Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
I had no idea Steinbeck was interested in science. I thought he was a novelist of human rights and the American working class. This book is the log of a journey he made with a scientist he befriended while he was living in Monterey in southern California. They go on this boys’ trip, hiring a retired sardine fishing boat for nine weeks and going to collect invertebrates – crabs, lobsters, snails.
What made you choose the Steinbeck book?
This was recommended to me by my marine conservationist brother. I had no idea Steinbeck was interested in science. I thought he was a novelist of human rights and the American working class. This book is the log of a journey he made with a scientist he befriended while he was living in Monterey in southern California. They go on this boys’ trip, hiring a retired sardine fishing boat for nine weeks and collecting invertebrates – crabs, lobsters, snails. It’s about amateur enthusiasm for the natural world and Steinbeck is a truly great science writer. He conveys a boyish enthusiasm for nature but some truly grown-up observations about man’s place in it – a real prescience for an environmental movement that hadn’t arrived when this book was written in 1941. It’s part Three Men in a Boat and part serious natural philosophy. It made me think about my relationship with nature and that you don’t need to be a scientist to be interested in the natural world.
He describes a memorable study he’d heard about where someone sits in the boat department of Sears and Roebuck and watches men walk by a fishing boat. The vast majority of men that pass the boat tap on its hull – quite involuntarily – and he wonders if it’s some innate memory in man of the ability to survive on water, a primal understanding of the healthy hollow ring a carved canoe has to have in order to float. He talks about the evolutionary connection between man and water, stuff that Dawkins would probably hate. A scientist couldn’t do this because there is no mechanistic explanation, no direct evidence and yet we know it’s there. So he speculates. It’s a great bit of science writing and people who aren’t scientists should read it. It’s open to everyone!
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Tom Clarke is Channel 4’s science correspondent. A scientist turned journalist, he has covered energy and the environment in the frozen North, met some of the world's most endangered whales threatened by oil exploration in Russia’s Far East, and followed the growing pains of the UK’s landmark Climate Change Bill. In 2007 Tom reported and presented a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation into the shadowy world of carbon offsetting. Most recently he was electrocuted (voluntarily) in Amsterdam in an attempt to explain an experiment designed to erase fearful memories.
