit of a mental download of all the thoughts swirling in my head after attending one of the sessions moderated by Ed Yong (of Not Exactly Rocket Science fame), and Maggie Koerth-Baker (editor at BoingBoing.net) where they extrapolated on the conundrum of providing context in science stories. The session was prompted by the concern that science news and science journalism often lack enough context so that readers can make adequate sense of complicated findings, such as Arsenic Life, or chronic issues that frequently have new developments which must be continually covered, such as climate change, or cancer research.

This is a fair concern when you’re contemplating how to best communicate news from a field that is often riddled with complexity and context.

First, the panelists asked audience members if they knew of any technological fixes for providing more context. Some people mentioned slideshows as complimentary to main stories, providing links to FAQs, or providing sidebars (as in, the old-school sidebars where pertinent information is extracted to a box next to the main story). Linking out to sources that provide a deeper explanation of a key concept, mechanism, process, or history was also mentioned; though some folks expressed concern about losing readers if they directed them away from their own news site or blog.

While I acknowledge the role technological fixes like slideshows can provide to add more context to a story (or more links to places with more information), I think this question sidestepped the elephant in the room, which is that sophisticated and skilled writing can incorporate needed context. In other words, from my perspective this is an issue that falls out more on the side of writing craft and reporting.

Open Lab 2012 / The Best of Science Writing Online 2012

Zeghie Peninsula Ethiopia. (Photo courtesy of David M. Jarze,n, PhD)

Simply put, 2011 was not the easiest year for me, personally or professionally, for many reasons I won’t go into here. So it gave me a boost to learn in mid-December that one of my blog posts from 2011 was chosen for inclusion in the anthology known as Open Lab. I’ve had two posts accepted to Open Lab before (2009, 2010), but this year felt different because the anthology was picked up by Scientific American and will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Previously, it was self-published on Lulu.com by its creator, Bora Zivkovic, and whoever Bora chose to be that year’s editor.

You can see a list of the 50 posts and one poem that were chosen out of the 720 entries at Jennifer Ouellete’s blog, Cocktail Party Physics. Jennifer was the gracious cat herder editor this year. The new title of the anthology is: The Best of Science Writing Online 2012. Normally this would be called OpenLab 2011, but with the new publisher and different editorial and publishing process the anthology will skip a year and come out late in 2012. As more than one person has noted, however, this doesn’t mean the chosen posts are THE best online science writing—that would be an impossibility to judge and curate—they are simply some of the best from the posts that were submitted. (To give credit where it’s due, that sentiment was first expressed by Ed Yong.) This brings up the obvious point: if you want your work to be considered for judging, you have to submit to OpenLab.

My single complaint about the transition to Scientific American from independent publishing is that SciAm inserted an indemnity clause into the publishing agreements they require the bloggers to sign in order to license reprinting of their work. What this means is that should anyone anywhere decide to sue over something that is published in the anthology, SciAm and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux are as resilient as greased teflon to the suit, which will smack the blogger instead.

Book writing: lessons learned

Like the young red wolf pup shown here, I had a lot to learn. (Photo courtesy of the Red Wolf Recovery Program, FWS. Here, Ryan Nordsven takes a blood sample from a red wolf pup, a routine procedure to test for genetic purity.)

As promised in my last post, I’ve pulled together some of the “lessons” I learned about the process of writing a non-fiction book while writing my first one, The Secret World of Red Wolves: A true story of North America’s other wolf. The process of writing a book is surely as different for every writer as the fingerprints inscribed on our digits. What follows below is a list of things I learned along the way, over the two year process it took to bring my project from an idea to a finished manuscript. (The focus of this post is on the actual writing, structure, and organization issues I encountered—not how to write or sell a book proposal.) I don’t expect that what I’ve shared here will make sense to everyone, but if you’re a writer who is struggling to tackle a big project then perhaps some granule of this discussion will help you to tackle your own project in a new, productive way.

