Author David Quammen at NEIDL Symposium
Original article from: BU Research posted on September 14, 2016. by Sara Rimer
On assignment for National Geographic 16 years ago, science writer David Quammen spent eight weeks following a field biologist and conservationist named Mike Fay as he made an epic trek across the Congo, bushwhacking his way through swamps and forests. Fay was gathering data documenting the richness of the ecosystems he was passing through. A team of Bantu and Pygmy men carried tents and food. They were all sitting around the campfire one night, Quammen writes, when “there comes a weird, violent, whooshing noise that rises mystifyingly toward crescendo, and then crests—as, whoa, an elephant charges through camp, like a freight train with tusks…Anybody hurt? No. Dinner is served and the pachyderm in the kitchen is forgotten.” Fay walked for 456 days and 2,000 miles, in shorts and Teva sandals. Quammen, who adopted Fay’s uniform on the trail, made periodic trips in and out of the Republic of the Congo and Gabon to join him, getting to field sites by dugout canoe, bush plane, and helicopter.
The journey illustrates one of Quammen’s principles of science journalism: go there. A contributing writer for National Geographic and an author, whose books include The Song of the Dodo (1996); The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (2006); Spillover (2012), about the science, history, and human impact of emerging diseases; Ebola (2014); and his latest book, Yellowstone: A Journey through America’s Wild Heart (August 2016), Quammen has been going there for over three decades. In his quest to explore the natural world and how humans are connected to that world, Quammen has gone to the Russian Arctic with a boatload of Russian and American biologists, to the jungles of Indonesia with park rangers who track Komodo dragons, to biosafety level 4 labs where virologists study Ebola and other dangerous pathogens.