From the Editor: Hey, Hey, We're the Monkeys

ix HEY, HEY, WE’RE THE MONKEYS from the editor ix This book-length issue of Ecotone celebrates the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth and the sesquicentennial of the publication of The Origin of Species. Ecotone was founded with the idea of breaking out of the pen of the purely literary and wandering freely between disciplines . This applies particularly to this special issue on evolution, and we could have no better model and centerpiece than Darwin, who, as well as studying ornithology, geography, history, and a dozen other fields, was also a hell of a writer—amiable, straightforward, and as clear as he could be given that he was trying to explain something fairly technical and entirely new. In Origin, Darwin makes his case not as a scientist would today, but by proceeding, for all his research, almost anecdotally. He also employs what you might call the Columbo technique, coming to his conclusions sideways and deferentially, like that shambling TV detective. “Oh, I’m sorry. I know you’re not the murderer,” he mumbles as he apologizes and genials his way toward unpleasant conclusions about our origins, nudging human beings where they don’t want to be nudged. It doesn’t hurt that when he needs to he can draw on his sevenyear study of barnacles and drop a mean crustacean reference. Or that he can reference fantails or short-faced tumblers or pouters from his decades-long study of pigeons. This fall, in the spirit of breaking across disciplines, I taught a course called “When Thoreau Met Darwin.” The two men may seem strange bedfellows at first, but there is more overlap than you might think. Of course they never actually met, but their great books, Walden and The Origin of Species, were published within five years of each other, in 1854 and 1859, respectively. And while it is unlikely that Darwin ever read a sentence of Walden, Thoreau read The Voyage of the Beagle with keen interest . Then in 1860, two years before he died at forty-four, Thoreau got his hands on Darwin’s Origin. It was long a cliché of Thoreau’s life that his last years were wooden ones, his transcendental fervor having died out, x Ecotone: reimagining place but Robert D. Richardson, one of our contributors to this issue and the author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, has helped overturn this misinterpretation . In fact, reading Darwin sparked Thoreau to a massive study of the leafing of Concord’s trees and the blossoming and fruiting of plants, a comprehensive phenological chronicling of his hometown that promised a new beginning in Thoreau’s writing, a movement away from the more personal focus of Walden and toward a wider, biocentric view of nature. It was a movement that mirrored Darwin’s ideas, ideas that pushed Homo sapiens away from center stage and made humans just another player in the world’s drama. Like Darwin, Thoreau was immensely curious. Richardson writes of Thoreau’s inspired reaction to reading Origin: “That his interests were still expanding, his wonder still green, his capacity for observation , expression, and connection still growing is the most impressive evidence that his spirits this January were still on the wing.” But while Thoreau wrote constantly, he shied away from the professionalism that the title of writer implied (and implies even more now). Writing was part of a larger project called living. “The mind is a burrowing organ,” he writes. His was a lifelong experiment in burrowing, working his way down through the “mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition , and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe.” And what was he mining for? An answer to a fairly simple question , I think: how to live on earth. For his part, Darwin was perhaps history’s greatest connector, his interests extending from barnacles to pigeons to how “the presence of feline animals in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!” For many years Darwin was, like Thoreau, a reporter to “a journal, of no very wide circulation.” This last quote...