2021/08/23
Amazon.co.jp: 生から死へ、死から生へ:生き物の葬儀屋たちの物語 : ベルンド・ハインリッチBernd Heinrich
2021/07/08
Death and Dying, the Animal Way - The New York Times 2013
A CONVERSATION WITH
Death and Dying, the Animal Way
Bernd Heinrich in Vermont.Credit...Paul O. Boisvert for The New York Times
By Claudia Dreifus
Jan. 14, 2013
For much of the year, Bernd Heinrich spends his time at a cabin he built in a remote forest in western Maine. The cabin has no indoor plumbing and no electricity, he says — just a tree growing inside it.
An emeritus biology professor at the University of Vermont, Dr. Heinrich, 72, sees the New England forest as a living laboratory to study nature’s changes. Over the years he has translated his observations into 17 popular books on nature and the animal world, including ones on bumblebees, dung beetles, owls and geese. Also among these works are a memoir and a 2002 book on running, “Why We Run: A Natural History.” (In the 1980s, Dr. Heinrich was a champion marathoner.)
And lately he has been studying how animals die.
Dr. Heinrich’s book “Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death” was published last summer by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
We spoke at the Trailside Nature Museum on the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in northern Westchester County, and later by telephone. A condensed and edited version of the interviews follows.
How did you come to write a book about animal death?
I first started thinking about it when a former student, Bill, wrote saying he was terminally ill and what would I think about his having a “sky burial” on my property in Maine? He wanted to leave his body to the ravens. Bill did not want to be cremated or buried in a sealed box. He wanted to be recycled and have his body provide food for other creatures.
Bill’s letter got me thinking about the different ways animals are recycled in natural ecology and about how scavengers cleanse the world so there’s room for new life.
In many ways, this was a subject I’d been circling for a long time. Over the years, I’d studied ravens and beetles, scavengers who are key actors in natural recycling. I may have felt some affinity for them because we — my parents, my sister and I — had once been scavengers ourselves.
Scavengers?
Yes. At the end of World War II, in Germany, my family escaped the advancing Red Army and lived in the forest. My father was an entomologist, a wasp specialist, and he believed the most awful place to be in a war was a city. We ate by scavenging. We trapped mice. I remember finding a dead boar, and my sister and I ate it.
But to return to Bill: I wondered if his idea was feasible. What if we put him out and no ravens came? I could imagine that even if they did eat him, there might be a human skull lying around and the next thing, the police would be up there. No, this wasn’t practical! I sent Bill a note saying that regrettably I could not help him.
But now I began doing little experiments on my property. I’d been working on a book about beetles and I thought this might make a chapter. So I put out roadkill — mice, raccoon, a shrew — and then watched for who came and how nature’s undertakers — burying beetles, maggots, gorgeous green bottle flies — broke the carcass down.
The entire scene was about transformation. A mouse would die and get eaten and it became beetles. Or its molecules could become part of a hawk or an owl. I looked at a moose and a deer carcass and I was fascinated by how quickly even big things disappeared in nature. So before I knew it, this chapter had grown into a book!
Did you find it difficult to work with roadkill?
Aside from the ick factor, a carcass is a very active scene. It’s not so much about death as life. The carcass provides a huge amount of concentrated food for the animals who are recyclers. So you get competition and all kinds of interesting animal behavior as they try to get access to it. If the food is being defended, that’s interesting. And if all kinds of animals want it, that’s even more interesting.
Some of the recyclers I enjoyed more than others. Ravens 까마귀are very appealing. I’ve never met a raven I didn’t like. I can’t find maggots appealing, but after a while I did get used to them. Today I can watch maggots and find them quite interesting. Just this summer, I put out a raccoon carcass and it was almost consumed by maggots and there was nothing left, no meat whatsoever, in three days. And then, I saw a whole cohort leave, thousands of them, and they left the raccoon as a group, all in one direction.
What do you think was going on?
I still don’t have all the answers. I can give you some hypothesis. They were heading for the sun, moving towards light. They had to leave the carcass because they’d finished it off and there wasn’t any food left. Most creatures, if they don’t have food, they move on. Why shouldn’t a maggot? The question still is why did they all go at once? This was in the summer and if you move in a group, you reduce the surface area and lose less water. I’ll be doing more research on this next summer.
Many scavenger species have a bad reputation. In some cultures, there’s a hatred for vultures and ravens. Do you understand it?
It’s because of their association with death — they are blamed for it. Ravens get blamed a lot for killing a lot of things when, in fact, they mostly eat the dead and the nearly dead. It’s an illogical association that comes from a lack of understanding of what these animals do. Consider what would happen in the ocean if nothing ate the dead fish. Eventually, the ocean would be up to the top with dead fish. If there were no recyclers, nature would stop.
Many of the scavenger species are now endangered. What is happening to them?