Approaching the writing: Knowing enough to know where and how to start

I planned for my book to be somehwere around 87,000 words (it topped out at 95,000), but before embarking on this project I’d never written anything longer than 4,000 words. Which might explain why I started out with lots of questions about how to organize and approach a writing project more than twenty-one times larger than anything I’d ever done. Seeking guidance, I asked two non-fiction authors I know (who had published multiple books each) how they had managed to break down the massive amount of work involved in writing multiple chapters. They are both journalists, and each told me that they simply treated each chapter like an in-depth article, and then stitched all the “articles” together. That sounded like a manageable way to tame what seemed like an unruly mess of ideas in my head, so that’s how I tried to conceive of my chapters. I stared at my draft table of contents and thought, This will be easy! I’ll just write seven or eight “articles” about these ideas. 

After bungling around for a few months and feeling stuck each time I tried to write the first “article,” I realized that their method didn’t work for me. I couldn’t conceive of the chapters as isolated articles linked by the theme of the book. I could only see the continuity between the chapters I’d outlined, although I couldn’t yet clearly envision the narrative path I wanted a reader to take through the story. I knew I wanted to plant seeds in the first chapter that would be cultivated and tended to in later chapters, but this was hard to do in the sense of writing an article. I realized with a sinking feeling that in biting off writing the first chapter, I first had to have a much firmer understanding of the whole book — the whole story — before I could understand where it began.

What followed was three or four months of intensive research and interviewing, more notes than I knew how to handle, a mind jammed full of red wolf facts, and a dozen or more stacks of research papers and documents carefully grouped by topic on my desk. I felt adrift and anchorless in those months. I often awoke at 3 a.m. with a hard, cold fear in my belly from knowing that after four months of “working on the book” I still had yet to finish a single chapter.

My first book: The Secret World of Red Wolves

Captive male red wolf at Sandy Ridge facility, near Columbia, North Carolina. (Photo courtesy of Ryan Nordsven, red wolf biologist with USFWS)

It’s been exactly six months since I posted on Wild Muse. What have I been up to since then? I finished my first non-fiction book! (No, really! It’s done!) It’s tentatively titled The Secret World of Red Wolves: A True Story of North America’s Other Wolf. Writing this book is a singular accomplishment in my life. If you’ve read this blog, you’re probably familiar with the book’s topic. But if you’re not familiar, then here’s a quick recap: it’s a story of the red wolf, Canis rufus, which is a predator that used to live throughout the central and southeastern United States. It’s a contested species, and its taxonomy has been elusive. Some people don’t believe it’s a wolf at all. Others believe it opens a window to a lineage of wolves that evolved solely in North America. If you’re opening another browser tab to look it up on Wikipedia, take the entry with a grain of salt, it needs improvement and the sections on its taxonomy and origins appear to be largely authored by the camp of people who disbelieve the animal is a distinct entity, without much coverage of opposing views. In the book, I cover the full spectrum of these views, in the context of how our understanding of these animals has changed as science uncovers new clues to their past origins.

Oddly, a modern detailed treatment of the red wolf’s whole story has not been told all in one place before for a general audience. The idea for this book came to me after I moved to North Carolina in late 2008. The Old North State is home to the only wild population of red wolves in the world. They have been reintroduced to the eastern part of the state, in a coastal area known locally as the Albemarle peninsula. When I moved, I knew from my previous research on Mexican gray wolves that a red wolf program was underway in North Carolina, but that was about the extent of my knowledge. In my literature review of Mexican wolves, I’d also bumped up against several papers on red wolves for which I read the abstracts but didn’t have time to read more. I filed them away for investigation at a later time, but they left me with the lingering impression that there was something controversial about the red wolf’s origins and our current understanding of its genetics.

When I finally had some free time, I searched for an in-depth non-academic book to learn about red wolves, but I was surprised I could not find a current one. The most recent one for general audiences is actually a section of a book from 1993— and believe me, a lot has transpired since then. Other recent books were written for children, or were fairly superficial and did not address any of the evolutionary origin or genetic debates that I knew had cropped up about red wolves since the mid-1990s. Writings that addessed the red wolf’s genetics and taxonomy were relegated to academic chapters within other works, and scientific papers. Without truly understanding what I was getting myself into, I began to form the idea that perhaps I should write a current book about red wolves. Afterall, I love learning about predator ecology and conservation. What could go wrong? (Well, for one thing, I didn’t know how to write a book!)

After a few months of research, I wrote a book proposal and sent it to a few university presses. The University of North Carolina Press accepted it in November of 2009.

