Category: Environment

Get Out Your Monocle! Exploring the Past in the Public Domain

Posted on by admin


Switzerland coverSwitzerland, by Sir Frank Fox. 

Originally published by Adam and Charles Black in 1914. Published by Project Gutenberg for Kindle and in other file types. Free.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

If you limit yourself to reading just
the ebooks available for free on the internet, as I have been doing
lately, you wind up inhabiting the world prior to 1923. American
copyright laws are complicated, but books published before that
magical year, 90 years prior to this one, are in the public domain. It's about as close to time travel as you can reasonably get.

To really immerse yourself in the era, you
can read the travelogues of Sir Frank Fox, a kind of early-twentieth
century Bill Bryson. An Australian journalist who spent much of his
life reporting for newspapers in London, he wrote books about the
natural history, geography, and ethnography of various lands, and
there are five of them—on Australia, Bulgaria, England, the Balkan
Peninsula, and Switzerland—available at Project Gutenberg for free.
For this review, I read Switzerland,
published in 1914.

As a rule, one of the risks of
inhabiting this pre-1923 world is drowning in a sea of unnecessary
words. Today the fashion is to write with extreme clarity,
projecting each scene into the reader's mind as if he or she were
watching a movie, and to snip out all excess verbiage. Not a hundred
years ago—reading Fox is a bit like codebreaking, with sentences
that sometimes encompass eleven or twelve clauses and words that
aren't used much anymore, like “waggish” and “beneficient.”
His very first chapter includes a hilariously lengthy Socratic
dialogue rebutting the idea that mountain people are more virtuous
and vigorous than lowlanders, owing to some magical quality of the
mountain air—not the introduction that a modern writer would use,
but curiously charming nevertheless, once you adjust your ear to his
style.

It's worth noting, too, that this
pre-1923 world as represented by its literature is a pretty
Anglocentric one. Fox's readers were British subjects, or former
British subjects, so perhaps it's no surprise that he is eager to
caricature “the Swiss race” and make his own sweeping
generalizations about why they are the way they are, while
simultaneously tearing down other sentimental depictions. And the
chapter on Swiss prehistory is threaded with regular assertions that
human society is on an ever-upward trend, with pathetic (yet noble)
nomads at the bottom and the 1914 European at the crest.

But it's an interesting experience,
revisiting the literary fashions and the inherited wisdom of a time
not so long ago. To the modern reader interested in geography and
ethnography, and not afraid to put on a monocle and go along for the
ride, Switzerland is
fun reading. The prehistory chapter includes a great summary of what
was known about the villages-on-stilts that fringed many Swiss lakes
in Celtic times. The chapter on local writers includes an anecdote
about the time Byron, visiting the fashionable salons along Lake
Geneva, attempted to scandalize polite society as he had in Britain,
and failed. Apparently the Swiss found him tedious. And the chapter
on the Alps, along with a compact treatise on the formation and decay
of mountains, includes this note:

“M.
Charles Rabot [a geographer and mountaineer] asserts that the
glaciers in Argentina are also retreating, and surmises, from data
perhaps not so well established, that there has been a general
retreat of glaciers during the last half of the nineteenth century
throughout Spitzenbergen, Iceland, Cetnral Asia, and Alaska. He
suggests that the cause is a present tendency towards equalisation
of the earth's temperature. Others more boldly affirm that the Swiss
glaciers, as well as other great ice masses existing on the globe,
are remnants of the last Ice Age, and are all doomed to disappear as
the cycle works round for the full heat of the next Warm Age. But the
disappearance, if it is to come, will not come quickly, and the doom
of ice-climbing in Switzerland is too remote a threat to disturb the
Alpinist.”

That passage falls with quite a
different meaning on our ears today, and one of the great pleasures
of reading Fox is looking for these harmonies and dissonances, the
moments that reveal how much has stayed the same and how much has
changed. If that sounds like fun to you, then there's a cache of free
ebooks waiting for you on Fox's Gutenberg author page.

Happy time-traveling.

 

 


HeadshotVeronique
Greenwood is a former staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. She writes
about everything from caffeine
chemistry to cold
cures to Jelly
Belly flavors, and her work has appeared in Scientific American,
TIME.com, TheAtlantic.com, and others. Follow her on Twitter
here.

 

Snowfallization

Posted on by Carl Zimmer

Review of "Sea Change," by Steve Ringman and Craig Welch, Seattle Times. Web site.

Review of "The Course of Their Lives," by Mark Johnson and Rick Wood, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Web site.