With some of the larger scavengers — the condors and the vultures — we’ve hunted out their food base. There’s nothing left for them to eat. Also, we are using poisons to kill competitors for our own food sources — rats and mice. Then owls and hawks eat these poisoned rodents and die.
With some of the vultures, there have been population crashes because some of the medication fed to livestock is toxic to them. They eat dead cattle, traditional food, and then they die.
I was just reading about how the Parsis of India have sky burials as part of their religion. Lately, they’ve begun breeding vultures for their ceremonies because there aren’t enough wild ones left. It’s tragic. The ecosystem is very complex and we can’t know what will happen if these animals disappear.
Are humans and their remains part of that complex ecosystem?
I think so. But human death is becoming more and more divorced from nature. We pump our dead with polluting chemicals like formaldehyde, put them into airtight boxes and then plant them in precious real estate that could be used for agriculture. We think we’re denying death that way. The appealing thing about Bill’s idea was that he wouldn’t be consuming resources in death — his body would give back to natural world.
What ever became of Bill?
He’s still alive. Happily that sky burial hasn’t been required.
2021/07/07
[[Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death: Heinrich, Bernd Intro+Conclusion
- Plants get their nutrients from the soil and the air in the form of chemicals - all bodies are built of carbons linked together, later to be disassembled and released as carbon dioxide -but nevertheless they are still "living off" other life.
- The carbon dioxide that plants take up to build their bodies is made available through the agency of bacteria and fungi and is sucked up massively and imperceptibly from the enormous pool of past and present life.
- The carbon building blocks that make a daisy or a tree come from millions of sources: a decaying elephant in Africa a week ago, an extinct cycad of the Carboniferous age, an Arctic poppy returning to the earth a month ago.
- Even if those molecules were released into the air the previous day, they came from plants and animals that lived millions of years ago.
- All of life is linked through a physical exchange on the cellular level. The net effect of this exchange created the atmosphere as we know it and also affects our climate now.
Bernd Heinrich - Wikipedia
Bernd Heinrich
Bernd Heinrich (born April 19, 1940 in Bad Polzin, Germany), is a professor emeritus in the biology department at the University of Vermont and is the author of a number of books about nature writing and biology. Heinrich has made major contributions to the study of insect physiology and behavior, as well as bird behavior. In addition to many scientific publications, Heinrich has written over a dozen highly praised books, mostly related to his research examining the physiological, ecological and behavioral adaptations of animals and plants to their physical environments. However, he has also written books that include more of his personal reflections on nature.[1] He is the son of Ichneumon-expert Gerd Heinrich.
Contents
Education[edit]
Heinrich attended Grundschule Trittau (1946–1950)[2] and college at the University of Maine. He then earned his Ph.D in 1970 from the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1971, he accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley where he became a professor of entomology. Between 1976 and 1977 he was a Guggenheim and Harvard Fellow.[3] In 1980 Heinrich accepted a position as a professor of zoology/biology at the University of Vermont. From 1988 to 1989 he was a von Humboldt Fellow.[3]
Scientific career[edit]
Heinrich is distinguished by his research work in the comparative physiology and behavior of insects. His work has elucidated new physiological mechanisms of temperature regulation of tropical versus temperate moths, bumblebees versus honeybees, beetles, dragonflies, flies, and butterflies, all done while at UCLA and Berkeley. After he moved back to Maine and started teaching at the University of Vermont, his comparative work on insect physiology led to behavioral and ecological studies from the perspective of all animals (e.g., comparisons of food sharing between social bumblebees and territorial ravens). His many years of research on ravens has culminated in numerous scientific papers on raven behavior and two books that put the research into a broad context.[4]
Heinrich's often popular books range from biologic detective stories (Ravens in Winter) to scientific specialties of field (The Hot-blooded Insects) to adventure and biography (The Snoring Bird) to human evolution (Why We Run). Many of these books are based on his original research documented in his more than 100 articles in refereed scientific journals.[4]
Running career[edit]
Heinrich has won numerous long distance running events and set a number of open U.S. ultramarathon and masters (age 40 and over) records throughout the 1980s. At the age of 39, Heinrich prefaced his masters career by winning the Golden Gate Marathon outright, with a time of 2:29:16, on a hilly course in San Francisco, California.[5] In 1980, Heinrich ran 2:22:34, his lifetime personal best, in the West Valley Marathon in San Mateo, California, where he placed third and missed qualifying for the 1980 U.S. Olympic Marathon trials by just forty seconds. On April 21, 1980, two days after his 40th birthday, he was the first masters finisher at the Boston Marathon, with a time of 2:25:25, good for 51st place overall.[5]
