This Author Says We've Lost Some Sense Of Wonder, And He Has The Cure

Gordon Grice was asked to help with a practical problem: An acquaintance's kid kept bringing home crab shells from the beach.

"And she wished there were a book to teach him how to preserve them without stinking up the house," Grice told The Huffington Post by email.

Now there is. It's called Cabinet of Curiosities, and it's more than just a how-to guide to de-smellifying marine samples.

The book extols the connections between all the intriguing critters, plants and animals that live on Earth -- an awareness of which will hopefully help shift readers' perspectives, Grice says. 

He said he hopes the compendium inspires others to take a tactile interest in the environments' beauty, stories and interconnectedness -- and our role, as cataloguers, participants and stewards.

"I do see nature as wondrous, and I admit that’s a pretty old-fashioned attitude," said Grice. "I’m afraid we’ve lost some of the sense of wonder, partly because we don’t spend as much time as our ancestors did getting out hands dirty outdoors."

The book begins with a history of exploring -- warning: a strong sense of wanderlust might ensue -- followed by descriptions of different kinds of natural history collections.

A reviewer on BoingBoing laments that Cabinet of Curiosities doesn't emphasize collecting in ways that minimize harm, but Grice tells HuffPost he does intend to "steer folks toward an environmentally friendly kind of collecting."

Then come the facts, photos and illustrations about fascinating bits and pieces of nature like claws, owl pellets or horseshoe crabs -- which aren't actually crabs at all.

"They get their name from what they look like," Grice writes in the book. "They are actually related to scorpions and spiders, although they are in a separate class. A horseshoe crab has a round shell, nine eyes, ten left, and a long tail. It almost never comes out to dry land, except to mate."

On the next page, you'll find instructions for a couple of ways you can prepare a dead horseshoe crab to be preserved and collected, with minimal odor. One suggested technique: burying it for a week, so that hungry bugs can do much the hard work for you.

Grice himself began filling shoeboxes full of curiosities at the age of six. He tells HuffPost he's still at it.

"Shoeboxes, CD cases, cluttered tables in my garage. There’s an alligator skull sitting on my desk at this moment," he said.

Grice recalls discovering a "fresh and smoking" meteorite on his family farm as "one of the coolest things that ever happened to me."

He'd still like to find a feather from one of the 60 European starlings released into Central Park in 1890, which turned into 200 million birds -- and "provided one of the earliest clear lessons in the danger invasive species pose to an environment," Grice said.

Ultimately, his life and work exemplify his overarching message to simply roll up our sleeves and dig in to nature.

"The more we remove ourselves from the system, the more troubles we have," he said."The key is putting your hands on things."

 

Get in touch with HuffPost's animal welfare editor at arin.greenwood@huffingtonpost.com

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