The Best Australian Science Writing 2016

By Jo Chandler

From the furthest reaches of the universe to the microscopic world of our genes, science offers writers the kind of scope other subjects simply can't match. Good writing about science can be moving, funny, exhilarating or poetic, but it will always be honest and rigorous about the research that underlies it. Now in its sixth year, The Best Australian Science Writing 2016 brings together knowledge and insights from Australia's brightest thinkers as they explore the intricacies of the world around us. This lively collection of essays covers a wide range of subjects and challenges our perceptions of the world and how we exist within it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Feb 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781742242606

Book preview

them.

Introduction

Jo Chandler

In the fall of 2015 I rode the Adirondack train from New York up to Montreal, then picked up a rental car and headed back south chasing drifts of fading ‘peak leaf’ foliage, navigating by colour a meandering trail of New England byways.

After several days cruising Vermont, soul-gorged on a wholesome spectrum of pumpkin and maple, I tracked out to the Maine coast and down US-1, and quickly wished I hadn’t. ‘America’s original Main Street’ was for the most part a boulevard of vacationland banality – lobster joints and laundromats and motel rooms piled one upon the other, all craning for an Atlantic glimpse.

Then Rachel Carson, long-time heroine, appeared out of nowhere and saved the day.

A hasty U-turn delivered me into a wildlife refuge dedicated to the writer, scientist and ecologist who inspired the modern environmental movement. It stretches down the coast under Kennebunkport, a clapboard fishing village quaint enough to lure a prize catch of wealthy weekenders. The Bush family’s summer pile is here, perched out on a discreetly fortified promontory. World leaders have come to stay, guests of two generations of presidents. Did they find time, I wondered, to contemplate the clouds of birds surfing the currents, or the waders plying the shallows preserved in Carson’s memory? Would that all our leaders were prescribed regular doses of wilderness, reminders of their stewardship of the natural world.

It was Carson who, through the 1950s and ’60s, used the language of the storyteller rather than the scientist to beguile audiences through the US and beyond into a new awareness of the fragile interconnectedness of plants and creatures and landscapes and oceans, explaining how ‘each species has its own ties to others and … are all related’.

The Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge testifies to this entwined reality, estuaries coiling through red and gold forest into tidal saltmarsh, coastal meadows giving way to rocky shorelines, glimpses of the land before our time. It today provides critical habitat and winter pickings for a long list of migratory birds, several of them perilously endangered. Carson saw more than beauty in this landscape: ‘In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the Earth.’

Carson (1907–64) set out in college to be a writer, but veered into biology, then melded both passions to ‘present deeply intricate scientific material in clear poetic language that could captivate her readers and pique their interest in the natural world’. She worked as a science communicator for the fledgling US Fish and Wildlife Service (the quote at the beginning of the paragraph is from her biography on their website) and as an author, producing a trilogy of popular books on marine science before her 1962 blockbuster Silent Spring exposed the devastating effects of pesticides and underwrote the creation of the Environment Protection Authority. Time magazine names her among the 25 most powerful women of the past century.

Back from my travels, as I settle down to the task of assembling this collection, Carson keeps showing up, a bird on my shoulder. Each of the scientists and writers whose work is included in these pages channel her, wittingly or not, when they strive to share their sense of wonder at the discipline they explore – cosmology, glaciology, biology, technology, archaeology, astronomy – en route walking us through questions of genetics, physics, chemistry and ethics, even contemplation of that amorphous, most mysterious universe that exists as a one-of-a-kind within each of us: our consciousness.

There’s more than an echo of Carson’s spirit in the story of amateur naturalist Edith Coleman told by Susan Double. While Coleman was born a generation before Carson, and trained not as a scientist but as a schoolteacher, she too was compelled to write from a deep, curious, patient engagement with the natural world, asking questions and answering them with painstaking observation.

She too rocked the scientific establishment with the novelty and insight of her findings – a mother from suburban Melbourne whose keen analysis and experiments solved a mystery that had baffled Charles Darwin. Unlike Carson, her achievements have remained largely unrecognised outside an expert coterie. Hopefully Double’s seductive tale of raw desire and cunning deceit, and of the extraordinary woman who exposed it, will do something to right that situation.

Another Carson antecedent and similarly resonant voice on tangled realities is Japanese thinker, scientist, poet and ‘faithful recorder’ of nature Kenji Miyazawa (1896–33). His prescience and popular resurgence is examined by playwright and Japanese cultural scholar Roger Pulvers, who paints an intriguing picture of a gentle, contemplative intellect weaving threads of history, physics and the organic and inorganic realms into a ‘net of interdependence’.

