In this issue, Winter 2009
Writers and Thinkers in the Current Issue
Bernie Krause started out as a musician, but hanging out with the Beach Boys gave way to a career in bioacooustic science. After 40 years in the field, Krause has amassed recordings of ecosystems all over the world and developed a revolutionary theory about how animals work together to create natural “soundscapes.” In Not So Silent Spring, freelance writer Dawn Stover takes a look at how human noise impacts these environments and the creatures that create them.
Paul Stamets has devoted his professional career to fungus: searching for it, cultivating it, and manipulating it into solutions that might solve global problems ranging from fuel shortages to bioterrorism. The Mushroom Messiah details some of these fungal fancies and their potential pitfalls. Stamets received a Bioneers Award in 1998 from the Collective Heritage Institute and is the author of Mycelim Running.
The way Sir Partha Dasgupta sees it, positive gains in a country’s GDP often mask unsustainable economic growth. What the GDP doesn’t take into account are the values of human and natural capital – which Dasgupta has spent his career studying. The Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics at the University of Cambridge is just one of the experts who weigh in on what the current financial crisis means for conservation in The Nature of the Fiscal World.
As detailed in a review of Joel Berger’s The Better to Eat You With: Fear in the Animal World, the biologist and author gets intimately involved in his science. Berger has spent days sleeping in the trees of Siberian forests, lobbed urine-laden snowballs at elk herds, and even dressed up in a moose suit to conduct experiments. The University of Montana professor’s new book details his treks into the wilderness and his theory that fear of predators is culturally transmitted among mammals.