Sea change photo small

Last year on Download the Universe, Veronique Greenwood wrote a review of a story about an avalanche. Journalists write about avalanches fairly regularly, but this piece, called "Snowfall" was different. It was a one-man-band of text, video, maps, and unfolding photos. The story attracted millions of readers and earned scads of awards, including a Pulitzer. And it has ushered in an era of big, ambitious online packages of newspaper reporting. Not surprisingly, science offers some of the best stories for the Snowfall approach.

One recent example is "Sea Change," published last month by the Seattle Times. Photographer Steve Ringman and reporter Craig Welch tackled the immense but little-known disaster that is ocean acidification. The carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere doesn't just warm the atmosphere. It also lowers the pH of sea water, making the chemistry of the ocean dangerous for some species. Oyster companies are already feeling the effects of the dropping pH, and if we continue to acidify the oceans at our current rate, the ecological effects could be tremendous.

Here's a nine-minute video from the project:

The package Ringman and Welch have created has three main text stories. It starts with an overview of acidification research, which is followed by two close-ups on fisheries that are being affected–namely, oysters and crabs. (Both are economically important to the Seattle Times's local readers.) Welch reports the stories in the classic mode of environmental journalism, mixing together in-person reporting in far-flung locations with explanations of the research that revealed the scale of the problem. The photos are impressive, the videos are well made, and the visualizations–which try to convey how big the phenomenon of ocean acidification is–are fairly successful.

If you've already read "Snowfall," the presentation of "Sea Change" doesn't feel like a bolt out of the blue. But that just shows how much our expectations have shifted. Just look back seven years to a similar series called "Altered Oceans" from the Los Angeles Times, to see what I mean. The authors, Kenneth Weiss and Usha Lee McFarling, won a Pulitzer for their efforts, which were even more ambitious than "Sea Change." Rather than focus on one way we're ravaging the oceans, they set out to create a picture of all of them, from pollution to climate change.

Although it came out in 2006, the "Altered Oceans" package of stories holds up well today. But the packaging is showing its age. The fancy front page takes you to five stories that are nothing but text. There are also animations and photos, but they're squirreled away in slow-loading pages. After looking at one of these pages, I discovered there was no way to find my way back to the front page again. Seven years of programming advances made "Snowfall" possible–and now raise our expectations for such ambitious online pieces. (Welch recently discussed the making of "Sea Change" with the Columbia Journalism Review.)

Cadaver small

From the mountaintops of "Avalanche" and the open oceans of "Sea Change," we take a claustrophobic trip indoors with "The Course of Their Lives." It's a four-part series from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel about medical students dissecting the cadavers of people who donated their bodies to science. There's no news here, no warning of an impending disaster. Instead, reporter Mark Johnson and photographer Rick Wood faithfully follow students through a remarkable experience–getting to take apart another human being, down to the brain and guts. Wood and Johnson both bring an emotional sensitivity to the project that makes reading it a deeply moving, human experience.

While I would heartily recommend "The Course of Their Lives," I would also point out some shortcomings. I don't want to belittle the piece by talking about them; they're worth talking about as a way to ponder the kinds of decisions that newspapers make when they create Snowfall-esque stories about science.

Some of the bells and whistles attached to "The Course of Their Lives" don't add much. The videos are mostly of talking heads, who sometimes speak stiltedly. Distilling people's words down in compelling written prose remains a superior technology to a video camera that's simply switched on.

I was also underwhelmed by the interactive anatomical diagrams that went along with the stories. They're meant to illustrate the lessons that the students learned about the cadavers, organ by organ. But who actually needs to see lungs light up on a diagram of a body to know what lungs are? The powers of visualization, both online and in apps, are spectacular. (My favorite anatomical example remains this ebook about Leonardo Da Vinci's anatomical sketchbooks.) But there's no point in using those powers simply to check off a box in a to-do list. It's another lesson that we should respect the technology of prose.

Ironically, the prose itself in "The Course of Their Lives" also felt a bit antiquated. American newspaper journalism long ago settled on a certain style. The paragraphs became short, and the sentences shorter. The words needed to be plain and serviceable. There were perfectly good reasons for this approach–but a lot of them had to do with the physical properties of printed newspapers. Stories couldn't be made of densely packed paragraphs, for example, because editors would need the freedom to cut off sections of stories at the last minute to make them fit their available space.

These were good reasons, but they had some odd consequences. Along with their standard fare of short news pieces, newspapers would also prepare a few massive, long-form pieces–Pulitzer-bait, essentially–but these pieces often retained the staccato structure of short news stories. In these sprawling pieces, that style read strangely. And once New Journalism's masters like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese turned magazine features into a new art form, the adherence to the old style in newspapers became even more peculiar.