Heinrich then left marathons and moved to ultramarathoning. In 1981, he set several records during a combined 50 mile/100 kilometer road race in Chicago. In the 50 mile race, his second-place finish was a new World record for masters runners. Moreover, he continued running, and in the 100 kilometer race set an absolute American record (i.e., the best of either road or track venues) of 6:38:21 for 100 kilometers. This result was also a World record for masters runners.[6]
In 1983, he set an absolute American record for the 24-hour run of 156 miles, 1388 yards in a track race in Maine. In 1984, he set an absolute American 100 mile record of 12:27:01, again in a track race. One year later, he set the American track record of 7:00:12 for 100 kilometers. In so doing, he became the only American man to hold both the road and track versions of the American record for the same event. His 12:27:01 for 100 miles and 7:00:12 for 100 kilometers still remained, at the end of 2007, the official American track records. In his career, Heinrich set American national records for any age in the standard ultramarathon distances of 100 kilometers, 200 kilometers, 100 miles, and longest distance run in 24 hours. At the end of 2007, Heinrich was inducted into the American Ultrarunning Association's Hall of Fame.[6]
In his book Why We Run: A Natural History (originally titled "Racing the Antelope"), Heinrich reflected on the sport of running as a scientist, and recounted his performance in the 100 kilometer race that ushered in his ultra-marathon career. Combining his expertise as a physiologist, comparative animal biologist specializing in exercise and temperature regulation, and runner, he posits that the unique human capacity for long-distance running in heat is a human adaptation similar to running adaptations in other animals. Another argument of the book was that humans evolved to be ultra-distance runners that could run down even the swiftest prey, through a combination of endurance, intelligence, and the desire to win (c.f. Persistence hunting).
Books[edit]
- Bumblebee Economics (Harvard University Press, 1979)
- Insect Thermoregulation (John Wiley & Sons, 1981)
- In a Patch of Fireweed: A Biologist's Life in the Field (Harvard University Press, 1984)
- One Man's Owl (Princeton University Press, 1987)
- Ravens in Winter (Summit Books, 1989)
- The Hot-Blooded Insects: Strategies and Mechanisms of Thermoregulation (Harvard University Press, 1993)
- A Year in the Maine Woods (Addison-Wesley, 1994)
- The Thermal Warriors: Strategies of Insect Survival (Harvard University Press, 1996)
- The Trees in my Forest (Addison-Wesley, 1997)
- Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (HarperCollins, 1999)
- Racing the Antelope: What Animals Can Teach Us About Running and Life (HarperCollins, 2001)
- Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival (HarperCollins, 2003)
- The Geese of Beaver Bog (HarperCollins, 2004)
- The Snoring Bird: My Family's Journey Through a Century of Biology (HarperCollins, 2007)
- Summer World: A Season of Bounty (HarperCollins, 2009)
- The Nesting Season: Cuckoos, Cuckolds and the Invention of Monogamy (Harvard University Press, 2010)
- Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)
- The Homing Instinct: Meaning & Mystery in Animal Migration (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014)
- One Wild Bird at a Time: Portraits of Individual Lives (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016)
- The Naturalist's Notebook:Tracking Changes in the Natural World Around You (co-authored by Nathaniel T. Wheelwright; Storey Publishing, 2017)
- White Feathers: The Nesting Lives of Tree Swallows (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020)
- Racing the Clock: A Running Life With Nature (Ecco, forthcoming 2021)
Documentary films[edit]
In 2011, a 60-minute film, titled An Uncommon Curiosity: at home & in nature with Bernd Heinrich[8] was released. The film follows Bernd Heinrich over the course of a year as he reflects on his past and shares his ideas about nature, science, art, beauty, writing, and running.
Heinrich was featured in a documentary film series called The Truth About Trees,[9] a production of the James Agee Film Project, which was released in 2015.
References[edit]
- ^ "Bernd Heinrich". HarperCollins Publishers. Archived from the original on 20 October 2012. Retrieved 4 May 2013.
- ^ "Bernd Heinrich - Trittau (Grundschule Trittau)". www.stayfriends.de.
- ^ Jump up to:a b "Bernd Heinrich CV2013". 2013. Archived from the original (DOC) on 3 July 2018. Retrieved 27 April 2013.
- ^ Jump up to:a b "Bernd Heinrich UVM Faculty Page". 2013. Retrieved 27 April 2013.
- ^ Jump up to:a b http://dserunners.com/results/archive/1980%20Nor-Cal%20Results.pdf
- ^ Jump up to:a b "American Ultrarunning Hall of Fame". American Ultrarunning Association. December 2007. Retrieved 29 November 2012.
- ^ "Search results for 'au:Bernd Heinrich' > '1975..2017' > 'Book' > 'English'". worldcat.org. OCLS. Retrieved March 25, 2017.
- ^ [1]
- ^ "Documentary film series and story project about the indispensable role of trees for life on Earth". truthabouttrees.org.