The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2015 Quotes

“our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; and that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, culture, and conversations to transform the possibilities for the last chapters of all of our lives.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

“THE SKY ABOVE northeast India looked like mango skin.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2015: Rebecca Skloot's Anthology of Award-Winning Essays on Our Planet's Challenges and Wonders

“Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we’ve committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I’m deep in my own. To say “going through the motions”—this isn’t reduction so much as acknowledgment of the effort—the labor, the motions, the dance—of getting inside another person’s state of heart or mind.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

“You don’t have to spend much time with the elderly or those with terminal illness to see how often medicine fails the people it is supposed to help. The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver’s chance of benefit. These days are spent in institutions—nursing homes and intensive-care units—where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

“Science is an inherently optimistic enterprise, the working assumption being that nature is comprehensible”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

“Field studies have shown that ravens “call” wolves to large animals they find dead. Why invite wolves to dinner? Because, unlike birds of prey, the raven lacks a bill or talons designed to open a carcass. Someone else—wolf or human hunter or motor vehicle—needs to do the job. Magpies have been observed working with coyotes in much the same way as ravens work with wolves, and the canine hunters have learned to listen when corvids call.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

“In 2012 researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute showed that two hours of exposure to a bright tablet screen at night, like an iPad or a Kindle, reduced melatonin levels by 22 percent.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

“Today an estimated 13 percent of birds are threatened, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. So are 25 percent of mammals and 41 percent of amphibians, in large part because of human activity. Hydropower and road construction imperil China’s giant pandas. The northern bald ibis, once abundant in the Middle East, has been driven almost to extinction by hunting, habitat loss, and the difficulties of doing conservation work in war-torn Syria. Hunting and the destruction of wetlands for agriculture drove the population of North America’s tallest bird, the whooping crane, into the teens before stringent protections along the birds’ migratory route and wintering grounds helped the wild flock build back to a few hundred. Little brown bats are dying off in the United States and Canada from a fungus that might have been imported from Europe by travelers. Of some 300 species of freshwater mussels in North America, fully 70 percent are extinct, imperiled, or vulnerable, thanks to the impacts of water pollution from logging, dams, farm runoff, and shoreline development.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

“I saw his broad head, with a dollop of hair on its crown, silhouetted by the stars and moon out the window behind him.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2015: Rebecca Skloot's Anthology of Award-Winning Essays on Our Planet's Challenges and Wonders

“But it’s exhausting to keep tabs on how much someone is feeling for you. It can make you forget that they feel too.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

“As in all good training, in the end it doesn’t much matter who trained whom; we all got what we wanted.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

“People butcher history all the time,”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

“we have to be cautious when we interpret animal behaviors, especially when we want a behavior to mean something in particular. Wanting is a drug, a hallucinogen.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

“People sometimes spend thousands of dollars treating fish they won at the fair or bought for less than $5. Because they love them.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2015: Rebecca Skloot's Anthology of Award-Winning Essays on Our Planet's Challenges and Wonders

“We have room to act and shape our stories—although as we get older, we do so within narrower and narrower confines.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

“A casual observer can testify only to the moment. And what one sees will always be colored by what one longs to see.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

“for an animal that must kill to live, it makes sense for the hunt and the kill to be pleasurable. If you don’t kill, you don’t eat, and if you don’t eat, you die.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

“Science is an inherently optimistic enterprise, the working assumption being that nature is comprehensible; mysteries can be solved; we can make things better.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

“living”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

“Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see:”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015