Gaze at Ernst Haeckel’s gracefully sinuous moon jellies, or any nineteenth-century compendium of nature illustrations bearing a title like “Animal kingdom arranged in conformity with its organization,” and the relationship between the natural world, and the human desires for beauty and order, starts to become apparent.
As parts of–and challenge to–this lineage, Jessica Riskin and Josie Iselin both explore the relationship between human nature and the natural world, skillfully blending scientific ideas with history, art, and culture. We are delighted that they will be joining us to discuss their newest titles, The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and The Mysterious World of the Bull Kelp Forest.
About the Books
Josie Iselin The Mysterious World of the Bull Kelp Forest
The Mysterious World of the Bull Kelp Forest by Josie Iselin offers a mesmerizing tour of our underwater forests and what they can teach us.
Offshore and out of sight to most beachgoers on the North Pacific coast is a wondrous habitat: the bull kelp forest. Each year, tiny bull kelp saplings explode into sixty-foot “redwoods,” until winter storms tear them loose and fling great tangles of wrack on the shore. While they flourish, these underwater forests harbor abalone, salmon, and rockfish, and they entreat cormorants and murrelets to hunt among their thrumming canopies. Meanwhile, fluffy-furred otters and pizza-sized sea stars gorge on spiny urchins who, if left to run rampant, will devour a kelp bed down to barren wasteland. In The Mysterious World of the Bull Kelp Forest, Josie Iselin profiles thirteen species—with stylish illustrations from Ellen Litwiller—to be our ambassadors to this undersung world. She explores how their interspecies dramas play out in eight coastal regions, from Alaska to central California, exploring instances of interdependent, compromised, and resilient coastal ecosystems. An array of sea creatures feature in these pages, as well as shorebirds that connect land and sea. Land-dwelling humans are also deeply implicated in this saga—by turns beneficiaries, agents of harm, and stewards of these subtidal sanctuaries.
Jessica Riskin The Power of Life
The Power of Life explores the tumultuous life and radical science of a revolutionary thinker, and the history of an idea that changed the world.
In the early nineteenth century, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first evolutionary theory of life and, with it, a new science: biology. Yet for centuries, evolutionary theorists have endeavored to discredit Lamarck and his theory of self-transforming organisms, rejecting the idea that animals play an active role in shaping their own evolution. In his lifetime, he was mocked by his adversaries and personally insulted by Napoleon. In this virtuosic melding of biography, history, politics, and science, Jessica Riskin sets out to correct the record. Riskin tells the story of Lamarck’s life and work as an intense struggle between rival forces to answer questions that remain foundational to our modern worldview: What is a living being, and what is science?
New findings suggest Lamarck’s basic claim was, in many ways, right, and a reconsideration of his life and work is long overdue. Denying the agency of living beings has informed two centuries of eugenic policies and environmental destruction, allowing people to regard the living world as so much raw material to shape and exploit for economic, industrial, and imperial gain.
About the Speakers
Josie Iselin is an artist, author, and designer who has been telling seaweed and kelp stories for over a decade. Her two books An Ocean Garden: The Secret Life of Seaweed (2014, 2023) and The Curious World of Seaweed (2019) display her profound understanding of seaweed natural history and her deep connections within the seaweed science community. Iselin directs content development for the Above/Below campaign and is the lead author of the campaign’s web story, The Mysterious World of Bull Kelp (bullkelp.info). She teaches in the School of Design at San Francisco State University and lives in San Francisco. josieiselin.com
Jessica Riskin is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University, where she teaches modern European history and the history of science. She is the author of The Restless Clock and Science in the Age of Sensibility and is a regular contributor to a number of publications, including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. She lives in Berkeley, California.
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