The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2017 Quotes

“Dung beetles follow the Milky Way; the Cataglyphis desert ant dead-reckons by counting its paces; monarch butterflies, on their thousand-mile, multigenerational flight from Mexico to the Rocky Mountains, calculate due north using the position of the sun, which requires accounting for the time of day, the day of the year, and latitude; honeybees, newts, spiny lobsters, sea turtles, and many others read magnetic fields. - Kim Tingley, The Secrets of the Wave Pilots”
― Hope Jahren, The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2017: A Stellar Anthology of Essays Balancing Research with Humanity―Selected by Hope Jahren

“The best explanation anyone has been able to offer is that the sheer complexity of the climate system renders it unstable—capable of flipping from one state to another,”
― Hope Jahren, The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2017

“From that standpoint, the greatest threat posed by GPS might be that we never do not know exactly where we are.”
― Hope Jahren, The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2017

“Fast food is so addictive because salt, sugar, and fat never appear together in nature.”
― Hope Jahren, The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2017

“Sugar was first introduced to the Western palate via New Guinea about 10,000 years ago.”
― Hope Jahren, The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2017

“In the 1970s, UCLA psychologist Eric Holman discovered that certain sweetened substances could make rodents prefer certain foods by virtue of their presence. For instance, by adding a saccharin to either a banana- or an almond-flavored solution, he was able to make rats prefer the taste of bananas or almonds, respectively, a process known as “flavor nutrient conditioning.” In recent years that work has been picked up with humans. Maltodextrin, a glucose polymer, is imperceptible to most of us. It doesn’t taste sweet. In fact, it doesn’t taste like anything. For it to activate the sweet receptors in the brain, the body must first break it down into glucose. If we mix it into another food, we don’t realize there’s a sugar present, but we still develop a preference for that flavor. In one study, people who tasted foods with maltodextrin mixed in would reliably choose the flavor that had been associated with the polymer in subsequent tests. They had been trained to prefer one food over another by a sort of sensory trickery. Imagine dusting a child’s broccoli florets with maltodextrin and transforming a disliked vegetable into a favorite.”
― Hope Jahren, The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2017

“Our brains form associations between smells and tastes that in turn affect both how much we like a certain food and our bodies’ anticipated response to it (how our brain prepares the rest of the system for the calories it thinks it’s going to consume). Those associations can then be used to trigger the reward system even when the perceived reward is smaller than the actual one. Take vanilla. Vanilla isn’t actually sweet. It’s quite bitter. But in the Western world we have come to associate it with sweet foods, and so to us it signals sweetness. When we smell it, our sweet receptors go on high alert—and the food we eat tastes sweeter than it otherwise would.”
― Hope Jahren, The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2017

“A study published this year in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research found that people tend to feel less full and eat more after consuming a food they perceive as “healthy,” even if it’s identical to one that is marked as unhealthy. For example, they will feel hungrier after a “healthy” cookie—and go on to eat more overall.”
― Hope Jahren, The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2017

“In many countries, including England and the United States, poor diet now rivals smoking as the greatest public health risk. Malnutrition does not necessarily mean lack of food, but rather lack of proper nutrients. You can eat five meals a day and qualify as malnourished. (Case in point: Morgan Spurlock’s near-lethal experiment in Supersize Me.) When it comes to certain nutrients, in fact, an estimated 80 to 90 percent of obese individuals are malnourished. (The same percentage holds for nonobese individuals.)”
― Hope Jahren, The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2017

“The poor, the disenfranchised, those already living on the edge, and those who contributed least to this problem are also those at greatest risk to be harmed by it. That’s not a scientific issue; that’s a moral issue.”
― Hope Jahren, The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2017

“The most dangerous threats to our species are precisely those that are most difficult to visualize: long-term, slow to emerge, amorphous. These threats include not only warming temperatures but also mutating viruses and political corruption and tend to be invisible, dimensionless, and pervasive, like death. Like natural gas.”
― Hope Jahren, The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2017

“Over a 20-year period, methane is estimated to have a warming effect on Earth’s atmosphere 84 times that of carbon dioxide. By that metric, the Aliso Canyon leak produced the same amount of global warming as 1,735,404 cars in a full year. During the four months the leak lasted—25 days longer than the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico—the leak contributed roughly the same amount of warming as the greenhouse-gas emissions produced by the entire country of Lebanon.”
― Hope Jahren, The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2017

“And yet, as Leopold himself later acknowledged, it was misleading. The notion of presettlement America as primitive ignored the long impact Native Americans had had on park landscapes, through hunting and setting fires of their own. It ignored the fact that nature itself, left to its own devices, does not tend toward a steady state—landscapes and ecosystems are always being changed by storms or droughts or fires or floods, or even by the interactions of living things. The ecological scenes the Park Service strove to maintain, from a largely imagined past, were in a way just a new version of the spectacles it had always felt bound to deliver to visitors.”
― Hope Jahren, The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2017