The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 Read Online Free

uneasily aware that I used to be able to visualize the cities I traveled. Carr’s point, though, is far more urgent than mine. He investigates airplane crashes in which the pilot’s overdependence on autopilot contributes to fatal errors. “We’re forgetting how to fly,” one veteran pilot says. Carr also tells us how some traditional cultures, such as the ice-hunting Inuit of Canada, have become so reliant on GPS that they’ve lost the ability to find their way on their own. They are starting to lose, as one observer puts it, their feel for the land.
    Sometimes it seems that we’re always slightly behind in this game of choice and consequence. We move forward with all the excited cheer of a new technology or biological insight, and then we realize that we’ve made our move without fully considering nature’s countermove. Perhaps nothing illustrates that better than our overuse of antibiotics and the resulting tide of antibiotic resistance, told in chilling though beautiful detail in Maryn McKenna’s look toward a “post-antibiotic” future. The best of popular science writing does many things well—illuminating complicated research, forgotten corners of the earth, the worlds that lie beyond our own—in ways that make the universe itself more real to us. But I’ve come to believe that it’s the ability to see a discovery as a decision, to follow it from start to sometimes troubling, sometimes triumphant finish, that is one of the most important things we science writers bring to the story of science.
    It is, of course, that very story of choice and consequence that eddies in my memory of radioactive dust, stirred into the air on that long-ago summer day.
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    So I’ll return you now to that afternoon, finally allowing the science writer, her photographer, and their Nevada test-site guide to leave that drift of bomb-town dust behind. Aside from wishing to be elsewhere, of course, there was nothing to do but wait for the wind to give it up. We brushed ourselves off—no doubt making sure that the dust was all over our hands—and continued the tour.
    The day was sunny, our guide was reassuringly nonchalant, and we headed down a strip of narrow roadway to our next destination, which turned out to be the test site’s nuclear waste storage area. Metal barrels stamped with radiation symbols were stacked around us. I still have a slightly crackly photograph that my photographer insisted on taking. It shows a woman in her early thirties, wearing a baseball hat, T-shirt, and blue jeans, holding a traditional reporter’s notebook in one hand, looking into the camera with a slight smile. Behind her is nothing but a wall of radioactive waste barrels, piled so high that there’s no sky visible in the image.
    â€œWhat were you thinking?” I say to her sometimes. But I know the answer. She was thinking what an incredible place this was, what a reminder of our atomic legacy. We’ve never really known what to do with the radioactive wastes of nuclear bombs except box them up and hide them away. Fifteen years ago the government created the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and placed such nuclear detritus from its test facilities in a deep salt mine near Carlsbad, New Mexico. In late February of this year, a leak was reported there; thirteen workers tested positive for radiation exposure. The exposure was low, but it’s a reminder that no problem ever remains fully buried. The lesson I took away from the Nevada site, or one of them, is that sometimes the most important thing the writer does is just tell the story, bring the choice and the consequence out of hiding, so that it’s not invisible, so that we, as a society, don’t forget.
    And as you can tell, I haven’t forgotten that windblown day. I haven’t forgotten because when we went through the radiation detectors on our way out, the alarms started clanging like a fire truck as my