Today, as newspapers and magazines shift online, that style has grown even more out of date. If you read stories from publications that got their start online, such as the Atavist, you never find the staccato style of old newspaper stories. There's no need to adhere to it.

Thus "Sea Change" and "The Course of Our Lives" serve as illustrations of journalism in transition–created by people trying to figure out how to bring the best of the old world of newspapers and leave the rest behind.

 

(Photos: Top-Steve Ringman, Bottom-Rick Wood)


Zimmer author photo squareCarl Zimmer writes the "Matter" column  for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including Evolution: Making Sense of Life.

 

Word Rising: In Long-Form Journalism, How Long Is Too Long?

Posted on by Virginia Hughes


Ackley-prod-01-LUprising, by Phil McKenna. Published by Matter, $.99. Visit Matter for details about formats, purchasing, and membership.

Review by Virginia Hughes

In his State of the Union address last month, President Obama made several nods to climate change. To reduce America’s dependence on oil — and the carbon emissions that come from burning it — he pushed for a bigger investment in clean sources of energy, like wind, solar and natural gas. “The natural gas boom has led to cleaner power and greater energy independence,” Obama said. “We need to encourage that.”

Thanks to advances in a technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, natural gas production in the U.S. grew by 8 percent in 2011, the sixth consecutive year of growth, leading the International Energy Agency to call this “a golden age of gas.” When burned, natural gas emits half as much carbon dioxide as coal does. The Obama administration and some prominent scientists — including Obama’s pick for new energy secretary — say natural gas could be used as a “bridge fuel,” curbing our coal consumption until greener alternatives are ready for primetime.

But what if natural gas isn’t so clean?

That’s the question artfully raised in Uprising, the fourth installment from Matter, an online platform for long-form science journalism. Uprising, like Matter’s earlier stories, presents an engaging narrative with juicy characters doing surprising science at a length of around 6,000 words. Unlike the other Matter stories, though, I’m not sure this one needed more than the 3,000 words of a typical magazine feature.

In Uprising, journalist Phil McKenna tells the story of two unlikely collaborators — Bob Ackley, a big-car-loving libertarian with decades of experience as a gas company technician, and Nathan Phillips, a liberal tree-hugging professor — and their wacky adventures cruising the streets of Boston to map natural gas leaks.

When methane, the primary ingredient of natural gas, leaks into the atmosphere (rather than being burned) it’s a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But nobody knows exactly how much gas is leaking. That’s where Ackley and Phillips come in.

Uprising tells why Ackley and Phillips started to work together, and what they’ve discovered so far: In a paper published last month in Environmental Pollution, they reported finding 3,356 leaks in Boston, including six where gas levels were high enough to cause an explosion. Their study included a city map tracking the leaks, which Matter recreated as a striking black-and-white grid with swashes of red and yellow to indicate the leaks. (And although the study is behind a pay wall, Matter made it somewhat open-access by linking to a Google Doc of the study’s full data set.)

The problem, for me, is that it’s unclear how (or whether) this single study contributes to the greater international debate about natural gas and climate that McKenna did such a great job setting up. The study focused on the number of leaks, rather than their volume, so it can’t say anything definitive about whether natural gas really is worse for the climate than coal.

It’s not that these investigations don’t matter: We learn that Ackley and others are finding similarly frightening numbers of leaks in other cities, such as Manhattan and Washington, D.C., and that some of this data is driving a major lawsuit against a utility company. It’s entirely plausible that these leaks will put a crimp on the natural gas boom. But the story doesn’t say much about how the wider energy community has reacted to this data. It didn’t include any skeptical voices, or any comments from scientists or policy makers who still believe in natural gas as a bridge fuel.

I was expecting the story to answer the initial question posed: What if natural gas isn’t so clean? And when I didn’t get that answer, I was disappointed, in a way that I might not have been had the story been shorter. The view, for me, wasn’t quite worth the climb.

 


Ginny-headshot Virginia Hughes is a science writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Nature, Popular Science, and Slate, and her blog Only Human is part of National Geographic magazine’s Phenomena. Follow her on Twitter.

