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.

David Quammen

Categorized in : Water Rivers Loss

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.

David Quammen

intellectual comforting book

Nor are we the culmination of evolution, except in the sense that there has never been another species so bizarrely ingenious that it could create both iambic pentameter and plutonium.

David Quammen

plutonium culmination evolution

Results "are no good unless they answer (or can be made to seem to answer, or can be twisted and wrenched and piled into odd shapes until they hint at being somehow perhaps on the verge or answering) a question that someone might conceivably want asked."

David Quammen

hints shapes answers

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.

David Quammen

hate writing character

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.

David Quammen

yellowstone men order

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.

David Quammen

independent taken successful

I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me as a nonfiction writer.

David Quammen

novelists use needs

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.

David Quammen

life-is-hard cheerful miracle

The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning.

David Quammen

underwater yearning creatures

By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.

David Quammen

cold logic evolution

Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.

David Quammen

being-me meat self

Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation.

David Quammen

unique natural islands

Identity is such a crucial affair that one shouldn't rush into it.

David Quammen

wildlife identity animal

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.

David Quammen

yellowstone issues land

If you are lying in a tent in the Congo jungle, you don't want to be reading about rainforest biology. You want to be in a distant world.

David Quammen

reading lying world

The elk are the most abundant large herbivores in the Yellowstone ecosystem. There are thousands and thousands of them. They migrate in and out. And those migration routes need to stay open.

David Quammen

yellowstone ecosystems needs

I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel.

David Quammen

novel used fiction

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?

David Quammen

yellowstone tears night

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.

David Quammen

work-out land animal

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.

David Quammen

criticism gathering attitude