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Lecture on big predators in history, culture

Published April 5, 2004; Category: EVENTS

Science writer to discuss animals that eat humans

An annual environmental-awareness lecture will feature David Quammen, author of Monster of God, a book about the place in nature and culture of big predators that can and do eat humans.

David Quammen

The George Link Jr. Environmental Awareness Lecture, titled "Man-Eating Predators in the Jungles of History and  the Mind," at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 7, in Filene Auditorium, is sponsored by the Environmental Studies Program.

Quammen, a Yale graduate and former Rhodes Scholar, studied literature - William Faulkner to be exact - during  his graduate studies at Oxford. After trying his hand at fiction writing, he turned to science writing and found  greater success. He now travels around the world gathering scientific, cultural, and literary information about  specific aspects of nature for his science books, the first of which was The Song of the Dodo.

His latest science book, Monster of God, published last year by W.W. Norton & Company, deals with the relationship of four predators - Indian lions, Australian crocodiles, Russian brown bears and Siberian tigers - with authoritarian governments and with primitive tribes. It also documents the place of these predators in literature, mythology and religion.

Quammen wrote a science column, "Natural Acts," for Outside magazine for 15 years, gaining "a reputation with readers for making natural science understandable and relevant, and with scientists for getting it right," according to David Sumner, former Assistant Professor of English at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, who  interviewed Quammen in 2001, when Quammen was writing Monster of God. (See "Quoting Quammen" below)

Quammen twice received the National Magazine Award for his columns at Outside, which are collected in two  volumes, titled Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature and The Flight of the Iguana: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature.

Quammen now lives in Bozeman, Mont.

By AMANDA WEATHERMAN

QUOTING QUAMMEN

• "I literally had not published a newspaper story, a magazine story, anything except in a student literary magazine before I published my first novel, with a good publishing house, in 1970, a book called To Walk the  Line, published by Knopf the year I got out of college."
• "When I first moved to Montana in '73, I had a fly rod and a Volkswagon bus and a box of books and a couple of  thousand dollars as a nest egg and a big, ambitious novel that I wanted to write.... I didn't know anybody in  the state of Montana.... It was in some ways a really wonderful, exciting time. I was 25. And in other ways it  was kind of a lonely, miserable time because I was trying to start over again as a writer.
• "Much, much too much, environmental writing is the same old sawing on the same old fiddle, preaching to the converted.... That is just not something I want to do. It just doesn't sound like any valuable way to spend the  time.... My primary responsibility is to be a good writer and go wherever that takes me."

DAVID QUAMMEN, in a 2001 interview. Excerpted with permission from "Facts, Shapes, and Our Relationship with the  Landscape: A Conversation with David Quammen," Weber Studies, Vol. 19, Fall 2001. To read the interview, go to http://weberstudies.weber.edu/, click on "search," and type "David Quammen" in the search box. The first  link leads to the interview.

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