Out of Eden: Questions & Answers

What is your book about?

Foremost, it's about the conservation issues posed by alien species: how the increasing movement of species globally threatens the many, small pockets of biological diversity around the world, and diminishes the ecological uniqueness of any given place. One scientist I spoke to referred to it as the "McDonaldsization" of nature.

At another level, the book is a sort of Richard Attenborough documentary about natural science: what ecologists are learning about how nature works by studying alien species, and the philosophical challenges involved in doing fieldwork. One scientist who read a final draft of the book said I'd manage to capture the "bloodiness" of science — by which he meant its inner workings, the amount of human effort and interpretation that goes into turning raw data into stable facts. The sight of that blood unnerved him, but I took it as a compliment.

The book is also very much a travel story — an outward one, through a physical environment of weird, on-the-move creatures and changing landscapes, but also an inward one, through metaphysical, even spiritual questions about what we want from nature and our place on Earth. And it's a human story. In one way or another, all the characters in the book are asking themselves what "home" means: where and how to create one for themselves, and how various biological invaders affect that search.

I tried to weave all these themes into a personal narrative. The result, I hope, is an engaging read.

Are you for alien species, or against them?

Well, I'm for them, insofar as I think we can learn a lot from them. By studying what happens when new species enter an environment, scientists have reconsidered many basic assumptions about how ecosystems allegedly work. It turns out that nature is a lot more resilient than we thought, and the ecological rules at play are much less orderly than expected. These insights in turn present the rest of us with some very challenging questions about what we expect and require from nature and how best to achieve it.

That said, alien species do throw into relief the plight of the world's native species — the rare flower pollinated only by one kind of long-beaked bird, or the albino cricket found only in a lava-carved cave in Hawaii. Those organisms represent a timescale — natural selection played out over thousands of years — that vastly exceeds our own individual time on Earth, and that's a timescale worth preserving, I think, if for no other reason than the aesthetics of it: the novelty and strange beauty of these organisms; the fact that they came into being with no help from us, though they now require our artfulness to survive; and the fact that they help give a unique texture to every region of the world. They're like priceless art, and I'm a fan of the arts.

What is the Godzilla of introduced species? What is the organism we ought to know more about?

The brown tree snake, originally from Australia, poses a real threat. Since it first arrived on Guam some fifty years ago, it has managed to eat virtually every bird on the island, and has driven two bird species utterly extinct from Earth. Lately it has begun appearing in Hawaii, which is home to 40 percent of the nation's endangered birds. If it becomes established, it could deal a serious blow to the native birds — which have already been hit hard by introduced avian malaria. Unfortunately, the snake is so good at staying hidden that decades could pass before scientists know for sure that it's living in Hawaii — by which point it will be too late to stop it. The Florida Everglades may have a similar problem now with Asian pythons and boa constrictors; so many have been imported and set free in South Florida that they now live and reproduce outdoors there. A few years ago someone caught a 22-foot python that had been living under a home in suburban Miami.

That said, some of the worst aliens are quite familiar to us. Pet housecats and feral cats, which are originally native to the Near East and Africa, already do tremendous damage to the nation's bird population, but we don't usually consider them an "alien species" problem. The grazing and trampling of livestock, which are likewise introduced species, are a bigger threat to native plants globally than the more exotic alien species one might conjure up. By the same measure, much of what counts as alien-species damage — by introduced insects and pathogens, for instance — is done to our lawns, gardens, and crops, which are themselves made up almost entirely of alien species. We've developed such close, dependent relationships with so many introduced species that we sometimes forget what we mean by "alien."

Personally, lately, my biggest alien-species worry is the virus responsible for the avian flu in Asia. If it manages to mutate into a form that can spread directly between humans, instead of simply between poultry and humans, it could quickly jump across borders, with frightening consequences.

Where did you travel for your research?

My first year working on the book was pretty much all travel: four months or so in Hawaii, on all the islands; a month on Guam (home to the world's biggest Kmart!); about three months in Australia, mostly in Tasmania; a couple of weeks in the Everglades and South Florida. Over the years, I also spent several weeks total with marine biologists in and around San Francisco Bay, Chesapeake Bay, and Martha's Vineyard.

The most unusual stretch of research was probably the two weeks I spent aboard an oil tanker traveling from San Francisco to Alaska. I was following a pair of biologists, originally from Maryland, who were studying what lives and travels in the ballast-water tanks of oceangoing ships. It was a little unnerving; I'd never really been to sea before, and we were about 200 miles off the Pacific coast. There's nothing to think about out there except how vast the sea is, and how small you are.

