WILD THOUGHTS FROM WILD PLACES
By David Quammen
Scribner, 304 pages, $24
David Quammen, author of “The Song of the Dodo,” is known as a naturalist, as well as a wanderer to and travel writer about far-flung places. Although some of the essays in “Wild Thoughts From Wild Places” (mostly reprints of his celebrated “Natural Acts” column for Outside magazine) are dispatches from suitably distant locales (for example, an outlying moor in aboriginal Tasmania; Aru, a remote island off the coast of New Guinea; the Futaleufu, a little-known river in southwestern Chile), the writing in this miscellany makes clear that Quammen’s real appetite is not that of the inveterate traveler, who yearns for exoticism and unceasing novelty. On the contrary, Quammen’s fascination is with how humans and the other species who inhabit the globe define for themselves a sense of place.
In “Point of Attachment,” one of the most compelling essays in this volume, for example, Quammen considers the natural history of the barnacle. He acknowledges that “Barnacles, to the undiscerning eye, are as boring as rivets.” Although these crustaceans, relatives of lobsters and crabs and not the bivalve mollusks they more closely resemble, spend much of their lives rooted in one place, at “other times, barnacle life is punctuated with adventurous travel, phantasmagorical transformations, valiant struggles, fateful decisions, and eating.” The central life mystery of these hermaphroditic creatures–species that, Quammen notes with a mixture of awe and incredulity, occupied the professional attentions of Charles Darwin for a full eight years–is why a leggy larva, which may in a few weeks travel as far as 500 miles, chooses to attach itself in the spot at which it will spend the rest of its years. As Quammen explains, the decision is both irreversible and often fatal: The location a barnacle chooses may lead to a long life, or it may be compromised by premature death from “predation, competition, starvation, desiccation, sunstroke, and all the other sorts of dire hardship by which natural selection . . . adjudicates evolutionary success and failure.” He concludes the essay where he began, observing that the question of why barnacles attach themselves where they do remains unanswered.
Quammen’s fascination with barnacles reflects his consistent preoccupation with the interaction of species and place, from the white tigers bred to attract tourist dollars at the Cincinnati zoo to the extraordinary adaptiveness of what Quammen calls the “superdoves” of 46th Street–pigeons that he encounters in Manhattan but that “waddle through parks and piazzas on five continents.” Essays on both these species mirror Quammen’s further preoccupation with the consequences of human intervention in natural ecosystems. The white tiger, he instructs, is in fact but a genetic mutation bred to bring Cincinnati zoo visitors, and not an endangered species at all. Their popularity as a tourist attraction leads him to question the value of zoos, which, he worries, “may actually undermine the continued existence of what they purport to celebrate.” Zoos, he offers, may permit people “carelessly to believe that the Bengal tiger . . . is alive and well because they have seen it.” But they haven’t seen it, he insists; “they’ve seen taxidermy on the hoof.”
Feral pigeons, the much-maligned denizens of Manhattan’s humanmade canyons, similarly invoke both Quammen’s praise and worry. They inspire him because of their adaptability: Neither wild nor domesticated, they are faster than other pigeons, able to eat more widely and travel farther, blessed with keener senses and a more robust sexual appetite than other birds, and succeed “in living at high population densities in close proximity to people who despise them.” Yet these superdoves elicit his concern as well. These birds have relentlessly replaced truly wild populations, and they have done so in response to patterns of human habitation. This raises for Quammen the “troubling but real possibility that the heavy presence of Homo sapiens across all the world’s landscapes, our irrepressible self-interest, and our well-meaning management decisions may yield a global menagerie of diminished, tractable creatures.”
It would be a mistake, however, to think that Quammen is concerned only with preserving wild species. The essays collected in “Wild Thoughts” also constitute a paean to the ability of humans to root themselves and live in harmony with a place. For all of his globe-trotting, Quammen explores the character of his own connection to Montana, as symbolized for him by the trout, whose presence “in a body of water is a discrete ecological fact that nevertheless signifies certain things,” specifically “a particular complex of biotic and chemical and physical factors,” which he describes in loving detail. He writes admiringly of Gilbert White, the author of a famed book of English natural history, who lived most of his life in–and minutely recorded the ecology of–the village where he was born. Darwin’s preoccupation with barnacles is also, for Quammen, a metaphor for that thinker’s life since, after his return from his Beagle journey, Darwin settled in the hamlet of Down and virtually never left it again.
Inevitably in such a collection, some selections are more satisfying than others. Some, like the 1987 essay on the men who, at a remote Montana location, wait to receive orders to launch ICBMs, have lost some of their punch with changes in world events. Others, like his tribute to the existential virtues of telemark skiing, will appeal only to the most dedicated practitioners of that sport. In addition, as is woefully true of too many new books, the editing is too often sloppy (“this particularly day,” for instance.) But these are minor complaints. A half hour spent with Quammen–who writes with beauty, intelligence and verve, a writer who always instructs but wears his learning lightly–seldom disappoints. “Wild Thoughts” is, in a phrase, a lovely book.
