There is a paradox in research and it is this: the more basic the claim, the harder is it to substantiate. I’m not talking about straightforward facts, like ‘the sky is blue’ or ‘chocolate is delicious.’ I’m thinking about things that you know to be true—you just can’t say how.
Take, for instance, the idea that Western cultures tend to see humans as separate from nature. The notion is widespread and consequential (it’s a big part of how Western society has justified environmental exploitation) and it has roots that stretch back thousands of years across religion, philosophy, and science. Which means, in short, that it’s maddeningly difficult to corroborate.
“That was exactly the kind of stuff that could easily take up 5 hours for no good reason,” says my friend Jane C. Hu, a journalist and editor who has done a lot of fact-checking. What exactly should one cite as evidence of the human-nature rift? The Bible? Descartes? John Muir?
The task gets even trickier when you need to go beyond simply validating an idea to understand its history and evolution. In my grass book, for example, I wanted to dive deeper into the story of humanity’s removal from nature. But I quaked at the prospect of having to reread the entire syllabus of my freshman philosophy seminar on man and nature.
So what’s a writer to do? I asked some smart people for advice, and here’s what they said.
Pass the buck
When working with writers as a fact-checker, Jane often advised them to narrow sweeping claims and then find an authoritative source to back up the specific statement. For example, you could use the U.S. Wilderness Act of 1964 to illustrate how Western society holds no place for humans in nature, since it defines wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” (Quite by accident, I used this approach in a story about the myth of pristine nature.)
Quoting a source directly is also convenient, because then, “the checking is not ‘is this true?’ but ‘did so-and-so say it?’” says Kristin Hugo, a science journalist who is writing a book called Carcass: On the Afterlives of Dead Animals. She and Jane both acknowledge that this strategy is, in some ways, passing the buck. But it can be enough to prove that something is true—and to pass fact-checking muster.
Back your way down the rabbit hole
Sometimes, you need to do more than confirm a claim—you need to understand where it came from. In this case, it’s tempting to start your research by scouring primary sources for the root of the idea. But it can be easier and more efficient to work backwards instead.
Modern scholarly texts that engage with or respond to a Big Idea like the separation of humans and nature will likely summarize its history and evolution in the introduction, says Eva Holland, a writer and the author of Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear. They will also cite previous work, which you can read should you care to venture down the rabbit hole.
Journalist Rebecca Boyle loves rabbit holes, and would trace ideas like this back “as early as I could tolerate.” For example, for her forthcoming book, Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are, Rebecca read modern books that quoted Otto Neugebauer, the mathematician who first made sense of Babylonian astronomy texts. So she dug up Neugebauer’s original work, then she read the cuneiform translations that formed the basis of his studies.
While this process can be time-consuming, it is often more fruitful than random Googling.
Find a guide
Sometimes, however, the rabbit hole leads to a labyrinth and you find yourself going in circles. In these situations, what you really need is a guide—in other words, a source “who is up for more of a relationship than a one-off interview,” says writer Josh Sokol. In his experience, these sources tend to share three traits: they are interested in your work, excited by your interest in their work, and invested in “getting the facts right for public consumption,” Josh says. That’s why they are willing to go the extra mile, pointing you to useful resources and maybe even offering to help with fact-checking.
I was lucky enough to find someone like this recently. While interviewing a scientist about something completely unrelated, we got to talking about common Western narratives of humans and nature (as one does). It turns out that this researcher’s hobby is reading the primary texts on this subject, so they were able to confirm my general understanding of the human-nature dichotomy. They also offered to stay in touch as I worked on the book.
One final thought…
I’ve already had another email exchange with this researcher and have been pleased at how two-sided our conversations have felt. Indeed, the deeper I get into book research, the more I find I’m able to give something back to my sources, like a relevant study from another discipline or even just a good question that hasn’t come up before. Whatever it is, my humble offerings seem to shift the writer-expert dynamic to something that feel more like an intellectual dialogue between equals—albeit with different backgrounds and goals. It’s one of my favorite things about book research so far.
OK, that’s all from me for now. As usual, I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences about pinning down Big Ideas, below or in the chat.
I love this piece - both for the content (thank you!) but also because the example you use (human-nature relationship) is a topic that I've been curious about. My big question lately has been "when did the separation of humans and nature begin, and why?" It seems like a psychosis, to dismember oneself and one's society from that most basic and necessary relationship, yet it persists and grows. I'm excited to learn more about your book on the topic!