Wild Muse is on indefinite hiatus

Breeding red wolf female of the Northern Pack, released after the batteries on her telemetry collar were replaced in January 2011. Somewhere west of Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, North Carolina. Photo by DeLene Beeland.

There is a season for everything, I’ve heard, and right now it is the season for losing myself in writing and research. I’m in the thick of things with my book and there never seems to be time left over to devote to anything else. (The book I’m working on is a story about native wolves of the East, Canis rufus, also known as red wolves.) Hopefully late in 2011 I’ll pick back up with blogging. Until then, thanks for reading and make use of Wild Muse’s archives.

Book review: The Species Seekers, by Richard Conniff

Cover to The Species Seekers, by Richard Conniff

The Species Seekers: Heroes, fools, and the mad pursuit of life on earth, by Richard Conniff, is a delightful natural history story that toes the line of an adventure book. The theme of the text explores various historical characters — their personalities and their deeds — who discovered a wide variety of nature’s bounty across the globe and across time. Conniff expertly weaves personality traits and anecdotes about the people who seek new species — the species seekers — so that readers learn not only who discovered what, but why they were driven to wander in new countries and trek through jungles and mountains to find new natural treasures. But it’s the way in which Conniff presents these characters, their travels and discoveries, that injects a fast-paced adventurous feel to the book.

He leads with a French colonel in Napolean’s army who spots an unusual beetle as he was about to lead his men to attack a Spanish line during the Battle of Alcaniz in 1809. The colonel dismounts, collects the beetle and pins it to a prepared piece of cork attached to the inside of his helmet. The cork was there for just this purpose, and the colonel had trained his men to collect interesting insects for him. His love for describing new species was so was so great that even his enemies sent him unusual specimens.

From this departure point, the narrative’s pace skips along like a light-hearted summer trip; the kind where you explore a multi-country itinerary in a condensed time period.

Conserving the Everglades headwaters

A friend and colleague of mine is using his photographic and visual story-telling skills to help communicate the importance of Florida’s ranching heritage within the perspective of conservation. The video below is a taste of a larger project he’s working on with many others to conserve 150,000 acres of headwaters to the Everglades, and the ranchlands within them. The safeguarded area would create the Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge and Conservation Area. This is a unique project being pushed by some in Florida for the Fish and Wildlife Service to acquire the development rights of large ranches and other lands, while allowing the ranch owners and landowners to continue their traditional ranching or agricultural practices. By placing these lands in conservation easements, the Everglades Headwaters will be protected from further development too. (And in a state known for selling off its natural assets, this is a big deal.) These ranches aren’t used only by people and cattle — wildlife flock to them too.

My friend, photographer Carlton Ward, has been experimenting with camera traps on many of these ranches for the past few years. The result has been a series of fabulous photos of rare Florida panthers, large black bears and their cubs, bobcats and foxes. These critters travel across the ranchlands and use them as both home and a wildlife corridor. An amazing camera trap photo of Carlton’s, of a black bear exhaling a fine mist in a cool dawn, graced the cover of Audubon magazine this month, and more were printed within.

Watch this video for more information on the proposed Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge and Conservation Area. To see the Florida panther photo, and to learn more details, read this in-depth op/ed Carlton wrote for the St. Petersburg Times. More information and videos are available at NorthernEverglades.com.

Book Review: Shell Games, by Craig Welch

 

Cover of Shell Games, by Craig Welch

Shell Games, by Craig Welch, is hands-down one of the most interesting wildlife stories I’ve read in decades. (Admittedly, the subtitle, Rogues, Smugglers, and the Hunt for Nature’s Bounty, snookered me from the outset.) Welch is an environmental writer at the Seattle Times, and the book grew from stories he first reported for his newspaper about wildlife trafficking in the Puget Sound. The more he looked into it, the more convoluted the tales became. The result is Shell Games, a story of the shellfish industry in the Pacific Northwest, how it went horribly wrong, and the crazy, greedy characters that sped it on the path to illicit international markets.

The shellfish in question is a long-lived clam called a geoduck. They are the antithesis of the big, fuzzy charismatic megafauna that so many wildlife stories depend upon to generate interest. Geoducks are large burrowing clams that live immersed in mud on the ocean floor for decades, with only a fleshy siphon thrust up through the sediment. Through their long-necked siphon, they feed, defecate and expel gametes. They live up to a century and a half, all within their ocean floor burrow. So, why on earth should we care about a long-lived, sedentary clam that weighs a couple of pounds (whoppers weigh up to 15) and garners $6 to $12 per pound of its flesh?