Snow Fall: A Gorgeous Ebook Comes to Life on the Web

Posted on by Carl Zimmer


Snow fall coverSnow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek. By John Branch. The New York Times and Byliner.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

On Wednesday night, a mysterious new article appeared on
the New York Times site. News of it began to leak out via Twitter, and people who headed over to read the first chapter of Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, an account of a backcountry ski run turned deadly, found a piece not only grippingly reported but
physically gorgeous, laced with soaring animations of the mountain, a looping GIF of the wind over the snow, and haunting audio and video captured by the
survivors. Here's a sample of the reaction, from Atlantic correspondent Yoni Applebaum:

 

By Thursday morning, the rest of the story–five further sections in all–had been posted, and we'd learned that Snow Fall, a groundbreaking example of
journalism enhanced by the web, would appear without multimedia features in the Sunday edition of the NYTimes and be the first ebook released
through a new collaboration between the New York Times and Byliner.

I've read the story and examined both the Web and ebook versions, and I'm here to tell you: buy the ebook if you'd like to carry the text around with you, but please, please do yourself the favor of reading it online.

The story starts on the back side of Cowboy Mountain in Washington. Two days' powder lie thick over the landscape, and
professional skier Elyse Saugstad and a group of 15 other ski industry professionals and local experts have just joyfully begun the descent of an
out-of-bounds run named Tunnel Creek. Standing in a copse of old-growth trees, Saugstad looks uphill and sees something that should not be there: a
two-story-high wall of snow. Seconds later, she and an unknown number of others are buried in a river of ice that, if it had not already crushed them to
death, would suffocate them within minutes.

These skiers and boarders weren't noobies. Over and over again, you hear, in the survivors' own voices in the embedded videos, that this was a dream team
of backcountry skiers with decades and decades of experience between them. They would have known if it had been unsafe to go. But in meticulous reporting
John Branch gently teases out the new technologies that have given out-of-bounds skiers enough of a boost in confidence that avalanche
deaths have leapt in recent years, along with the cultural effects—the politesse, the bravado of even smart skiers—that clicked together like the parts of a deadly machine in
Tunnel Creek.

The comparison that immediately comes to mind is with Young Men and Fire, the last book written by Norman Maclean. Maclean's 1992 masterpiece is a reconstruction of the
Mann Gulch Fire, a disastrous 1949 blowup in Montana that consumed 12 smokejumpers, the elite fire-fighting parachutists of the Forest Service, in less than 10
minutes. As I watched the animations laying out the tracks each skier took, and watched the helmet cam videos of Saugstad and others taken just before, and
after, the mountain fell, I thought, “This is what Young Men and Fire would have looked like, had the smokejumpers had video on their helmets.”

If the Byliner version, which has only text and a few photos, were the only version, I'd be crowing over it. But having seen the beauty and skillfulness of
the web version, I have to wonder why the New York Times did not release Snow Fall through The Atavist, which has made it their business
to tell multimedia stories in ebook form. Perhaps there's a business question in play here. After all, the Atavist offers stripped-down Kindle versions of their stories, which sometimes climb up Amazon's best-seller charts. For now, there may just not be enough demand for elaborate programming for these long-form features. And since the Times has already built Snow Fall an online home–and, as of Friday morning, sold most of the advertising
slots in it to Sotheby's–they may see the ebook simply as a way to skim a little more cream off what they've already done, without investing too much more work.

That's a bit of a pity. But at least we'll always have the Web.

 


HeadshotVeronique
Greenwood is a staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. She writes
about everything from caffeine
chemistry to cold
cures to Jelly
Belly flavors, and her work has appeared in Scientific American,
TIME.com, TheAtlantic.com, and others. Follow her on Twitter
here.

Evolving Fish, A Dying Sea, And A New Genre: Digital Comics Science Journalism

Posted on by Carl Zimmer

Symbolia coverSymbolia. First issue free. Subsequent individual issues $1.99. Annual subscription $11.99. Available as an iPad app or pdf; other devices to come. See web site for details. 

Comics first gained respectability as art, then as storytelling, and more recently as comics journalism. Joe Sacco's celebrated Safe Area Goradze, for example, showed how comics journalism could deliver powerful portrait of life during wartime. Published in 2001, Safe Area Goradze was the product of a pre-ebook age, the sort of printed work that you might buy as a deluxe hardbound edition and display on a shelf. A decade later, comics journalists are increasingly giving up paper and going digital.

A new example of this new genre is Symbolia, a magazine that released its first issue this week. It's been generating a good deal of buzz, with write-ups in venues like the Columbia Journalism Review, Poynter, and Publisher's Weekly. I decided to check it out and discovered a creation that was fit for reviewing at Download the Universe. That's because three out of the five stories in the first edition are about science.

Continue reading “Evolving Fish, A Dying Sea, And A New Genre: Digital Comics Science Journalism” →