Word: naturalist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and Nov. 24 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, the landmark work in which Darwin laid forth his theory of natural selection. While celebrations have emphasized the British naturalist's giant role in the advancement of human progress, British political journalist Dennis Sewell is not convinced. In a new book, The Political Gene: How Darwin's Ideas Changed Politics, he highlights how often - and how easily - Darwin's big idea has been harnessed for sinister political ends. According to Sewell, evolution...
...lovers began urging that the expanding nation set aside areas of wilderness to remain undeveloped and unspoiled. Their cautionary tale was Niagara Falls, which by the 1860s was "almost ruined" - overrun by hucksters and tourist traps, with nearly every good view privately owned. Unless the government acted, advocates like naturalist John Muir warned, Yosemite and Yellowstone would end up the same way. "To Europeans," reads narrator Peter Coyote, Niagara "was proof that the United States was still a backward, uncivilized nation...
...added in 2007, hugging a mountainside nearby. Facilities include the aptly named Lost World Spa, a heated plunge pool, a games room, a lounge and a library, but O'Reilly's is above all a rambler's paradise, with stunning bird-watching and rainforest walks. When British broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough sought ancient Antarctic beech trees and satin and regent bowerbirds to film for his acclaimed 1979 series Life on Earth, he went to the vast Lamington National Park, which surrounds O'Reilly's and forms part of an Australian World Heritage Site...
Travelers like the erudite British naturalist Redmond O'Hanlon used to come to these parts in search of untouched rainforest and unadulterated indigenous life. His Into the Heart of Borneo recounts a 1983 attempt, with poet pal James Fenton, to "rediscover" the Borneo rhinoceros near Sarawak's mountainous border with Indonesia. O'Hanlon describes wild dance parties at Dayak longhouses, fueled by gallons of tuak, a potent milky rice wine, and enthuses about jaw-dropping tangles of tropical growth along the Rajang and its watery veins, some walled in by lush, 200-ft.-high (60 m) tree canopies...
...only nine days after her victory. "I wish to do what is best for the university," she said at a hastily arranged press conference at the Hay literary festival in Wales, where she is promoting her latest book of verse, Darwin: A Life in Poems. Even before Padel, the naturalist's great-great-granddaughter, wove together fragments of Charles Darwin's writings to create her acclaimed poetic biography, she cited his ideas as an inspiration. "Darwin loved form; he's always saying he loved the rich, complex forms of what he looked at. And that's so like poetry...