From Room 9:  From Public to Virtual Venues

Short-Term Exhibits for Academic Use

The Exhibit A five-month exhibit at Stanford University’s Falconer Biology Library (November 2004–April 2005) entitled Changes in Conservation Status called attention to the enormous number of vulture deaths in India that occurred at the end of the millennium.

Since the early 1990s hundreds of thousands of healthy-looking vultures in India had dropped dead. The cause of death appeared to be scavenged food contaminated with diclofenac, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug that is given to livestock and tends to concentrate in their liver and kidneys. Autopsies showed that the internal organs of 85 percent of the dead vultures had a buildup of uric acid crystals, usually a telltale sign of kidney failure. The same birds tested positive for diclofenac. This was the first record linking wildlife losses to a veterinary drug. Those losses were significant: in the twelve years between 1992 and 2004. Oriental White-backed Vultures (Gyps bengalensis; shown here) had declined by more than 99 percent, and Long-billed Vultures (G. indicus) by 97 percent. After a slow start, steps were taken to phase out the drug and establish a captive breeding program to rebuild the vulture populations, some of which were plummeting by half yearly. The effects of diclofenac were later reported in Pakistan as well.[77]

Years ago Kenneth Brower warned, “When the vultures watching your civilization begin dropping dead . . . it is time to pause and wonder.” The pause-and-wonder phase may have lasted too long in the case of these birds, for the repercussions are widespread and troubling. For two millennia the Parsi have laid out their dead at the top of Towers of Silence to be quickly eaten by vultures, but few vultures show up now. Elsewhere, especially at dumps, rat and feral dog populations climbed sharply in the absence of vultures. These second-rate scavengers are less efficient, and they harbor rabies and other diseases. Even the deaths of sacred cows now pose problems that, in some places, have elevated into health hazards.[78]

Viewing the Science Art is not yet commonly exhibited. But it could be, and images like this need not be exhibited in a biology library to gain attention. Teaching is often compartmentalized; learning is not. Formal education has provided conditions favoring the development of discipline-specific departments and the evolution of curricula based on those departments. Thus it happens that science is taught in science class, whereas art is taught in art class. Because Science Art is relevant to both, is educationally useful, and offers an important way of drawing people’s attention, it could create a productive zone of overlap between these two disciplines. Students, instructors, and even the public at large could find out about emerging environmental issues, for example, or their resolution, in the zone of overlap. Science Art does not always have a specific agenda, nor should it, but it often provides a medium for environmental education that reaches beyond particular issues (see Plate 65). The wide appeal of Science Art is reminiscent, in some respects, of the large number of nature images produced in the 1600s, when the Golden Age of Dutch art benefited from Dutch dominance in commerce, which fostered the exploration of remote regions--leading in turn to the production of images featuring the natural history and species from these places.[79]
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