‘If there is a single message in his works, it is this: if we do not listen to the voices of all natural phenomena, then we have no one to blame but ourselves for our inevitable fall.’

*****

Just now, as the measurements of human interference with biological and atmospheric systems continue their terrifying trajectories, there is no comfort in Miyazawa’s enunciation of an unforgiving Earth.

Indeed, we’re collectively betting the farm that Gaia will cut us a little more slack. But dispatches from the scientific front line – including several presented here as essays and reports and tales of derring-do from the field – indicate her patience has run out.

One of the most unsettling anecdotes comes from writer Ashley Hay as she time travels through Australia’s magnificent native forests. Hay is something of a gumnut tragic. Almost 15 years ago she published a book called Gum: The Story of Eucalypts and their Champions, which finished, she recalls, ‘with a line about eucalypts being adaptable, diverse, tenacious, interactive, opportunistic – much like the people whose stories they defined.’

But here she stands in a forest on the edge of the Blue Mountains that has been rigged up to breathe in the conditions of a future Earth, the breeze carrying twice the concentration of CO2 as found before we entered the Industrial Age. This experiment is contrived to help us anticipate the ecological and environmental consequences when these conditions come to bear – a reality that looks likely, if not inevitable, despite humanity’s belated strides forward at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in late 2015.

Many eucalypt species, for all their apparent rugged endurance, tolerate a very narrow range of conditions. Hay’s essay picks up on research that has long foretold that many species are on track to be exposed to temperatures and rainfalls they’ve never before had to endure. ‘What would happen to our sponge – our lungs?’ She doesn’t pose this as rhetorical hand-wringing, but as scientific enquiry, enlisting it as the jumping off point for an excursion deep into the forests of the future.

The methodology of the science Hay cites is enlisted frequently in the journals these days as researchers clamber to plot the known tolerances of flora and fauna against the climatic scenarios we are cooking up. I’ve written articles about similar work in the cloud forests of Far North Queensland that grimly predicts the imminent expiry of species of frogs, possums and birds as the conditions that have nurtured them since Gondwana are lost. In 2016 we have seen the tragic validation of this approach in the global coral bleaching event that has devastated the pristine northern swathe of the Great Barrier Reef, just as scientists predicted it would back in 1999.

Efforts to model future climate rely on our understanding of the deep past, and to that end we have a story from Adam Morton explaining an epic effort by glaciologists to dig up a million years of climate history from the remote interior of the East Antarctic plateau.

Elsewhere, one of the expeditioners leading that endeavour, Tas van Ommen, provides a first-hand account of another of his projects, surveying the greenless, treeless vastness of the icecap. Van Ommen is part of an international team that has spent consecutive summers cruising 150 000 kilometres of transects in a workhorse DC-3 loaded up with radar, laser, geomagnetic and gravity instruments. Their mission is to divine the slippery mechanics of the ice sheet by figuring out what lies beneath. ‘And it turns out that East Antarctica needs careful watching.’

One of their concerns is to ‘see’ the hidden underbelly of the monster Totten Glacier, which satellite measurements show has been thinning and dropping around 2 metres per year. What they’ve discovered is a bedrock topography that dips in a vast basin under sea level, making the Totten and the interior it ‘plugs’ much more vulnerable to warming than previously recognised, recasting perceptions about the stability of the sleeping behemoth of East Antarctica – the greatest body of fresh water on the planet, with potential to contribute 3.5 metres to sea level rise in coming centuries.

Science writing, like science, confronts, discomforts, frightens, challenges, evolves. As Ashley Hay explains, this last is ‘one of the most captivating and seductive things about the nature of scientific enquiry: it is cumulative, incremental; information grows as new technologies come online; new questions can be posed, new discoveries come to light. What we know continues to expand as each new researcher devotes attention, imagination, to something and frames a new hypothesis, and as each external variable leans in and exerts its own pressure’.

And so we can have an article by a Nobel Laureate, Peter Doherty, shirt-fronting science deniers with the declaration that reality cannot be denied. And then have Margaret Wertheim delving deep into the archives of science and philosophy to turn reality on its head with her reflections on ‘the mystery of subjective experience and its attendant problem of consciousness’.

