Citizen Scientist
Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction
by Mary Ellen Hannibal
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Pub Date Sep 06 2016 | Archive Date Dec 14 2016
Experiment, The | The Experiment
Description
Citizen science might just be our last, best chance to fight extinction. But is there really hope for threatened species? Mary Ellen Hannibal needed to find out.
Hannibal, an award-winning writer and emerging emissary from scientists to the public, sets out to become a citizen scientist herself. In search of vanishing species, she wades into tide pools, follows hawks, and scours mountains. The data she collects will help environmental research—but her most precious discovery might be her fellow citizen scientists: a heroic cast of volunteers devoting long hours to helping scientists measure—and even slow—today’s unprecedented mass extinction.
A consummate reporter, Hannibal digs into the origins of the tech-savvy citizen science movement—tracing it back through centuries of amateur observation by writers and naturalists. Prompted by her novelist father’s sudden death, she also examines her own past and discovers a family legacy of looking closely at the world. Her personal loss only fuels her quest to bear witness to life, and so she ultimately returns her gaze to the wealth of species still left to fight for.
Combining research and memoir in impassioned prose, Citizen Scientist is a literary event, a blueprint for action, and the story of how one woman rescues herself from an odyssey of loss—with a new kind of science.
Hannibal, an award-winning writer and emerging emissary from scientists to the public, sets out to become a citizen scientist herself. In search of vanishing species, she wades into tide pools, follows hawks, and scours mountains. The data she collects will help environmental research—but her most precious discovery might be her fellow citizen scientists: a heroic cast of volunteers devoting long hours to helping scientists measure—and even slow—today’s unprecedented mass extinction.
A consummate reporter, Hannibal digs into the origins of the tech-savvy citizen science movement—tracing it back through centuries of amateur observation by writers and naturalists. Prompted by her novelist father’s sudden death, she also examines her own past and discovers a family legacy of looking closely at the world. Her personal loss only fuels her quest to bear witness to life, and so she ultimately returns her gaze to the wealth of species still left to fight for.
Combining research and memoir in impassioned prose, Citizen Scientist is a literary event, a blueprint for action, and the story of how one woman rescues herself from an odyssey of loss—with a new kind of science.
Advance Praise
“The idea that science is something for a caste of high priests to attend to is simply wrong: Science is all around us, and we each can revel in its pleasures and processes. This is a stirring, empowering narrative.”
—Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth
“One of Hannibal’s themes in this ambitious new book is the ‘double narrative,’ or the contradiction between what we tell ourselves we are doing every day and what is really going on. She explains that empires have been built on a biotic cleansing of species, the loss of which now threatens the very foundation of our lives. Hannibal poses citizen science, or the contribution of amateurs to research, as a platform not only for change, but also as a new way of seeing without the old blinders. Invoking literary, historic, and scientific touchstones, and telling a personal story as well, she provides what citizen scientists John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts called the ‘toto picture.’ We can’t afford to see the Earth any other way.”
—Paul R. Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies and the president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University
—Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth
“One of Hannibal’s themes in this ambitious new book is the ‘double narrative,’ or the contradiction between what we tell ourselves we are doing every day and what is really going on. She explains that empires have been built on a biotic cleansing of species, the loss of which now threatens the very foundation of our lives. Hannibal poses citizen science, or the contribution of amateurs to research, as a platform not only for change, but also as a new way of seeing without the old blinders. Invoking literary, historic, and scientific touchstones, and telling a personal story as well, she provides what citizen scientists John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts called the ‘toto picture.’ We can’t afford to see the Earth any other way.”
—Paul R. Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies and the president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781615192434 |
| PRICE | $25.95 (USD) |
Average rating from 6 members
Featured Reviews
Ilana W, Reviewer
An interesting and well documented investigation into the merits of citizen scientist. 'Knowing with better accuracy what we are looking at is a virtue of citizen science'. It is a new trend that as in the case of 'citizen journalism' it has the merit of involving more human resources and diverse backgrounds into the scientific investigation. Such an approach, can, for instance, contribute to a comprehensive research into the case of endangered species. It is written simply yet with poignant scientific references, that as in the case of 'H is for Hawk' inserts personal memories into the narrative. An interesting lecture for both scientists and anyone with an interest for serious science.
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