Ethan Linck is a biologist and writer living in New Mexico, USA. In addition to The Hypocrite Reader, his essays have appeared in High Country News, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Jacobin.
Ethan Linck
Articles by Ethan Linck:
Cataclysms to Desolate the World
in Issue 96 | Prophecies (Jan 2021)What happened to a forest where fruit doves no longer ate fruit and dispersed seeds, a forest no longer filled with their mournful, cascading calls?
Wilderness and “A Third-World Critique” in the Era of Climate Change
in Issue 69 | Carbon (Oct 2016)biocentric “deep ecology” - A Third World Critique - 400 parts per million - 1964 Wilderness Act - “pristine” landscapes - ecological theater and evolutionary play - the ecosystem service hierarchy - hyperobject - the right number of trees but have no wolves
Birds, Whiskey, and the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis: Ernst Mayr in the Solomon Islands
in Issue 59 | Taxonomy (Dec 2015)New Guinea was almost unimaginably remote - leaving the leader only with a gaggle of Yale college seniors - the Solomons spray like emerald teardrops south of the equator - natural selection, genetic drift, and mutation - thoroughly tired of the tropics - birds like fantails, white-eyes, and monarchs
Black Coffee
in Issue 47 | Nocturne (Dec 2014)« Mountain Mocha—they’ve got the most beautiful women in all of Sandy » - you don't really know who is doing the drinking - and as we start to desire coffee and those stubbled men - In between hourly circuits of our thin and wispy nets - I felt bashful, and left the creamer alone - proselytizers and disciples, snobs and unapologetic pleasure seekers - their own bearded biologist - the far right end of the fussy / unfussy axis
El Oso Plateado
in Issue 39 | Animals (Apr 2014)despite the indignity of its bonds - where the neotropics meet the nearctic - ecologically, the tragedy gains weight - he'd bash in the skull of one cow a year and was never seen - « he did not know he had toppled the spire off an edifice a-building since the morning stars sang together » - empty spaces and big, dangerous bears fly in the face of this logic
The Enduring Appeal of Counting Birds
in Issue 33 | No Number in Nature (Oct 2013)because of the whale - articulated musculature and weightless skeletons and piping song - 670 species seen in North America (that’s good) - « biological species concept » - the « tips » of a phylogenetic tree - Ernst Mayr - ego-driven jaunts by unscrupulous private collectors - Malaria, dried orchids - 426 taxa - your garden-variety twitcher - the limits of ourselves
On Singing
in Issue 31 | Strategies of Togetherness (Aug 2013)at the end of a long rutted dirt road in Yakima Indian Reservation - there is a romance to the Colorado Plateau - struggle, iron, volcanoes - the ecocentric canon - Abbey had women problems, and so did I - I remember him in wild, grand places - canyons are a vulvic answer to the peaks - a vein of dirt in the slickrock badlands beyond the RVs and mountain bikers