Equally it reassures, fortifies, inspires. Leah Kaminsky, writer and physician, displays for us her own ‘Scrabble tray of genetic letters’ and contemplates a future of genetically intimate, yet impersonal, medicine and a 200-year lifespan. Fiona McMillan sings a lullaby to her newborn, and joins the choir of mothers through deep history, connecting the dots of human evolution and language and the modern blight of obstetric emergencies (leaving me with a question – have we hit an evolutionary cul de sac?). Alice Gorman directs our gaze to Pluto, unveiled by the New Horizons flyby mission, and asks how ‘the act of focusing, through the feeble jellies of our eyes’ on this distant planet transforms the universe.

Then, lest we get carried away with ourselves, Elmo Keep takes us on a hot and dusty, humbling tour of the follies of humanity’s quest for immortality in the Nevada desert.

I’m not a scientist: I’m a lover of stories, and a storyteller. I read, research and write popular science for the same reasons I turned off US-1 to wallow in the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge.

To be awed, nourished, comforted by nature.

To be humbled, put into cosmic perspective, an inhabitant of ‘an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people’. (Thank you Carl Sagan.)

To find solace in the best endeavours of humans in deciphering the world we live in – you’ve got to credit the ingenuity, even when it is tracking the stupidity.

* * * * *

In recent years, as the climate wars reached what we can only pray was a screaming crescendo, Rachel Carson was posthumously hauled into the skirmish as cannon fodder.

Her eminence as an environmental evangelist saw her demonised by the well-oiled machinery of the anti-environment, anti-science commentariat. In their landmark 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway devoted a chapter to explaining revisionist attacks on Carson, which blame her for millions of malaria deaths as a consequence of the banning of the pesticide DDT – falsely, they argue. (The pesticide was banned because it was losing its potency due to mosquito resistance, not because of the alarm she raised about its accumulation in the food chain.)

When the Paris Climate Agreement was wrangled in December 2015, setting out a global plan to put the world on track to try to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees, the hope was that it would unleash enough momentum to crash through, if not quell, orchestrated science denial.

Even if this proves to be the case, science’s standing is diminished in an era of pseudoscience and ‘truthiness’ – ‘the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true’ – a word credited to US comedian Stephen Colbert.

At a commencement address at the California Institute of Technology earlier this year, Atul Gawande – a surgeon and staff writer for the New Yorker – dispatched graduates into ‘the scientific community, arguably the most powerful collective enterprise in human history’ with some reflections on the modern mistrust of science.

He cited a US survey tracking the erosion of public faith in the scientific community. In 1974, conservatives with college degrees had the highest level of trust in science and scientists; today, they have the lowest.

This is despite science allowing us ‘to nearly double our lifespan in the past century, to increase our global abundance, and to deepen our understanding of the nature of the universe,’ Gawande reflected.

Even where the knowledge provided by science is overwhelming, people often resist it – sometimes outright deny it. Many people continue to believe, for instance, despite massive evidence to the contrary, that childhood vaccines cause autism (they do not); that people are safer owning a gun (they are not); that genetically modified crops are harmful (on balance, they have been beneficial); that climate change is not happening (it is).

So what, Gawande asked, is a science believer to do? ‘Is the future just an unending battle of warring claims? Not necessarily.’ He cites the ‘debunking’ analysis and form guide developed by Australian researchers John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky in a section on tactics that can be deployed to build trust.

‘Rebutting bad science may not be effective, but asserting the true facts of good science is. And including the narrative that explains them is even better.’

It’s all about storytelling. In this volume we celebrate good science, the thrills-and-chills blockbuster narrative of humanity’s quest to figure out everything, from our deep cellular life to our place in the cosmos to counting the cost of – and curtailing – our fossil fuel addiction.

Transforming the bush

Paul Daley

These cows are in no hurry. Each just meanders to the dairy, all rolling hindquarters, swishing tails and loping heads, the blue-black and tan Rorschach ink-blot patching of their hides vivid against the washed-out Australian summer light. They stop as they please along the way. Chew cud. Moo. Drop pats. Moo again. They nudge the soft earth or a companion before snorting and continuing on up through the paddocks to the shed.

It’s milking time – just as it’s always milking time in this dairy for about 360 Fresians at Camden, where the outer orbit of Sydney gives way to the gentle rise that becomes the Central Highlands. These cows are not held to the human clock and milked according to the dairy farmer’s traditionally antisocial (for both people and cows) timetable at the crack of dawn and again dusk. And they don’t have to line up for hours, either, cramped in a race, their udders bursting, in order for a dairy worker to quickly wash their teats, apply the suction cups, extract their milk, disinfect and send them on their way.

