Quotes from 2006
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Songs of the Gorilla Nation, Dawn Prince-Hughes
I am both proud and discouraged when people say “You're autistic? Wow!
I would never have known." I am glad that I am so successful at appearing
normal (whatever that is), but I also wish at times people knew how hard I
work at it. So much goes on that other people can't see.
I count numbers in my head or curl my toes over and over while I am talking
to someone. When I am not drawn in by another person's choice of topic, I often
start thinking of things that I am more interested in and don't hear anything
they say. I get a physical thrill when I encounter symmetry: I love the lines
and color of tennis courts and love to run on them; I love driving through
tunnels and being surrounded by their roundness. When I get homesick and cry,
it is because I miss times and places and not necessarily individual people.
I continue to have "sense addictions": I smell all the purple irises
I can when I go for walks; I still love to smell tin boxes of Band-Aids. I
love the feel of having my scalp massaged and my arms tickled lightly more
than traditional forms of physical contact. In times of stress I revert to
eating the same thing at the same time of day for weeks at a stretch. I wear
dark glasses and earplugs for the same reason. I startle and must fight rage
when someone touches me unexpectedly, and I still have a very hard time with
groups of people. My social awkwardness, though controlled, will always make
interaction difficult for me.
Yet I believe autism can be a beautiful way of seeing the world. I believe
that within autism there is not only the group—the label—but the
individual as well; there is strength in it, and there is terror in its power.
When I speak of emerging from the darkness of autism, I do not mean that I
offer a success story neatly wrapped and finished with a "cure." I
and the others who are autistic do not want to be cured. What I mean when I
say "emergence" is that my soul was lifted from the context of my
earlier autism and became autistic in another context, one filled with wonder
and discovery and fall of the feelings that so poetically inform each human
life. When I emerged, I had learned—from the gorillas—far better
how I could achieve these things.
I went forward by going backward. I went backward in time into the most primal
and ancient part of myself. Back into the quiet recesses of the mind, where
evolution has paused to breathe, bringing its people with it. I did this with
the first and best friends I ever had: a family of captive gorillas, people
of an ancient nation. These gorillas, so sensitive and so trapped, were mirrors
for my soul as it struggled behind bars, gawked at by the distorted faces of
my world, taken out of a context that was meaningful and embracing. They taught
me songs about themselves, about meaning and context, about the world, and
about me.
Because gorillas are subtle and unthreatening, I was able to look at them,
to watch them, in ways I had never been able to do with human people. Through
this process I learned that persons are more than chaotic knots of random actions;
I learned that they have feelings, needs for one another, and valuable perspectives,
and that as people we are reflected in one another. Because the gorillas were
so like me in so many ways, I was able to see myself in them, and in turn I
saw them—and eventually myself—in other human people.
Gorillas, like autistic people, are misunderstood.
The Golden Spruce, John Valliant, Norton and Co. 2005
IN THE NORTHWEST COAST, there is no graceful interval between the ocean and
the trees; the forest simply takes over where the tide wrack ends, erupting
full-blown from the shallow, bouldered earth. The boundary between the two
is unstable, and the sea will heave stones, logs, and even itself into the
woods at every opportunity. In return, the roots of shore pine and spruce grope
for a purchase on rocks better suited to limpets and barnacles while densely
needled boughs cast shadows over colonies of starfish and sea anemones. The
air is at once rank and loamy with the competing smells of rotting seaweed
and decaying wood. From the beach you can see as far as height and horizon
will allow, but turn inland and you will find yourself blinking in a darkened
room, pupils dilating to fill the claustrophobic void. The trail of a person,
or the thread of a story, is easily lost in such a place. Even the trees, swaddled
in moss and draped in ferns, appear disguised.
A coastal forest can be an awesome place to behold: huge, holy, and eternal-feeling,
like a branched and needled Notre Dame, but for a stranger it is not a particularly
comfortable place to be. You can be twenty paces from a road or a beach and
become totally disoriented; once inside, there is no future and no past, only
the sodden, twilight now. Underfoot is a leg-breaking tangle of roots and branches
and, every fifty feet or so, your way is blocked by moss-covered walls of fallen
trees that may be taller than you and hundreds of feet long. These so-called
nurse logs will, in turn, have colonnades of younger trees growing out of them,
fifty years old and as orderly as pickets. In here, boundaries between life
and death, between one species and the next, blur and blend: everything is
being used as a launching pad by something else; everyone wants a piece of
the sky. Down below, the undergrowth is thick, and between this and the trees,
it is hard to see very far; the sound of moving water is constant, and the
ground is as soft and spongy as a sofa with shot springs. You have the feeling
that if you stop for too long, you will simply be grown over and absorbed by
the slow and ancient riot of growth going on all around you. It can be suffocating,
and the need to see the sun can become overpowering—something you could
do easily if it weren't for all those trees.
