Genetic Tales: Don't Ask Me, I Don't Know How It Ends

• Author: Oliver Houck
• Pages: 182-185

182 Best of the Books: Ref‌lections on Recent Literature

Genetic Tales:

Don’t Ask Me, I Don’t

Know How It Ends

By Oliver Houck

Tears of the Cheetah and Other Tales From the Gene tic Frontier,

by Stephen J. O’Brien . St. Martin’s Press. 304 pages.

From the November/ December 2012 issue of The Environment al Forum.

When former Representative Helen

Chenoweth of Idaho said some

years ago that she couldn’t see why

salmon were endangered “because I can buy

them o the shelf at Albertson’s,” one had to be

grateful for her candor. She really could not see

why, and therein lay a problem. When Justice

Antonin Scalia wrote shortly thereafter that

“impaired breeding does not injure living crea-

tures,” he drew a spirited response from Justice

Sandra Day O’Connor who, perhaps because

she stayed awake in Biology 101, or perhaps

as a woman she was a little closer to these

things, obser ved that “nesting and breeding is

what species do.” Unfortunately, Chenoweth

and Scalia were not alone, and they still aren’t

nearly a decade after these stories unfolded.

e fact is that most people who lead this country in law and legislation

have a weak grip on the nature of life on Earth. Indeed some, from religious

or other convictions, consider the inquiry and its ndings iniquitous. Hence

the columnist George Will writing to condemn those who see humanity as

“rising from the primordial ooze.” Hence Rush Limbaugh’s admonition that

the spotted owl accustom itself to the intrusion of ma n, as if chastising an

errant child. For more of the same one need only stumble onto AM radio.