The knowledge base of natural history is under threat as research funding is increasingly focussed on fast-paced, short-term experimental work over the slower-paced, longer-term observational work necessary to build and maintain it. I felt compelled to write this book because it seems to be a problem that everyone in biological research and almost no one outside of it is aware of. Like many of the extinctions quietly proceeding around the world, it just isn’t something we hear about. We as citizens and stewards of this planet owe it to ourselves and our children to be aware not only of the issue but of the opportunities we have to contribute to its solution.
Unrooted is one scientist’s story of what led her to the field of Botany, the changes she witnessed within the grind of academia as she pursued her PhD, and the impossibility of finding employment in her field after proudly earning her doctorate (a situation made dramatically worse once she became a mother). Erin Zimmerman writes in a clear and engaging voice — whether describing the electric jolt of reading Charles Darwin’s own handwriting on a specimen’s label at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, or the indignity of having to squirrel herself away in a musty change room to pump breast milk as a postdoc, this is a beautiful blend of memoir, science history, and an impassioned defence of the importance of her disappearing field of expertise. This is exactly the sort of thing I like — I learned a lot and was affected, heart and mind; I couldn’t ask for more and wish Dr Zimmerman nothing but success. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Sitting down to my stack of herbarium specimens and alcohol-preserved flowers every day felt like losing myself in a good book. Scientific research topics can seem narrow to the point of absurdity, like an entire career spent on a single species, but ask any scientist, and they’ll tell you that there really is a lifetime’s worth of discovery there. It speaks to the complexity of our universe that even the thinnest slices can be so expansive. To me, sustained, close attention to a little-regarded slice of that universe felt spiritual, like time spent in quiet worship before a vast and intricate cosmos, trying to know it just a little bit better.
Technically a taxonomist (Zimmerman could spend whole days in close scrutiny of plant parts, sketching what she saw with the delightfully anachronistic use of pen and ink) with an eventual focus on Dialiinae (in the legume family, but more exotic than just peas and beans), Zimmerman’s work was not unlike that of the early collectors like Joseph Banks and Alexander von Humboldt. What was particularly fascinating to me was to learn that Herbariums around the world are filled with thousands of samples dating back to the days of these early world-wide adventurers, some of them hundreds of years old, which have never been through the hands of a trained taxonomist (and even if some of these sample types have already been described, each unique sample — with its known date and location of collection, along with anything peculiar to the sample itself — would contain a wealth of information about climate, the environment, and challenges to growth). But as Zimmerman made her way through her postgraduate work, she watched as the discipline of Botany was folded into generic Biology departments, those researchers who were known in the field as taxonomists were changing their focus to computer-aided dna analysis (because that’s where the funding is), and even her own future husband dropped out of academia to pursue an education with a guaranteed job at the end. Zimmerman makes the case that the sort of work she did — slow and methodical, at the human scale — is imperative for making the kind of discoveries that make people care about the world and its disappearing species; as Damon Little of the New York Botanical Garden said, “If something doesn’t have a name, you can’t conserve it.” (It is estimated that there are 350 000 or more unknown/unnamed plant species.)
I appreciated everything Zimmerman shares about her experience as a woman in science — from some incredible female mentors to the male supervisor who patronisingly spoke to her with a hand on her knee — and her historical overview of women in the field (from sample collecting seen as a gentile hobby for gentlewomen, to men erecting an ivory tower around the field when they decided to make Botany a “serious” science), and as she watched the pathway to tenure become ever narrower in her field of expertise (less than twenty-five per cent of PhDs will eventually find themselves with a tenured position), the reality of motherhood seemed to close that door to Zimmerman for good.
There was no one dramatic incident that extinguished my desire to be in research. What I’d faced was an environment in which I was under strong pressure to never need accommodation, to never let anyone see that I had other loyalties in my life. It was a death by a thousand tiny cuts. And that’s what makes this story important, because I suspect that’s how it is for many of the nearly half of all women in science who leave after becoming mothers. Each time you’re made to feel unprofessional for having caregiving responsibilities, each time you’re made to feel like a burden for requesting minor accommodation . . . it wears you down a little more. You believe that you are the problem. And when the reward at the end of those years of hard work and low pay are far from assured, it doesn’t take a PhD to figure out you might be happier and better off elsewhere, no matter how much you loved the actual science and the questions you were trying to answer.
Unrooted ends on a positive note — Zimmerman has found a career in science writing that allows her to balance her work and family responsibilities — but she continues to stress that Botany matters in our threatened world. I loved everything about this — the science, the exposé of persistent sexism and grant-chasing in academia, and Zimmerman’s personal history — and would recommend this to anyone who enjoyed Lab Girl or Braiding Sweetgrass.
