The Nature Pages

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	The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2001 by Edward O. Wilson Houghton Mifflin, 2001
	As a form of expression, science writing occupies a vulnerable middle ground between the technical scentific reports found in professional journals and the broad fictions of speculative literature. Scientists may view these writers as amateurs and the literary critics consider them journalists, but they provide a vital bridge between two branches of the same culture.		The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002
	Nature writers work in a similar territory, though closer to the literary pole, according to Edward O. Wilson, who edited the 2001 edition of this annual anthology. "With roots going back to nineteenth-century romanticism, it cultivates the facts and theories of science but relies heavily on personal narrative and aesthetic expression," he explains.		The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003
	The narratives of both science and nature writers not only help us understand the universe and our role in it, but they are also critical to our survival as individuals and as a species.		The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004
	"Science, like the rest of culture, is based on the manufacture of narrative," writes Wilson. "That is entirely natural, and in a profound sense it is a Darwinian necessity. We all live by narrative, every day and every minute of our lives. Narrative is the human way of working through a chaotic and unforgiving world bent on reduciing our bodies to malodorous catabolic molecules. It delays the personal surrender of our atoms and compounds back to the environment for the assembly of more humans, and ants."		The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005
Search our selection of new, used and out-of-print books.	As the recipient of the highest U.S. awards for both science (National Medal of Science) and literature (Pulitzer Prize), Wilson was uniquely qualified to select the writings for this collection, which includes pieces published in 2000 by Barbara Kingsolver, Edward Hoagland and Jane Goodall. Weighted in favor of science writing like Bill Joy's essay on technology ("Why the Future Doesn't Need Us") and David Berlinski's discourse on the algorithm ("Iterations of Immortality"), it does include Hoagland's essay on "Harpy Eagles" and Ted Kerasote's "Killing at Dawn" about Yellowstone wolves. Subjects and issues outside the Americas occupy the attention of Goodall, Kingsolver, David Quammen, Mark Cherirngton and others.		Hoagland on Nature: Essays
	As evidenced here, the best American science and nature writers of the year 2000 traveled widely and returned home with serious social and environmental issues to share.