Mary Ellen Hannibal - Citizen scientist: searching for heroes and hope in an age of extinction

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MARY ELLEN HANNIBAL is a longtime environmental journalist and the author, most recently, of The Spine of the Continent: The Race to Save Americas Last, Best Wilderness. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, and Elle, among many others. She is an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow, a recipient of the National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Award, and a recipient of Stanford Universitys Knight-Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism. Currently a Stanford Media Fellow, she is a frequent speaker connecting the scientific community to the concerned public. She lives in San Francisco.

MaryEllenHannibal.com

ALSO BY MARY ELLEN HANNIBAL

The Spine of the Continent: The Race to Save Americas Last, Best Wilderness

Evidence of Evolution

Leaves & Pods

Good Parenting Through Your Divorce

Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction
Copyright 2016 by Mary Ellen Hannibal

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hannibal, Mary Ellen, author.
Title: Citizen scientist : searching for heroes and hope in an age of
extinction / Mary Ellen Hannibal.
Description: New York : The Experiment, 2016. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016016409 (print) | LCCN 2016029859 (ebook) | ISBN
9781615192434 (cloth) | ISBN 9781615192441 (Ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Endemic plants--Conservation. | Endemic
animals--Conservation. | Introduced organisms--Control. | Extinction
(Biology) | Plants--Extinction.
Classification: LCC QK86.A1 H365 2016 (print) | LCC QK86.A1 (ebook) | DDC
576.8/4--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016016409

ISBN 978-1-61519-243-4
Ebook ISBN 978-1-61519-244-1

Jacket and text design by Sarah Smith
Author photograph by Richard Morgenstein

Manufactured in the United States of America
Distributed by Workman Publishing Company, Inc.
Distributed simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen and Son Ltd.
First printing August 2016
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

You cant step in the same river twice.

Heraclitus

The past is never dead. Its not even past.

William Faulkner

NOTES

Introduction:

Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 7.

Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: Norton, 2014), 121.

Chapter One:

Stephen Larsen and Robin Larsen, A Fire in the Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 226.

Personal communication with Rich Mooi, curator of invertebrate zoology, California Academy of Sciences.

.

Vanishing Fauna, special issue, Science 345, no. 6195 (July 25, 2014).

.

John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 9. I love this book. It is fascinating and also beautifully illustrated.

I wrote briefly about Linnaeus and Mount Ararat in my previous book, The Spine of the Continent. If you happen to have read that book and noticed the repetition, thank you, for one thing. I just think its worth telling again.

Janet Browne drily notes that the coup de grace for the Ark was delivered in 1777, in an obscure zoological track by Eberhardt Zimmermann, who pointed out that the pair of lions would have handily eaten the pair of sheep posthaste before turning to the rest of the herbivores on board the Ark. Janet Browne, The Secular Ark (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 25.

First published as Journal and Remarks in 1839.

E. O. Wilson, From So Simple a Beginning: Darwins Four Great Books (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).

John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez (New York: Penguin Books, 1941), 51.

Browne.

Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, 329. Wilson, From So Simple a Beginning.

Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 199.

The term was coined in 1868 by the English biologist Thomas Huxley.

.

Chapter Two:

New York: St. Martins, 2016.

Barnosky and Hadly, 1819.

Barnosky and Hadly, 19.

Marc A. Carrasco, Anthony D. Barnosky, and Russell W. Graham, Quantifying the Extent of North American Mammal Extinction Relative to the Pre-Anthropogenic Baseline, PLOS ONE 4, no. 12 (December 16, 2009).

Stephen R. Palumbi and Anthony R. Palumbi, The Extreme Life of the Sea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 129. The Palumbis describe the otters air bubbles as a shimmering silver cloak that warps and twists as it swims.

David Helvarg, The Golden Shore: Californias Love Affair with the Sea (New York: St. Martins, 2013), 47.

Josie Iselin, An Ocean Garden: The Secret Life of Seaweed (New York: Abrams, 2014), 34, 69.

Stephen R. Palumbi and Carolyn Sotka, The Death and Life of Monterey Bay: A Story of Revival (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2011), 114.

Earthwatch is a scientific research institution that routinely uses citizens to help undertake research. Since people pay for the opportunity, Earthwatch doesnt quite fit the definition for citizen science Im using in this book, which in the broadest sense is free and available to anyone.

Morgan Lee, Marine Revival off San Onofres Shores, San Diego Union-Tribune, March 6, 2014.

Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 5.

Walter Sheldon Tower, A History of the American Whale Fishery, Political Economy and Public Law (Philadelphia: Publications of the University of Pennsylvania, 1907), 59.

Eric Jay Dolin, Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 24849.

Matt McGrath, California Blue Whales Bounce Back to Near Historic Numbers, BBC News, September 5, 2014.

Joe Roman et al., Whales as Marine Ecosystem Engineers, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 12 (July 2014): 37785.

Craig R. Smith and Amy R. Baco, Ecology of Whale Falls at the Deep-Sea Floor, Oceanography and Marine Biology: An Annual Review 41 (2003): 31154.

.

.

Beach Watch was started by Point Blue in the mid-1980s in response to a major spill and then handed to the sanctuary in the early 1990s.