How about, because they are dug up illegally by the thousands and smuggled out of the country to Asian markets — and because competition for them is so fierce that fishermen literally blow up each other’s boats, smugglers inform on their biggest competitors, and the industry garners millions and millions of black-market dollars. Criminal rings form to harvest these shellfish at night, with divers sucking air from secret lines drilled through the hull of ships to maintain clandestine secrecy. Some bandits even use re-breathers so that their illegal harvests can’t be detected by tell-tale bubbles at the surface. All this so that tasty geoduck can be served night after night in seafood restaurants, at home and abroad. Now that is pretty interesting!

Advice on science writing careers

Awhile back I was contacted by someone from a university (I think it was in the United Kingdom, shameful that I can’t fully recall!) who was putting together a career resource guide for science majors. She said their goal was to show the grads that there are career paths available other than pure research, and they were interested in my thoughts on science writing careers. (I still have no idea why she solicited my input. Probably something to do with Twitter.)  After warning her that I was still laying the groundwork for my career, and that I only had that point of view to offer, I sent some responses to her questions. I thought it would be fun to post them here too. I’m sure other science writers — especially those with longer and more storied careers than mine — would have given a different set of responses. So, fellow science writers, if you feel inclined please share your thoughts in the comments.

What made you want to become a science writer?

For me, it was first and foremost a love affair with words and writing. In a tight race for second place, it was a strong hunger to learn more about the world around me, and I think science is the best tool for that. As an undergraduate, I flitted back and forth between biology, anthropology, and geology with no clear commitment to studying any single discipline. (I graduated with a Bachelor of Design from a College of Architecture. Go figure. But that is another story.) After finishing school and working in the real world for four years I had, as we call it in the States, a quarter-life crisis about what I wanted to do with my time on earth. I felt a strong pull to look back into the sciences, and ultimately decided to unify my dabbling under the single lens of writing. I entered an interdisciplinary ecology master’s program that allowed me to study both ecology and, as the interdisciplinary portion, journalism. It’s selfish, but writing about science allows me to learn with each and every story I work on, and that aspect is the fuel that keeps me running. It also gives me a small mouthpiece to communicate about issues I feel the general public ought to know more about: ecology, biological diversity and the affect of human development upon wildlife and natural systems.

What path did you take to get there?

Guess I leap-frogged into this question in the previous one, so I’ll pick up the story thread post-graduation. After finishing up my master’s of science in interdisciplinary ecology in the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Florida, I worked in a science writing position at the campus’s natural history museum. Actually, it was the state of Florida’s natural history museum, and actually, I kind of talked my way in to the job half-way through my master’s program (which I did part time because I liked working at the museum so much). For two years, I translated research from a dozen and a half scientific disciplines into stories for general audiences. These were published on the museum’s website through a platform I helped create, in an insert for a museum’s member-edition of Natural History magazine, in our university research magazine and as press releases.

I am very interested in writing craft, so while at this job I spent a lot of time studying how to write for a truly general audience — people that may not have had a science class since high school, for example.

“Bullets, Bombs and Butterflies,” article in Wildlife in North Carolina

Last summer, I followed around a North Carolina State University PhD student in the woods of Fort Bragg as he monitored amphibians at ephemeral ponds. That adventure turned into this story about imperiled Carlona gopher frogs. But another story was waiting in the wings, as it were. His advisor, Nick Haddad of NC State, was working on helping other small creatures on the base. It turns out that Fort Bragg is home to the only known populations of St. Francis’ satyrs in the world. They are a sub-species of the Mitchell’s satyr, and were once thought to be extinct in the wild.

Soldiers at Fort Bragg practice exploding munitions in artillery impact zones within the base. Smalls-arms fire practice takes place in firing ranges that ring the larger artillery impact zones. Native wildlife love these zones, and this is where populations of St. Francis’ satyr was found. Haddad and Brian Ball, an endangered species biologist at Fort Bragg, believe that fires sparked in these zones mimic the native fire regimes of old, and maintain small populations of once-widespread native species.

You can read the full story on this butterfly here. (Best read in “two-pages continuous” mode in your PDF viewer.)