New books about what nature teaches us – Weekend
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Susana Monceau “Schrodinger’s Possum”
Publishing house individual
Translation Dmitry Lupich
Spanish author Susana Monceau works at the intersection of cognitive psychology, ethology (the study of animal behavior) and analytical philosophy. Her main specialty is that she is a philosopher, and as a philosopher she looks at the main questions of nature. In Schrödinger’s Possum it is a matter of death. Do animals know what death is? Do they understand the difference between living and nonliving? Do they feel grief of loss and, conversely, a desire to kill? Monceau’s answer to all these questions is: absolutely yes. Just to understand the animals here, you need to abandon the anthropocentric view. Help in this are ants, elephants, killer whales, toads, dogs, of course, chimpanzees, as well as the titular opossum, who knows how to pretend to be dead at the moment of danger, that is, he knows how to fake death, and therefore knows what it actually is. Quite in keeping with the subject matter, this book is rather melancholy, but also cheerful in places; Philosophical research is interspersed with scientific anecdotes. Conclusion: animals actually know death better than people surrounded by culture, they constantly live in its presence, and we may have something to learn from them.
Jonathan Blackcomb “Superflies”
Publishing house Colibri
Translation Tatiana Zemrelub
The book by ethologist and environmental activist Jonathan Blackcomb is a true eulogy for flies. These creatures are almost the most hated for humans among living beings. Flies cause organic disgust, second only to cockroaches in this regard, and, Blackcomb believes, this is completely in vain. Diptera are amazing insects, complex, often extremely beautiful, often dangerous, but also very useful for humans. Without flies there would be no cheese, no modern criminology (detectives calculate the time of murder by the behavior of insects on a corpse), and, of course, genetics. Blackomb travels through the world of dipterans – from banal flies and mosquitoes to all kinds of blackbirds and greenfinches, talking about their sexual habits, food preferences, social skills, as well as their amazing ability to adapt. He calls flies “God’s favorites” and “opportunists of evolution”: no other species can survive in such diverse conditions – from the ice of Antarctica to the antennae of cancer. In general, this book shows that you can love the most unexpected things.
Robin Wall Kimmerer “Life in the Boundary Layer”
Publishing house Ad Marginem
Translation Vladimir Petrov
Like Superflies, this book is about organisms whose importance and beauty we underestimate, but the genre is a little different. Blackomb’s work is typical science-pop; Life in the Boundary Layer veers towards lyrical auto-fiction, almost poetry in places. Robin Wall Kimmerer has a dual identity: she is a botanist and at the same time an activist for indigenous peoples in the United States. Her research is based on a combination of Western academic science techniques and methods of sensory and spiritual knowledge of nature inherited from her ancestors (Kimmerer is from the Potawotami Indian family). This is how synthetic ecological thinking arises. Of course, there is a slight New Age spirit here, but at its best. Mosses are an ideal object for this approach – almost invisible organisms that live on the boundaries of the elements (earth, water, air). Mosses seem to create an ornament of things, but upon closer inspection it turns into a rich, almost magical life. Kimmerer notes that we usually see moss as a background for more interesting phenomena, but “moss is not background music, but the intertwined themes of a Beethoven quartet.”
Vladimir Paevsky “Feathered polygamists”
Publishing house Palmyra
Ornithologist Vladimir Paevsky has been studying bird demography since the 1960s. His popular book is a brief excursion into the romantic, family and sexual relationships of birds. The plots here are easy to guess: marriage ceremonies – mating of capercaillies and battles of geese, monogamous and polygamous ways of cohabitation, tenderness and cruelty in the relationships of various turukhtans and dunlins, raising offspring, and so on. Paevsky also touches on various kinds of eccentricities, such as prostitution among hummingbirds. This book is written extremely simply, almost artlessly. The author’s poems, with which he illustrates his own theses, give it a specific charm. For example, these: “How mockingly wise nature is – / All these birds, butterflies, fields! / After all, everything around is for procreation, / For a new life, eternal, like the Earth. // Everything is for sale: combs, spurs, stumps, / Suckers, smell, color and fringe, / And the genitals of plants (In everyday life – flowers), and their aroma. // And everything around is under the sign of copulation, / From the battle of tigers to the scattering of spores, / And there are no hitches in the growth of populations, / If sexual selection is effective.”
Jonathan Slat “Owls in the Ice”
Publishing house Alpina non-fiction
Translation Elena Bortkevich
The book by American biologist Jonathan Slat is something of a scientific travelogue in the manner of, say, the works of Ernest Seton-Thompson. The plot of the plot: a young ornithologist is looking for a topic to study, and chooses a fish owl as his hero – one of the largest owls in the world (Slat touchingly calls him a “flying bear cub”). The problem is that the fish owl is a rather elusive animal. The scientist goes in search of the bird in Russian Primorye and goes deeper and deeper into the forests and ice. His book is a travelogue about a wild, cold land, including horrors from the weather, surprise at local customs, and other essential components of the genre. There is also enough about the eagle owl himself, although the story about him is told in a somewhat impressionistic manner: Slat listens to the mating, admires the architecture of the nests and waits with bated breath to see the bird itself. In addition to the scientific and adventure plots, the book has a political component: Slat’s attempts to intensify the care of local authorities about endangered birds. The lesson here is this: we often cause damage to beautiful creatures that we don’t even see, and if we met them, we wouldn’t forget them forever.
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