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David Quammen

David Quammen Biography

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“Medical research using chimpanzee surrogates is not just a hot issue, made hotter in recent years by the rise of animal-rights movement and, in counterpoint, by the terror AIDS. It's also... a central conundrum within the much larger issue of humanity's relationship to nature. It's bigger than AIDS; it's bigger than the enterprise of according legalistic 'rights' to a few thousand species of vertebrates. By a sequence of almost syllogisticallly linked questions, it leads straight to the core of a very personal yet very global matter - whether we humans are really part of the natural world or not. It demands eventually that we ask ourselves, Is a human life sacred, or just valuable? And the corollary, If a valuable entity proliferates itself by a factor of six billion, is each unit still as valuable as it was?”

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Book:The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder
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“The more numerous we become, the more crowded, the more interconnected, the more demanding of resources, the more invasive of wild places, the more disruptive of richly diverse ecosystems—the closer we stand to the epidemic threshold for any new virus that probes us as a possible route to greater evolutionary success.”

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Book:Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus
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“Vast areas of old forest have been cut, or chained down with bulldozers, to make way for cattle ranching and urban sprawl. People have planted orchards, established urban parks, landscaped their yards with blossoming trees, and created other unintended enticements amid the cities and suburbs. 'So bats have decided that, as their native habitat is disappearing, as climate is becoming more variable, and their food source is becoming less diverse, it's easier to live in an urban area.”

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Book:Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
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“John Deck was a snake fancier. He had only been rattler-bit a few times. At an early age he'd had his own pit full of diamondbacks, a plywood affair out near the garage. Some of the snakes would scootch themselves up vertically along the boards and John, cocky lad, used to knock them back down with his own quick right hand, until one day he presumed against a snake that was readier than he was, and caught a palmload of fangs.”

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Book:The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder
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“When a silverback gorilla dies of Ebola, he does it beyond the eyes of science and medicine. No one is there in the forest to observe the course of his agony, with the possible exception of other gorillas. No one takes his temperature or peers down his throat. When a female gorilla succumbs to Ebola, no one measures the rate of her breathing or checks for a telltale rash. Thousands of gorillas may have been killed by the virus but no human has ever attended one of those deaths - not even Billy Karesh, not even Alain Ondzie. A small number of carcasses have been found, some of which have tested positive for Ebola antibodies. A large number of carcasses have been seen and reported by casual witnesses, in Ebola territory at Ebola times, but because the forest is a hungry place, most of those carcasses could never be inspected and sampled by scientific researchers.”

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Book:Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
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“That constitutes a chastening reminder for someone like myself, with a bias in favor of the written page and a sour prejudice against mass-market video: a reminder that, although images can be deceptive, they don't stand convicted alone. Writing is just another form of concoction. Words can lie too. You can trust me on this, probably.”

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Book:Wild Thoughts from Wild Places
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“Un individuo humano puede elegir no consumir savia de palma, no comer carne de chimpancés, no montar las pocilgas a la sombra de los mangos, no limpiar la tráquea de los caballos con las manos desnudas, no tener sexo sin protección con prostitutas, no compartir aguja, no toser sin taparse la boca, no subirse con síntomas a un avión o no poner a las gallinas y a los patos en el mismo corral.”

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Book:Contagio: La evolución de las pandemias
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“Invadimos los bosques tropicales y otros espacios salvajes, que albergan una enorme cantidad de especies de animales y plantas; y en el seno de estas criaturas, multitud de virus desconocidos. Talamos árboles; matamos animales o los enjaulamos para enviarlos a los mercados. Alteramos ecosistemas y provocamos que los virus escapen de sus huéspedes naturales. Cuando esto ocurre, los virus necesitan un nuevo huésped. A menudo, ese huésped somos nosotros.”

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Book:Contagio: La evolución de las pandemias
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“There’s a voice that says: "So what?" It’s not my voice, it’s probably not yours, but it makes itself heard in the arenas of public opinion, querulous and smug and fortified by just a little knowledge, which as always is a dangerous thing. "So what if a bunch of species go extinct?" It says. "Extinction is a natural process. Darwin himself said so, didn’t he? Extinction is the complement of evolution, making room for new species to evolve. There have always been extinctions. So why worry about these extinctions currently being caused by humanity?" And there has always been a pilot light burning in your furnace. So why worry when your house is on fire?”

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Book:The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction
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“This is not evolution vs. God. The existence of God, any sort of God, personal or abstract, imminent or distant, is not what Darwin’s evolutionary theory challenges. What it challenges is the supposed godliness of man, the conviction that we, above all other life forms, are spiritually elevated, divinely favored, possessed of an immaterial and immortal essence, such that we have special prospects for eternity, special status in the expectations of God, special rights and responsibilities on Earth.”

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Book:The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution
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“What do we measure when we measure time? The gloomy answer from Hawking, one of our most implacably cheerful scientists, is that we measure entropy. We measure changes and those changes are all for the worse. We measure increasing disorder. Life is hard, says science, and constancy is the greatest of miracles.”