Induced to wander to the dairy only by the irresistible promise of fresh pasture beyond, these animals are milked according to a pattern that largely meets their rhythm of grazing, watering, resting and lactating.

They are not herded or cajoled in any way to head for the shed. There are no dogs snapping at stragglers’ fetlocks. It’s rare for people to bother them at all. Indeed, there’s scarcely a person in sight on this dairy farm, situated in the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries Elizabeth Macarthur Agricultural Institute.

There are no people about because, once the cows reach the shed, they effectively milk themselves in what is the world’s first robotic rotary milking dairy. The result of a collaboration between the Swedish dairy equipment producer DeLeval, Dairy Australia and the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Veterinary Science, the Camden property is host to the research-and-development prototype FutureDairy, which can automatically milk up to ninety cows an hour.

Two commercial models of FutureDairy have been operating on large-scale Australian dairy farms, one in Tasmania and the other in Victoria, since 2012. About another thirty-six commercial farms in Australia employ the smaller-scale robotic technologies of other innovators to do what has hitherto been the backbreaking manual and, later, semi-automated, work of dairy farmers for well over two centuries.

While the name FutureDairy is freighted with prescience for an era yet to be reached, it is, in fact, already arriving and transforming the economies and lifestyles of the early adopters. Its positive implications for dairy production are no less profound for animal welfare and, of course, for the wellbeing of the dairy farmer – a person who, almost invariably, endures the unforgiving rigidities and relentless physical work of milking cows by virtue of birth rather than choice.

No less acute or obvious are the potential ramifications for the dairy farm labourer. On a conventional Australian dairy farm the rule of thumb is one human for about 100 cattle. So, a farm with 400 cows would probably employ four people, nearly three quarters of whose time is spent milking (the rest would be dedicated to feeding, feed production and animal welfare).

But at FutureDairy each of the cows, once in the dairy yard, moves onto one of sixteen milking points on the rotary platform. As the platform gently turns, robotic arms wash the teats and attach the cups. The milk is extracted, the teats disinfected and the cups flushed. About eight minutes later the cow steps off the revolving platform and into a yard, where it receives a feed reward before being allowed into fresh pasture. Each cow is identified by a dongle around its neck that electronically records and transmits the time and volume of its last milking.

Sensors on the drafting gates that separate the dairy yards from the pasture automatically read each cow’s data. Those who’ve been milked too recently are sent back to pasture instead of onto the robotic milker.

The farmer can control all of this remotely, check yields and production mechanics on an iPad and need only attend the dairy in case of a malfunction, following an automated phone call or text.

Not a single person need touch a cow during any 24-hour milking cycle.

* * * * *

In Australian agriculture you don’t need to imagine the future to be able to see a part of it.

In a decade or two more of the cows than not on big dairy farms will probably milk themselves thanks to systems such as FutureDairy. Roving surface-based machines and drones, with their capacity to efficiently survey and even herd animals from above, will threaten the livelihoods of that already dwindling breed, the stockman. Not to mention the kelpie.

Global Positioning Systems (GPS) technology is already the norm on many farms. Applied to traditional farming equipment such as tractors, harvesters, ploughs and sprayers, it has enhanced labour efficiency and helped curb costly waste by enabling large-scale crop farmers to harvest and spray fields with pesticide and herbicide with centimetre accuracy.

Such traditional, driven machines – even those adapted with GPS – are, however, already threatened with obsolescence. Big, driverless machines, including tractors, will be a reality on some Australian farms this decade. While they will represent an obvious next phase in the evolution of that titan of rural production, the tractor, first commercially introduced to Australia by AH McDonald in 1908, people-less vehicles will not represent the cutting edge of agricultural technology and production.

That will most likely be left to the robots. Robots that can plant, fertilise, spray, weed, monitor and ultimately harvest, pack and transport crops will inhabit the countryside. While the drones hum overhead other remotely controlled intelligent surface robots will be able to inspect and herd farm animals (the prototype of one, ‘the Shrimp’, has already been tested with the FutureDairy herd at Camden).

