Citizen Scientist Searching For Heroes And Hope In An Age Of Extinction [Paperback]

Citizen science might just be our last, best chance to fight extinction. But is there really hope for threatened species? Mary Ellen Hannibal needed to find out.

Hannibal, an award-winning writer and emerging emissary from scientists to the public, sets out to become a citizen scientist herself. In search of vanishing species, she wades into tide pools, follows hawks, and scours mountains. The data she collects will help environmental researchbut her most precious discovery might be her fellow citizen scientists: a heroic cast of volunteers devoting long hours to helping scientists measureand even slowtodays unprecedented mass extinction.

A consummate reporter, Hannibal digs into the origins of the tech-savvy citizen science movementtracing it back through centuries of amateur observation by writers and naturalists. Prompted by her novelist fathers sudden death, she also examines her own past and discovers a family legacy of looking closely at the world. Her personal loss only fuels her quest to bear witness to life, and so she ultimately returns her gaze to the wealth of species still left to fight for.

Combining research and memoir in impassioned prose, Citizen Scientist is a literary event, a blueprint for action, and the story of how one woman rescues herself from an odyssey of losswith a new kind of science.