HOW THE CANDIDATES WOULD HANDLE ENERGY ISSUES

MSN Money asked me to write a series of pieces about where the presidential candidates stand on major issues.  Here’s the one about energy.  Check out the MSN Money web site for video clips of the candidates and other pertinent add-ons.

            Energy prices and policy are one of the most divisive issues out there, with middle class voters growing angrier and more frightened every time they fill up a gas tank or think about heating their homes this winter. Candidates John McCain and Barack Obama have both ramped up their rhetoric on energy issues as they struggle to set themselves apart.  But both have also flip-flopped.  So when it comes to energy, what do these guys really believe?

GRUNTING FOR WIGGLERS

Flags mark spots where worms emerged for grunter Gary Revell.

In my book Spineless Wonders–Strange Tales of the Invertebrate World (Holt, 1996), I wrote about making a living as a worm grunter. You can read part of my account below.  And then you can read what you’ve been waiting for all these years, a new scientific explanation of the secret logic of worm grunting.

 

It’s a moment charged with nature’s drama, akin to David Attenborough creeping up on the mountain gorillas of Rwanda.  I am thrashing through the piney flatwoods of the Florida Panhandle, into the secret realm of the great shaper of the earth.  Listen!

RUNT-runt, RUNT-runt, RUNT-runt.  It’s a sound like a wild hog wallowing, somewhere out here in the Apalachicola National Forest.  Over that way!

A few steps more and, through the burnt gallberry brush, I spy a man, grinning and sweating, slashed head-to-toe with soot.  He is on his knees in front of a black stake, called a stob, hammered into the ground.  He takes a shiny automobile leafspring and strokes the flat surface down rhythmically across the top of the stob:  RUNT-runt, RUNT-runt, RUNT-runt.  He pauses, listens, then varies the rhythm, catching the stob on a backstroke.  The earth quakes around him.  It looks like some primitive cargo cult ritual.  In fact, the man is calling earthworms.  Weirder still, he is making a living calling earthworms–or as they say hereabouts “grunting.”

As he works, Ruben Hill’s glance darts around the floor of the forest

GREAT MOMENTS IN PUBLIC RELATIONS HISTORY

In a story today about banking turmoil in North Carolina, the New York Times buried this gem on an inside page:

In Raleigh, executives at RBC Bank canceled the parachuters that were supposed to appear at the grand opening of its new headquarters, saying it was not an appropriate time to have people jumping off a bank building.

No word, sadly, on whether the parachutes would have been golden.

DARWIN’S REVENGE: DISPLACING RICHARD OWEN

If you read my piece on the discovery of the gorilla (below), you will know I have been having fun trashing the nineteenth-century paleontologist Richard Owen. This is a related piece that I wrote for the Atlantic Monthly’s web site.

One does not normally see 2000 lb. statues in marble and bronze playing musical chairs. But that’s what happened recently at the Natural History Museum in London, with Charles Darwin and his main adversary as the only players.

The museum was designed in the Victorian era as “a temple to nature,” and it feels like a cathedral. There’s a main hall that looks a lot like a nave, and at the far end, there’s a statue on a stairway landing below a stained glass window, in a position that might otherwise be occupied by Jesus Christ. For 90 years, until this past May, a bronze image of Richard Owen, the great nineteenth-century anatomist who founded the museum, stood in this place of honor.

Owen is remembered nowadays mainly for having coined the term dinosaur (meaning “terrible lizard”), but he also wrote important papers on animals from the moa and the pearly nautilus to the ground sloth. When Charles Darwin returned from his round-the-world travels on H.M.S. Beagle, he handed over the sloth and other fossils for Owen to analyze.

But the two men later fell out over Darwin’s evolutionary theories. Owen was a social climber and a schemer. If T. H. Huxley was “Darwin’s bulldog,” then Owen was the snarling lapdog of the establishment opposition. And he waged a long losing battle against the Darwinian revolution. Darwin, who seldom had an unkind word for anyone, once remarked, “The Londoners say he is mad with envy because my book is so talked about. It is painful to be hated in the intense degree with which Owen hates me.”

Owen soon had further grounds for stoking his hatred:

HEART OF DARWIN

This is a travel piece I wrote (and forgot to post here) for the September Atlantic Monthly.  It‘s from a trip to London, where I was doing research at the Linnean Society for a new book, and found myself thinking a lot about Darwin, in anticipation of his 200th birthday in February 2009, and the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species in November 2009.  

 

In paintings and sculptures from the last years of his life, the great naturalist Charles Darwin gives the impression of a man deeply wishing he could be somewhere else. At the National Portrait Gallery in London, he keeps his rumpled hat clutched in one hand, ready to bolt for the door. At the Natural History Museum, he has his coat folded across his lap, as if yearning to shed the burden of fame and slip quietly into oblivion. On the ten-pound note, his eyes are haunted beneath a vast furrowed brow, and there’s dismay behind that Biblical white beard.

This image of Darwin is everywhere, and that seemed to me, on a recent trip to London, to be a pity. Even the founding father of evolutionary theory was not born a gloomy old man. I began to wonder if it might be possible to walk Darwin’s London and get a sense of him when he was still young and caught up in the fray.  The landmarks of his life turned out to be all around.  One day, for instance,