Australia’s 2013 National Food Plan outlined a Commonwealth ambition to increase by 45 per cent the value of this country’s agricultural and food related exports by 2025 – a figure that can only be achieved with the continual advent of new technologies such as robots. In 2010–11 the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that in just one year the area covered by farming in Australia had increased by 3 per cent to 409.7 million hectares, while the land mass dedicated to cropping went up 24 per cent to 32 million hectares. About 53 per cent of the continent’s total land mass is used for agriculture.

Inverse to the significant rise in agricultural production, more and more Australians are leaving rural and remote areas for the big cities and urban centres. Almost 89 per cent of us live in major cities and inner regional areas.

Despite Australians’ sentimental and cultural attachment to those vast expanses of uninhabited outback, stock runs, russet fields and verdant crop lines that we romantically generalise as ‘the bush’, Australians have always predominantly been most comfortable dwelling and working on the coastal, urban plains where most major cities and centres are situated. While most Australians lived outside the cities at Federation in 1901, by 1908 only four in ten people lived rurally. By 2001, just 14 per cent of Australians lived outside ‘urban’ areas, which the ABS defines as a ‘population cluster’ of one thousand people.

Despite Australia’s agricultural output as a proportion of the economy being among the highest in the OECD, the number of farmers has been in steady decline since the 1960s as more and more small family operators sold out to large-scale businesses.

According to the bureau yearbooks, the proportion of workers employed in Australian agriculture fell from 30.2 per cent in 1911 to 4.3 per cent in 1996. The World Bank recorded a further significant 25 per cent drop to 3.3 per cent in the decade and a half to 2009. During the three decades to 2011 the number of Australian farmers declined by 106 200 or 40 per cent. This translated, in more starkly human terms, to an average of 294 farmers leaving their properties each month.

The human implication of all of this is clear: despite Australia’s reliance on locally produced food and its economic dependence on agricultural exports, the numbers of small and medium-sized farmers living off the land is dwindling rapidly. Rural communities all across Australia are shrinking along with the ancillary businesses and services – main street shops, doctors’ surgeries, schools, car dealerships, places of worship, community centres and sporting clubs – that have traditionally served them.

Yes, while it produces most of Australia’s food needs, contributes handsomely to gross domestic product and export earnings, the bush is being progressively hollowed out of its people. By the time, in a future this side of the horizon, the cows are milking themselves – when commercial applications of the Shrimp are herding the sheep and cattle, when few tractors carry drivers, and when robots are tending fields and harvesting apple and pear orchards devoid of people – what will remain of this country’s supposed connection to the land?

The next question, of course, is will Australians in the cities still be willing to spend their taxes on supporting services including roads and hospitals, the maintenance of the National Broadband Network, telephone systems and publicly funded transport? Will city people still think it is fair that it costs the same to post a letter from capital city to capital city, as it does from Sydney or Melbourne, as to a more difficult-to-reach rural hamlet?

Will the bush be reduced to a vast mechanised place of scant human habitation beyond those specialists who service the robots – a place that exists primarily to service the cities and the export markets?

Non-Indigenous Australia’s emotional nexus with the land – with its roots in masculine pioneering stories and blinkered notions of benign settlement, and for all its subsequent embodiment in the over-mythologised, stylised story of Anzac – is already stretched with the emergence of each new urban generation.

Robots could well see it broken and ‘the bush’ largely reduced to a state of imagination.

* * * * *

In the late 1980s Phil Koshitzke left the family wheat farm at Warracknabeal in Victoria’s Wimmera district to study at university in Melbourne. He returned in 1997 with a doctorate in aeronautical engineering to become the fifth generation of his family to grow wheat on land that his original settler forebears began working in the 1870s. ‘I suppose I was a farmer who went and got an education – not a doctor who went farming,’ he says.

He explains succinctly the constant exodus of farmers from, and the continual amalgamation of, properties in the Wimmera, in the context of the evolution of automation, beginning with the tractor and combine harvester in newly federated Australia. ‘When this area was settled each farmer was allowed to select 320 acres only. Ever since the original settlement, as farming practices became more automated, the size of farm holdings has continuously expanded about every score [twenty years]. For each generation, two farms would combine into one and this trend continues today. My local area had sixty children enrolled at the primary school in my grandfather’s time. Now it’s about a handful of kids in total,’ he says.

Institutions adapt accordingly, he says. Or shrink and eventually die.

Sport, including various football codes, women’s basketball and netball competitions – with their legend-forging long historical inter-town rivalries – has traditionally been a community and social glue in the bush. But it’s getting increasingly difficult to field