The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016

Foreword

IF, BY CHANCE, this anthology is read a century from now, what might those future readers make of it? First they would need to place the book in the context of its era, a pivotal one for all the world’s inhabitants, human and nonhuman alike. Perhaps they’ll recall that 2015 was the year our civilization established a grim new benchmark: the concentration of carbon dioxide in our planet’s atmosphere reached 400 parts per million for the first time in recorded history, a level not seen since at least two million years ago, during the Pliocene epoch. Earth might as well have been another world then. Our own species, Homo sapiens, had not yet evolved; the average global temperature was five to seven degrees warmer; sea levels were anywhere from 16 to 130 feet higher than today.

In what sort of world will those future readers dwell? That depends on us and the choices we make over the next decade. Will we finally end our dependence on fossil fuels and avoid disaster? Will we be praised for our foresight or cursed for our shortsighted selfishness? Will historians in the 22nd century condemn our reckless dismissal of the increasingly urgent warnings of our best scientists? This much is certain: if we fail to act, it won’t be because we didn’t understand the magnitude of the threat.

As I began writing this foreword, James Hansen, the eminent Columbia University climate scientist, discussed the crisis in a video released to coincide with the publication of a startling new paper. The paper, which Hansen wrote with 18 coauthors from around the world, makes for sobering reading. He and his colleagues argue that we are perilously close to irreversibly dooming our descendants to the most catastrophic effects of climate change. “Have we passed a point of no return?” he asked in the video. “I doubt it, but it’s conceivable.” He added: “We are in a position of potentially causing irreparable harm to our children, grandchildren, and future generations. This is a tragic situation because it is unnecessary. We could already be phasing out fossil fuel emissions.” All that’s lacking is a commitment to action.

Hansen, who first testified before Congress—in 1988—that we were on a dangerous path, said it’s very likely that the climate is changing even faster than computer models have been predicting. Specifically, the severity of future storms and the extent of sea-level rise later in this century may disastrously outpace current forecasts, according to his recent paper. If the seas rise by several meters—which can’t be ruled out—the world’s coastal cities would have to be abandoned. Imagine the loss of London, Shanghai, Tokyo, New York, Miami . . . And yet, given the enormous stakes, we haven’t made much progress since Hansen’s initial warnings nearly three decades ago. Greenhouse gas emissions are still rising, and so are the oceans.

Here’s one disheartening gauge of our society’s concern: How much time did the nation’s leading nightly news programs—on ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox—devote to the subject of climate change last year? It is, after all, the most pressing issue facing humanity. Without concerted international action, crops will fail; refugees will flee—are fleeing—flooded and drought-stricken lands; the extinction of species will accelerate. So, a big story, one worthy of serious, sustained reporting. There was even a religious angle when Pope Francis urged the world’s leaders to act. Care to hazard a guess now about the coverage? Twenty minutes a week? Two hours a month? The correct answer: 146 minutes—for the entire year, for all the networks combined. Not even 3 minutes a week. Quarterback Tom Brady’s “deflategate” imbroglio received twice as much airtime. Only one network, Fox, upped its “reporting” on the issue from the previous year—with a parade of talking heads denying the reality of climate change.

Fortunately, some of the country’s best journalists don’t ignore the most important story of our time. In “The Will to Change,” Robert Kunzig covers Germany’s effort to engineer “an epochal transformation” that will, if successful, slash the nation’s planet-warming carbon emissions by 40 percent in 2020 and by 80 percent in 2050. If a cloud-shrouded, industrialized northern European country can end its long use of coal and other fossil fuels, maybe the rest of the world can, too.

Should the United States, China, and other nations fail to follow Germany’s lead, there will be many more stories like Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Siege of Miami” and Gretel Ehrlich’s “Rotten Ice.” Large parts of Miami now regularly flood, Kolbert writes. The influx of salt water has started to threaten Florida’s freshwater aquifers. If the eight-inch rise in sea level over the last hundred years has caused such problems, what will be left of Miami at the century’s end, when seas will likely be at least three feet higher still? A significant part of that increase will come from Greenland’s melting glaciers, which every year add some 50 billion tons of water to the oceans. Ehrlich, who has spent many months living in Greenland, gives a firsthand account of what it’s like to travel by dogsled in the new, melting Arctic.

But Amy Stewart, this year’s guest editor, hasn’t limited her selections to climate change. She has given us a collection of stories that range far and wide, from the creation of a 15,000-page mathematical proof (Stephen Ornes’s “The Whole Universe Catalog”) to the life-threatening hazards of working in nail salons (Sarah Maslin Nir’s “Perfect Nails, Poisoned Workers”). Ornes’s piece is a rarity: an exciting story about mathematics. Only a few aging mathematicians understand the Brobdingnagian proof known as the Enormous Theorem, and there’s a real risk that they will die before passing on their expertise to a new generation of savants. Nir’s story features outstanding investigative reporting of a seemingly benign urban workplace. Manicurists—most of whom are poorly paid immigrants—are routinely exposed to a “toxic trio” of chemicals linked to miscarriages, cancer, and other painful maladies.

One of the other stories Amy has chosen—Kea Krause’s “What’s Left Behind”—describes how the solution to an intractable problem might lie in a most unexpected place: the heavily polluted waters of an abandoned copper mine. And then there’s Amy Leach’s luminous “The Modern Moose,” which will make the day of anyone who reads it. I don’t want to spoil the other surprises that you’ll find in this anthology—our guest editor will have more to say about her selections in the next few pages—so I’ll stop here, and invite all readers, present and future, to dive in.

With work on this year’s anthology now over, I’m already gathering candidates for the 2017 edition. Do your part! I try to read widely, but without the help of many thoughtful readers, writers, and editors from around the world, I would miss some very good stories. Nominate your favorites for next year’s anthology at http://timfolger.net/forums. I encourage writers to submit their own stories. The criteria for submissions and deadlines and the address to which entries should be sent can be found in the “news and announcements” forum on my website. Once again this year I’m offering an incentive to enlist readers to scour the nation in search of good science and nature writing: send me an article that I haven’t found, and if the article makes it into the anthology, I’ll mail you a free copy of next year’s edition. Maybe our next guest editor will sign it, too. I also encourage readers to use the forums to leave feedback about the new collection and to discuss all things scientific. The best way for publications to guarantee that their articles are considered for inclusion in the anthology is to place me on their subscription list, using the address posted in the “news and announcements” forum.

I’d like to thank Amy Stewart for selecting such a diverse collection of stories for this year’s anthology. As in years past, I’m very grateful to Naomi Gibbs and her colleagues at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who are responsible for the entire series of Best American anthologies. And finally, here’s to many more years spent on a habitable and fair world with my beauteous wife, Anne Nolan. If I had to live in a Pliocene climate with anyone, it would be with her.

TIM FOLGER