Of all the places I went, Tasmania was probably my favorite. Hawaii was beautiful, certainly, but there was something otherworldly about Tasmania: partly because it's so green and empty; partly because folks drive on the opposite side of the road; partly because I'd been traveling for several months by then, so everything in Tasmania looked simultaneously foreign and entirely familiar. It felt like the antipodes, like I'd fallen down a hole through the Earth and come out the other side. It's a magical place. Like a lot of my material, though, I had to cut most of the Tasmania stuff from the final manuscript; it now takes up only about three pages late in the book.

What's the strangest thing you saw?

A carnivorous inchworm, Eupethicia orichloris — one of about two dozen carnivorous caterpillars that are found only in Hawaii. I saw it in a laboratory, under a microscope; it stood up on one end and looked sort of like a miniature green escalator. Its tail end had these bristly hairs, and if a fly or bug touched them, the front end of the inchworm — which was equipped with clawlike legs — snapped around and grabbed the fly and started munching. The creature ate several flies during the fifteen minutes or so that I watched; it was gripping entertainment, better than the Crocodile Hunter! Hawaii, because it's been evolutionary isolated for so long, is filled with unusual species like carnivorous inchworms that are found nowhere but there.

Actually, reading back through my book, I see that there are few of the usual "charismatic megafauna" in it — no big cuddly animals, not even all that many colorful birds. Mostly I spent time with the small stuff: the inchworms, the cave-dwelling crickets, the sea slugs, the microscopic marine invertebrates, the microbes that live only in NASA's Spacecraft Assembly Facility in Pasadena. It's like a Lost World down there, rich and barely explored, in part because scientists have a hard time getting the necessary funding to explore it; there's more interest in Florida jaguars than, say, the subvisible copepods in Tampa Bay.

For exactly that reason, I felt that it was important to enter that world myself and reveal it to the reader. Biological diversity is all about the details, the texture of the fabric of life; it's a texture so fine that most of us can never access it, we may live our whole lives without grasping its extent, or even knowing it's there. Likewise, when biologists talk about how the spread of alien species eats away at biological diversity, often that transformation plays out on these impalpably fine scales. Again, a person might never notice. Fifty percent of the earthworms in American soil are introduced — can you detect a difference? But I like to think there's value in the texture alone, even if there is no large-scale, practical value. In Out of Eden, I wanted to bring that texture to life, if only so that somebody else besides me and a few scientists might glimpse those intimate details.

What do you feel is the largest myth or misconception about nature?

We tend to think about nature and people as two separate, incompatible worlds. Nature is defined as the wilderness where we aren't; if we touch it or interact with it, it's not natural anymore. Some years ago the writer Bill McKibben took this logic to its extreme: now that human-induced global warming has touched even the most remote parts of the planet, nature, he argued, has ended.

If alien species demonstrate anything, it's the opposite: nature is alive and well, and can thrive even — perhaps especially — in the places where we live. Ecological invasion is sometimes referred to as "biological pollution" or a "green cancer," but those are bad analogies. Traditional pollution kills environments, just as cancer kills people. Ecological invasion doesn't kill ecosystems, it just changes them into other ecosystems that may be less valuable or interesting to people. To put it differently, all biological invasions are natural, whether they occurred with our aid or without it. But not all invasions are desirable.

As I traveled around and spent time with various ecologists, I made a point of asking again and again, "So what?" Why not just let everything loose, spread the same plants and animals around the world, homogenize Earth's habitats, and be done with it? What's the harm in that? I heard many answers. Alien species can spread diseases, like the West Nile virus, and can threaten rare or endangered native species, as Hawaii has discovered. But the one common objection was a more personal one: When you start seeing kudzu and dandelions and squirrels everywhere you go on Earth, the world becomes a less interesting place. As one scientist said to me, "We are increasingly dealing with a number of species that are associated with humans throughout the world. If that's what you want to live with — a small suite of a dozen, maybe two dozen species — then you can live with that, I suppose. You can argue that biodiversity has a utilitarian value. But it's an aesthetic issue for me."

That surprised me. I'd expected a different sort of answer: That alien species are bad because they're bad for nature. It's true that some invasions do spell trouble for some native species. But really, invasions are bad — or can be bad, in some cases — because they're bad for us, because they change the nature around us and that we're accustomed to. That may sound like a horribly solipsistic way to think about the issue, but there's no avoiding it. The fact is, we could spread all the alien species around the world, and nature wouldn't care. Only we care — which is reason enough for us to care.

