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  • Fidelity to Fact
  • Anna Lena Phillips Bell

April—every day a new flower scent to try to identify; every day warmer—and I'm thinking yet again about a perennial conundrum. Amid distraction, and amid so much information, how to hold in mind the many present threats to ecological balance? How to remember all we have lost of the beyond-human world, all we might lose? In her essay "Metamorph," Anya Groner talks about the chytrid pandemic that's devastating frog populations, and how her twin sister, a biologist, has devoted her life to studying it. "Even after Maya explained her research," she writes,

it took me a long time to understand the stakes. Though amphibian decline had gotten a decent amount of press, to laypeople like me, the scientific rhetoric obscured the severity of the crisis. And with so many scary stories populating the news, a disease that didn't directly impact humans had serious competition for my attention.

To keep feeling the import of so many catastrophes and potential catastrophes is challenging even if one has considerable economic and social privilege. Add health troubles, financial strain, threats to personal dignity and safety, and environmental harms—all likely to affect large numbers of people in this affluent country—and it can be even harder to keep the plight of frogs dying from chytrid, or bats dying from white-nose syndrome, or redbay trees dying from laurel wilt disease, in mind.

Partly what's needed is systems awareness—the realization and re-realization that those white-nosed bats might be feeling environmental stressors that could affect people too, or people's food supplies. Partly what's needed are good explications of scientific work, in all its slow, messy complexity. (Friends in science, I hope y'all know I would apply that phrase just as readily to poetry.) And partly it's writing and art that show us the personal effects of engaging with and understanding ecological interactions—both for scientists themselves and for people trying to understand their work better.

So it makes me happy to have, in Ecotone's pages, essays like "Metamorph"—work by writers who are engaging with scientific research, bringing both fascination and patience to the task of illuminating that research for our readers.

Just as important as conveying the winding trails of scientific stories is bringing to the page a sense of the wonder earthly phenomena can inspire. Linda Hogan writes, in this issue's Poem in a Landscape department, about Pablo Neruda's love of stone, and about her time working in the Laboratory of Chemical Evolution at the University of Maryland, not long after the first moon voyage. A moon rock kept [End Page 5] in a glass case in the lab draws her and fascinates her, as does the work of the researchers she supports. What Hogan discovers for herself—a lifelong path of exploring the universe in poetry and fiction—she appreciates in the paths of scientists. The impulse behind both kinds of work, she suggests, may be the same—a love for Earth's places and phenomena that instills the desire to know them more fully.

The danger, of course, with writing about science (not to mention doing it) is that it's so easy to get it wrong, or incomplete. How we talk about data and statistics, how many and which studies we cover, which researchers we talk to on which days of the week—all these factors affect scientific storytelling. This is part of the reason our staff diligently fact-checks the work that will appear in Ecotone. We dive deep into databases, available thanks to our university library (bless you, library, and thank you, databases). When we can't discern what's what, we find somebody who knows, and we call them. Even with hours spent on a single essay or story, we may still not get it right every time, but we can try.

And we must try. At the risk of sounding alarms that have been ringing continuously this past year, telling stories well and truthfully and completely—finding, you know, facts, and presenting them in contexts that are both clear and accurate and also...

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