The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2014 Quotes

“Two years ago, when leaders in neighboring Mathews County broached the subject of sea-level rise, Tea Partiers packed meetings, warning of an environmentalist plot to “put nature above man.” They linked a proposal to build dikes to a United Nations sustainability plan known as Agenda 21, which has inspired a number of conspiracy theories among far-right activists.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“Our own ways of mourning may be unique, but the human capacity to grieve deeply is something we share with other animals.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“We typically think of stress as being a risk factor for disease,” said Cole. “And it is, somewhat. But if you actually measure stress, using our best available instruments, it can’t hold a candle to social isolation. Social isolation is the best-established, most robust social or psychological risk factor for disease out there. Nothing can compete.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“Your subjective experience carries more power than your objective situation. If you feel like you’re alone even when you’re in a room filled with the people closest to you, you’re going to have problems. If you feel like you’re well supported even though there’s nobody else in sight; if you carry relationships in your head; if you come at the world with a sense that people care about you, that you’re valuable, that you’re okay; then your body is going to act as if you’re okay—even if you’re wrong about all that.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“We think of kindness as an emotional quality, but it’s also an act of imagination, of extending yourself beyond yourself, of feeling what you do not feel innately by invoking it.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“shared pain is central to what it means to be a human being,” but we are a society that values the anesthetic over pain. We hide our prisons, our sick, our mad, and our poor; we expend colossal resources to live in padded, temperature-controlled environments that make few demands on our bodies or our minds. We come up with elaborate means of not knowing about the suffering of others and of blaming them when we do.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“A growing body of scientific research links antibiotic use in animals to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria: in the animals’ own guts, in the manure that farmers use on crops or store on their land, and in human illnesses as well. Resistant bacteria move from animals to humans in groundwater and dust, on flies, and via the meat those animals get turned into.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face an existential question: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want? If we don’t grapple with that question ourselves, our gadgets will be happy to answer it for us.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“Other mysteries have been untangled. Redheads are known to feel pain especially acutely. This confused researchers until someone realized that the same genetic mutation that causes red hair also increases sensitivity to pain. One study found that redheaded patients require about 20 percent more general anesthesia than brunettes.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“Why would we have evolved this way? The most probable answer is that an organism that responds quickly to fast-changing social environments will more likely survive them. That organism won’t have to wait around, as it were, for better genes to evolve on the species level. Immunologists discovered something similar twenty-five years ago: adapting to new pathogens the old-fashioned way—waiting for natural selection to favor genes that create resistance to specific pathogens—would happen too slowly to counter the rapidly changing pathogen environment. Instead, the immune system uses networks of genes that can respond quickly and flexibly to new threats.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“Torcida told me a creation story of his people and why they consider Mount Gorongosa sacred. In early times, he said, God lived with his people on the mountain. Humans were giants then and not afraid to ask God for special favors. In a drought they would say, Bring us water. The Creator, growing tired of their constant importuning, moved his residence up to heaven. Still the giant people persisted, reaching up from the mountain. At last, to put them in their place, God decided to make them small. Thereafter life became a great deal more difficult—and so it has been to this day.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“We drove through the Old Dominion University campus, where a small permanent lake has formed in the back corner of a huge parking lot. “You can’t pave under water,” he noted dryly, “so this obviously wasn’t under water when this parking lot was paved.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“But with sea levels rising along the East Coast—a natural phenomenon accelerated by climate change—scientists project that in our lifetimes what was once considered a hundred-year flood will happen every three to twenty years.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“And it wasn’t just one warning. Eight years before the Panel on Climate Change’s report, an assessment of global warming’s impacts in New York City had also cautioned of potential flooding. “Basically pretty much everything that we projected happened,” says Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the cochair of the Panel on Climate Change and coauthor of that 2001 report.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“As the mother of the ten-month-old hospitalized in San Diego said, if people want to make that choice, they should go live on an island with its own schools and doctors: “their own little infectious disease island.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“Massachusetts is seeing a surge in the number of unvaccinated children. Last year nearly 1,200 kids entered kindergarten with religious or philosophical vaccine exemptions, roughly double the total about a decade ago.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“Bettinger bought his first genetic test in 2003. A few years later he launched a blog—The Genetic Genealogist—with the aim of explaining the science behind the tests in simple language.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“Even in the heyday of frozen concentrate, the popularity of orange juice rested largely on its image as the ultimate natural beverage, fresh squeezed from a primordial fruit. But the reality is that human intervention has modified the orange for millenniums, as it has almost everything people eat.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“Henry Adams: “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“We and all the others and everyone—regardless of the lives we’d led, and more than anything else, and beyond the agonies and dangers that attend every act and action of ours in this life, we all wanted to live. And that desire, if not the result, is something to think about.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“Up close, aggressive measures are required to be impervious to suffering; you have to convince yourself that people deserve what they’re getting, that their suffering has nothing to do with you. Our capacity for empathy is why the reality of war is usually kept from us or delivered in measured, manipulative doses—our wounded, perhaps, but not theirs, or those of our wounded who make for uplifting stories, but not those who are severely mutilated. And we face choices about how we live, because we are implicated.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“Imagination enlarges us—as though our nervous systems could be made vast and at home in the world, if not at ease with its cruelties and losses. Comfort is dangerous. You can be overwhelmed by suffering, as relief workers sometimes are, and your ability to imagine and engage is finite—as anyone who deletes all those e-mails urging us to act for prisoners or polar bears or disaster victims knows.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“Choosing not to feel pain is choosing a sort of death, a withering away of the expansive self.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“The U.S. government spends billions of dollars on disasters after they happen, but it pinches pennies when it comes to preparing for them.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“Every inappropriate prescription and insufficient dose given in medicine would kill weak bacteria but let the strong survive.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“Your experiences today will influence the molecular composition of your body for the next two to three months,” he tells his audience, “or, perhaps, for the rest of your life. Plan your day accordingly.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“Social isolation is the best-established, most robust social or psychological risk factor for disease out there. Nothing can compete.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want? If we don’t grapple with that question ourselves, our gadgets will be happy to answer it for us.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“Learning requires inefficiency.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“the best instructional programs help students master a subject by encouraging attentiveness, demanding hard work, and reinforcing learned skills through repetition.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014