How did you get interested in writing about science?

Like a lot of people, I sort of stumbled into what I do. I went to college thinking I was going to study either English or math, and ended up splitting the difference: the history and philosophy of science. The fact was, I liked science, and in some cases I was actually OK at it, but ultimately I liked reading and writing about it more than actually doing it. Also, for some reason, the especially hard required classes for science majors seemed to be scheduled for 8 a.m., which was a challenging hour for me. That right there told me I'd be better off in a humanities career.

Midway through college I took a year off, moved to New York, and got an internship at Harper's. That got me hooked on journalism, magazines especially; and the kinds of pieces Harper's was running then — great reported essays by Michael Pollan and Chuck Siebert, among others — embodied the kind of writing I wanted to do. After college I feel into a great job at The Sciences magazine, where I stayed on as an editor for a few years, and later at the New York Times Magazine. I began Out of Eden in 1996, drifted in the freelance wilderness for awhile, then worked at the American Museum of Natural History, doing writing and editing for a multimedia science-news unit; that was very cool. Now I edit half-time for Discover magazine, and write for myself half-time.

To be honest, I don't think of myself as a "science writer," just a writer — though clearly I do seem to gravitate toward science-related topics. Scientists can be interesting people to hang around: they're thoughtful, often articulate, and are passionate about whatever it is they study, whether that thing is the Big Bang or the lifecycle of barnacles. The challenge for me is to capture that passion in words, so that a layperson can appreciate and enjoy it. In the end, science isn't so different from English or math: it's a kind of language, with its own rules and shaded meanings, and it's left to the writer to translate.

Was "Out of Eden" really an odyssey?

More than I ever expected! Beginning to end, the book took about nine years to write. I started officially in 1996, but I'd done a little research already for a New York Times Magazine article I wrote in 1994 about the brown tree snake. And I'd been casually collecting newspaper clippings about alien species for three or four years before that.

At one point, when I was doing a lot of driving for reporting trips, I started listening to Homer's Odyssey on audiotape: the Fagles translation, read by Ian McKellan — really gripping! Pretty soon all sorts of odd correspondences began popping out of my notes. For instance, in the Hawaii portion of the book, there's a sequence where I'm crawling underground with an entomologist, who's telling me about his research on Oliarus polyphemus, a tiny, albino insect that lives in lava-carved tunnels. In The Odyssey, Polyphemus is the name of the giant, one-eyed Cyclops who traps Odysseus and his crew in a cave. The men escape by poking out the Cyclops's eye with a stick; later, Odysseus travels into the underworld and communes with a bunch of ghosts, including the ghost of Polyphemus. It's an emotional scene, and I tried to carry some of that energy into my description of the lava-tube Polyphemus. Strangely, when I read back through The Odyssey recently, I found no mention of Polyphemus in the underworld--I must have heard it wrong.

The Cyclops shows up again later in my book, in the marine-biology section. I spend a lot of time in the company of these microscopic shrimp-like creatures called copepods; they're native to marine environments around the world, and they're increasingly being moved around the world in the ballast water of oceangoing ships. Physically, copepods have one big eye on what passes for their foreheads, and have scientific names like Cyclops, Macrocyclops, Megacyclops, and even Metacyclops. Actually, copepod is a Greek word meaning "oar-footed"; these critters basically scrabble at the water with their ten tiny legs, and they make these incredible journeys up and down in the water column every night. They're like Odysseus and Polyphemus all in one. Now, through our own travels, they're making global odysseys of their own.

This might be the place to mention that I grew up in Syracuse, New York. Back in the nineteenth century, some clerk in a land office had a fetish for Greek history, and he handed out impressive names to various villages and towns on the New York State map: Syracuse, Rome, Ithaca, Troy, Homer. In high school, our drama director wrote a musical about a girl, Helen, who gets kidnapped by a cult; her boyfriend, Dizzy — short for Odysseus, naturally — travels from Ithaca to Troy and back again to rescue her. I played one of Dizzy's sidekicks; I met my end at Circe's Café, where I ate too much, sang a song about gluttony, and was turned into a pig.

What's your next project?

Staying home. I got married about two years ago, and for the entire time my wife has known me — going on five years now — our lives have orbited around this book, evenings, weekends, vacations, you name it. So we're both looking forward to a break. In a few months, when she gets bored of me hanging around the house, maybe I'll start something new: a book about time, maybe, or the beginning of the universe. Something short and quick.