"I felt an obligation to go out and try to hunt these missing birds down because a huge hole had been blown open in the scientific record," he says. Johnson ( joins Here & Now's Robin Young to discuss the book and his own obsession with Rist's story, which grew as Johnson tried to escape the pressures of his nonprofit The List Project. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR) This article is more than 5 years old.Īuthor Kirk Johnson's new book " The Feather Thief" explores the 2009 theft of rare Victorian-era bird feathers from a British museum by American music student Edwin Rist, who was obsessed with using the feathers for exotic fishing lures. Thanks."The Feather Thief," by Kirk Wallace Johnson. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. he individual letters which go to make up one of the volumes of our earth’s history and, as a few lost letters make a sentence unintelligible, so the extinction of numerous forms of life which the progress of cultivation invariably entails will necessarily render obscure this valuable record of the past. Alfred Russell Wallace once expounded on the importance of cataloguing the natural world: Of the three sections of the book-the story of the theft, the history of Alfred Russell Wallace and the Victorian era's "feather fever," the author's experiences researching this book-which do you find most interesting? Is The Feather Thief an important book or merely an entertaining book about an absurd obsession? Do we need care about what happened to the birds of Tring? What is their value to science? Johnson says that the curators had protected the specimens for years, because they "understood that the birds held answers to questions that hadn't yet even been asked." If the questions haven't been formulated by this juncture in history, are they really that important? In what other areas do we see this debate playing out, and where do you stand in regards to it? the belief that nature is put here for the use and betterment of humankind. In what way does the basic conflict at the heart of this book continue today? That conflict is the belief that nature is worth preserving for posterity vs. ![]() Talk about why the loss of the birds' identity tags is so devastating to the scientists. Follow-up to Question XXX: Juxtaposed to Rist's lack of remorse is the museum's science director who calls the theft a "catastrophic event," of "stealing knowledge from humanity." Is it catastrophic? What do the losses mean to science? Is Rist correct? Or is that beside the point? You can no longer use DNA, because what you would want to do it for is to prolong and help living birds, which hasn’t really worked anyway, because they’re still going extinct, or will go extinct depending on what happens with the rainforests. ll of the scientific data that can be extracted from them has been extracted from them. ![]() What do you think of Rist and his self-exoneration? He says at one point: When the author interviews Rist, he shows little remorse for his theft. What are your thoughts regarding Edwin Rist's legal penalty? Fair? Too light? What was Edwin Rist's motivation for his theft? Actually, is obsession a motivation? ![]() "I don’t think you want to write that story.… We’re a tight-knit community, fly-tiers, and you do not want to piss us off.” Johnson becomes frustrated by those who don't seem to grasp the seriousness of Rist's crime. Johnson reports that a fly-tier expert warned Johnson away from pursuing the story of the Tring theft. We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for THE FEATHER THIEF … then take off on your own:
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