The Forests for the Trees, Jeff Forester, MN Historical Press, 2004
Of all the standing timber in the United States before white settlement, four-fifths
of it grew on the eastern third of the country. Every day for fifty years Americans
Cut more than one hundred square miles of forest for fuel. The average cabin
burned more than its weight in wood—from twenty to forty cords—each
year. Most colonies had a1 least a few one-thousand-ton ironworks, each of
which consumed between twenty and thirty thousand acres of forest annually.
Every year the rate of deforestation accelerated.3
Americans burned most of the timber east of the Mississippi River, While lightning-caused
fire was always a threat, in the East it usually came during thunderstorms,
accompanied by rain. Additionally, thunderstorms were common at times of high
humidity and did not usually occur in the early spring or late fall, when the
forests were driest. Coal fires, campfires, sparks from railroad engines, and
field clearing accounted for most of the huge wildfires that swept back and
forth along the line of civilization.
Animals in Translation, Temple Grandlin
When I was young I had no idea that being a visual thinker made me different
from anyone else. I thought everyone saw pictures inside their heads. So
naturally, when I didn't like the lab work I was doing and wanted to start
learning about animals in their natural environments, I focused on the visual
environment. It wasn't a conscious decision, it was just what I naturally
gravitated to.
Being verbal thinkers, behaviorists hadn't really thought about the visual
environment. When they talked about the environment rewarding or punishing
an animal in response to something it did, they usually meant food and electric
shocks. That made sense for a Skinner box, where there's nothing much to look
at, and if you mess up you get a shock. (A Skinner box was a special cage,
usually a Plexiglas box, behaviorists used to test and analyze a rat's behavior.
There was nothing in it except a lever and maybe some indicator lights that
went on or off when a reward was available.) Most Skinner boxes didn't shock
the animals, but if punishment was part of the experiment, usually the punishment
would be a shock.
In the wild, though, there aren't any electric shocks, and you can't get food
by pecking a lever. You get food by being highly attuned to the visual environment.
Behaviorists finally started to catch on to the importance of vision to an
animal when somebody did a famous experiment showing you could teach a monkey
how to push a lever just by letting him look outside a window every time he
hit the lever. They didn't need to give the monkey a food reward, just a view.
Animals need to see, and they want to see.
1491, Charles Mann, Knopf, 2005
At the DNA level, all the major cereals—wheat, rice, maize, millet,
barley, and so on—are surprisingly alike. But despite their genetic similarity,
maize looks and acts different from the rest. It is like the one redheaded
early riser in a family of dark-haired night owls. Left untended, other cereals
are capable of propagating themselves. Because maize kernels are wrapped inside
a tough husk, human beings must sow the species—it cannot reproduce on
its own. The uncultivated ancestors of other cereals resemble their domesticated
descendants. People can and do eat their grain; in the Middle East, for example,
the wild barley harvest from a small piece of land can feed a family. By contrast,
no wild maize ancestor has ever been found, despite decades of search. Maize's
closest relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks nothing like
it (teosinte splits into many thin stems, whereas maize has a single thick
stalk). And teosinte, unlike wild wheat and rice, is not a practical food source;
its "ears" are scarcely an inch long and consist of seven to twelve
hard, woody seeds. An entire ear of teosinte has less nutritional value than
a single kernel of modern maize.
The grain in wild grasses develops near the top of the stem. As it matures,
the stem slowly breaks up—shatters, in the jargon—letting the seed
dribble to the ground. In wild wheat and barley, a common single-gene mutation
blocks shattering. For the plant the change is highly disadvantageous, but
it facilitates harvest by humans—the grain waits on the stem to be collected.
The discovery and planting of nonshattering grain is thought to have precipitated
the Neolithic revolution in the Middle East. Like other grasses, teosinte shatters,
but there is no known nonshattering variant. (At least sixteen genes control
teosinte and maize shattering, a situation so complex that geneticists have
effectively thrown up their hands after trying to explain how a nonshattering
type might have appeared spontaneously.) No known wild ancestor, no obvious
natural way to evolve a nonshattering variant, no way to propagate itself—little
wonder that the Mexican National Museum of Culture claimed in a 1982 exhibition
that maize "was not domesticated, but created"—almost from
scratch.
A Natural History of Ferns, Robbin Moran, Timber Press, 2004.
A typical fern sporangium consists of a thin stalk on top of which is attached
a globose capsule measuring about VI28 inch (0.25 mm) in diameter* The wall
of the capsule is one cell layer thick and therefore thin, fragile, and translucent.
But along the top, one row of cells stands out from the rest. This row, called
the annulus, is darker and encircles two-thirds of the capsule (Figures 2 and
5). Its cells are thickened on the inner and radial walls but have thin, flexible
outer walls. The dark radial walls impart a segmented appearance to the annulus,
and for this reason when students see the annulus for the first time they usually
say it resembles Sigusanito (little worm). In the front of the capsule, the
annulus gives way to two transversely elongated cells called the stomium (mouth).
