David Quammen
David Quammen
David Quammenis an American science, nature and travel writer and the author of fifteen books, five of them fiction. He wrote a column, called "Natural Acts" for Outside magazine for fifteen years. His articles have also appeared in National Geographic, Harper's, Rolling Stone, the New York Times Book Review and other periodicals. In 2013, Quammen's book Spillover was shortlisted for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
CountryUnited States of America
taken independent successful
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.
people lions sacred
Kill off the sacred bear. Kill off the ancestral crocodile. Kill off the myth-wrapped tiger. Kill off the lion. You haven't conquered a people, or their place, until you've exterminated their resident monsters.
animal identity wildlife
Identity is such a crucial affair that one shouldn't rush into it.
logic cold evolution
By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.
lying reading world
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.
book comforting intellectual
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.
april blond fierce gone humor iconic jane ponytail shines sly sparkle turned
On April 3, 2014, Jane Goodall turned 80. The iconic blond ponytail has gone gray, but the sparkle of intelligence, sly humor, and fierce dedication still shines from her hazel eyes.
dues paid prodigy
I was a prodigy who learned how difficult writing was only after getting published. I paid my dues later.
novel
I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel.
hate writing character
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.
carrying
You can't take a knife on a plane anymore, but you can get on carrying a virus.
likely next spread thousands
Ebola isn't a respiratory virus. It doesn't spread through the airborne route. So it's not likely to spread like wildfire around the world and kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. That's what I think of as the next big one.
world novel using-me
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.
childhood happy male
I'm a white, middle-class male who had a happy childhood in Ohio. The world does not need me to be a novelist.