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Book:Wild Thoughts from Wild Places
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“Evolution as described by Charles Darwin is an scientific theory, abundantly reconfirmed, explaining physical phenomena by physical causes. Intelligent Design is a faith-based initiative in rhetorical argument. Should we teach I.D. in America's public schools? Yes, let's do - not as science, but alongside other spiritual beliefs, such as Islam, Zoroastrianism and the Hindu Idea that Earth rests on Chukwa, the giant turtle.”

ShouldIdeasSchoolEarthAmericaSpiritualBeliefCausesTeachDesignTheoryEvolutionArgumentIntelligentIslamGiantsInitiativeExplainingPublic SchoolTurtlesIntelligent DesignScientific TheoryRhetoricalFaith BasedSpiritual Beliefs
Author:David Quammen
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“There was a very important superintendent of Yellowstone, a man who was involved in the founding of the National Park Service itself, Horace Albright. And he became superintendent, which is the boss of Yellowstone Park, in 1919 - from 1919 to 1929. Later, he was director of the park service itself. Albright embraced the idea that in order for the national parks - and Yellowstone in particular - to have support from the American people and from politicians, there needed to be wildlife as spectacle.”

PeopleMenImportantIdeasOrderSupportParticularNeededInvolvedPoliticianDirectorsParksBossFoundingWildlifeNational ParksYellowstoneSuperintendents
Author:David Quammen
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“And so in 1975, the grizzly bear was put on, as I said - on the endangered species list as threatened. And new measures were taken, for instance, bear-proofing garbage, creating new regulations to - essentially to try and keep people and people's food away from the bears, let the bears adjust to eating the abundant wild food that's available in Yellowstone and allow them to be more wild, to be independent of humans as sources of foods for the good of both sides. And that has been quite successful.”

PeopleTryingHumansHas BeensSaidSidesSuccessfulTakenSourceBearsEatingCreatingIndependentSpeciesAvailableListsInstanceRegulationThreatenedBoth SidesGarbageEndangered SpeciesGrizzliesYellowstoneGrizzly Bears
Author:David Quammen
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“But private lands development around the periphery of the parks - Grand Teton and Yellowstone - is a crucial issue because if those private lands are transformed from open pastures, meadow, forest land to suburbs, to little ranchettes, to shopping malls, to roads, to Starbucks - if those places are all settled for the benefit of humans, then the elk are not going to be able to migrate in and out of Yellowstone Park anymore. And if the elk can't migrate into the park, then that creates problems for the wolves, for the grizzlies, for a lot of other creatures.”

IfsHumansLittlesProblemAbleIssuesLandDevelopmentCreaturesBenefitsForestsParksCrucialShoppingTransformedSuburbsMallsMeadowsStarbucksPasturesPeripheryMigrateGrizzliesYellowstoneElk
Author:David Quammen
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“If you're Maasai Mara National Park in Kenya, if you're in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, you don't get out of your vehicle and go walking around amid the lions and the leopards. You stay in your Land Rover. You stay in your safari van, and you look out the windows or you look out the pop top at these animals. I know by experience how badly that can work out if you violate those guidelines.”

IfsKnowsLooksAnimalLandWalkingWindowWork OutPopsParksOver YouLionsVehicleVansKenyaNational ParksGuidelinesLeopardsTanzaniaSafariMaasai
Author:David Quammen
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“You can hike into the Yellowstone backcountry. You can camp in the Yellowstone backcountry. You can take food into the Yellowstone backcountry, and you're surrounded by grizzly bears. And it's - it's a very, very thrilling, peculiar situation. Every sound that you hear in the night, you wonder is this a grizzly bear coming to tear into my tent?”

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Author:David Quammen
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“As I started to read nonfiction in the mid '70s, I discovered, holy cow, there was a lot of imaginative nonfiction. Not the kind where people use composite characters and invented quotes. I hate that kind of nonfiction. But imaginative in the sense that good writing and unexpected structure and vivid reporting could be combined with presenting facts.”

PeopleWritingKindCharacterFactsUseHateHolyI HateStructureUnexpectedCowsNonfictionImaginativeVividPresentingGood WritingComposites
Author:David Quammen
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“Wallace's sales agent, back in London, heard mutterings from some naturalists that young Mr. Wallace ought to quit theorizing and stick to gathering facts. Besides expressing their condescension toward him in particular, that criticism also reflected a common attitude that fact-gathering, not theory, was the proper business of all naturalists.”

FactsYoungCommonAttitudeHeardParticularTheoryOughtCriticismSticksLondonQuittingAgentsGatheringNaturalistCondescensionMuttering
Book:The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions
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“[Theory is] an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. That's what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. They embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionally - taking it as their best available view of reality, at least unil some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along.”

MeanHas BeensFactsRealityMightViewsAcceptingTheoryFitDegreesEvidenceScientistEmbraceAvailableExperimentsStatementsObservationDataExplanationExpertsSpeculationKnowledgeableUnreliableDreamy
Author:David Quammen
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“To drown a river beneath its own impounded water, by damming, is to kill what it was and to settle for something else. When the damming happens without good reason . . . then it's a tragedy of diminishment for the whole planet, a loss of one more wild thing, leaving Earth just a little flatter and tamer and simpler and uglier than before.”

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Book:Wild Thoughts from Wild Places
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