During spore shooting the annulus functions by taking advantage of the physical
and chemical properties of water. These properties arise from waters polarity,
which is created by each water molecule^s carrying a slight negative charge
near the oxygen atom and a slight positive charge near the hydrogen atoms.
The oppositely charged regions of different water molecules attract to form
a weak, short-lived hydrogen bond. This attraction accounts for the cohesive
properties of water—its tendency to stick together even though it is
liquid. The slight pull created by the cohesion of water molecules is what
supports the weight of an insect as it scurries across the surface of a pond.
The insect does not sink because it is not heavy enough to break the cohesive
forces at the water s surface.
Under a Wild Sky, William Souder, North Point Press, 2004
The Audubons kept an unusual house. Their rooms were filled with music and books and lively talk of commerce and nature. Outside their door, the grounds were overrun with a motley assortment of beasts. When Audubon found a very young turkey cock separated from its broodmates in the woods and brought it home, the bird became tame—and popular with people in the village after it developed a penchant for following anyone who spoke to it. The turkey grew large, refused to commune with Audubon's domestic turkeys, and could be seen silhouetted against the sky each evening on the ridgetop of the Audubon house, the only place it would roost. During one of the turkey's absences into the forest, Audubon happened upon it while out hunting. He would have shot it had not his dog recognized the bird, which sat unperturbed while the two of them walked up to it. Lucy tied a red ribbon around the bird's neck to alert local hunters that it was not a member of the wild flock. But it was eventually killed by a man who didn't see the ribbon until he picked up the bird. The man apologetically brought the turkey to Audubon, who probably ate it.
Disconnected Rivers, Ellen Wohl.Yale University press. 2004
The United States thus has two competing traditions. One tradition emphasizes individual and corporate freedom to optimize short-term profits, with economic growth and increased standards of living based on the excessive exploitation of natural resources. The other tradition emphasizes resource conservation and environmental protection, an interest in natural history, and expectations of outdoor recreation and public access to wilderness areas. These competing traditions together shape the understanding and use of rivers in the United States.
Frogs, Badger and Netherton, Voyageur Press, 1995
The toad is a "moveable drugstore," authority Robert DeGraaf declares. Scientists regard the toad as a “veritabal chemical factory," he writes, "containing hallucinogens, powerful anesthetics and chemicals that affect the heart and nervous system." If a toad is taken into an animal's mouth, adrenal hormone-like substances in its secretions are quickly absorbed by membranes in the mouth and throat, paralyzing the respiratory system and overstimulating the heart rate, causing a lethal heart flutter. If digested and absorbed into the victim's bloodstream, however, other chemically active components trigger a reaction that slows down the heartbeat, causing heart failure and death
Frogs: A chorus of color, Behler and Behler, Sterling Publishing 2005.
Early in our research all doubts vanished. Our eyes popped open to the astonishing
range and diversity of these amphibians. Frogs sport an amazing variety of
survival strategies and physical forms, ranging in size from tiny tree frogs
to goliaths the size of a human infant. Many are more colorful than the most
dazzling birds, and their skins produce chemical cocktails of dizzying complexity.
Frogs communicate with sophisticated croaks, grunts, chirps, trills, snores,
growls, whistles, and deeply resonating bellows. Their voices have filled
the night with song since the dawn of the dinosaurs. Some frogs get around
by jumping, but others hop, climb, walk, run, burrow, swim, and even parachute.
They eat insects, worms, spiders, snails, fish, rodents, small birds, and
other frogs. One species even eats fruits. And the reproductive diversity
of frogs is unmatched among vertebrates. In short, frogs are among the most
visually stunning, vocally pleasing, and adaptively remarkable life-forms
on the planet.
Shadow of Hiawatha, AlanTrachtenberg, Hill and Wang, 2004
Tensions between the theory that "all men are" created equal" and
the practical realities of "we the people" arose then and have remained
a defining mark of the American national ethos. Indians were apparently in
a class or category of their own and hardly figured in discussions of "rights" in
the early republic. Between the ravages of disease and conquest, many native
tribes and cultures had disappeared even before the founding of the nation.
Even by 1760, the Indian population had already declined precipitously, so
that a mingling of natives and Euro-Americans was rare and became rarer. Natives
and nation seemed to exist in a contradictory relation driven by interests
that seemed doomed to clash. The earliest experiences of the tribes with the
new federal government set a fatal pattern: fierce struggle to protect their
lands, their communities, their lives, followed by defeat, removal, and in
many cases, annihilation. The theory of the vanishing race became a convenient
rationale for the nation’s refusal to meet the tribes halfway on common
ground. Jefferson had hoped that an enlightened policy of education and interbreeding
of Indians with whites would bring the tribes around to civilized ways and
peaceful integration. But as Joyce Appleby writes, “the yearning for
economic independence among ordinary white Americans sealed the fate of dependency
for Native Americans.”