CHIMACUM — He speaks to us of hippie wasps, “flying pearls” and instant gratification.
Thor Hanson, winner of a Guggenheim fellowship and author of books including “The Impenetrable Forest,” “The Triumph of Seeds” and “Buzz,” will give the annual Huntingford Humanities Lecture at the Chimacum High School auditorium, 91 West Valley Road, on Thursday. The 6:30 p.m. program is free as always; the Jefferson County Library presents it every fall.
When he’s not traveling — his “Impenetrable Forest” is about the beginning of the mountain gorilla ecotourism program in Uganda — Hanson lives on San Juan Island. An independent conservation biologist, he seeks to astonish people with true stories about the natural world.
“Buzz,” published earlier this year, has sent him out on tour talking about bees and their social lives. Hanson also speaks about how these creatures, as essential to us as oxygen, are in dire straits due to the use of pesticides.
Yet he’s no dour doomsayer. Hanson is a dad who writes about adventures he and his son Noah have together: hunkering down by his backyard writing shed, awaiting the appearance of a bumblebee queen.
Why wait for her like this? She’s one amazing animal, that’s all.
When talking about bees in general, Hanson calls them hippie wasps. It’s his way of illustrating bee evolution: The critters evolved from meat-eating wasps, and now they have long hair for carrying pollen around. They love flowers and they’re vegetarians.
Then come those flying pearls. They’re alkali bees with external skeletons that shimmer, gemlike. In Walla Walla County’s Touchet Valley, he and Noah commune with them. Dad and son drove out to the alfalfa fields where the bees are plentiful, turned the engine off and put the windows down — to feel and hear their buzzing vibration. This, Hanson writes in “Buzz,” is the sound of the farmers’ livelihood.
When Hanson talks with people about the declining bee population, he’s resolutely positive. Plant flowers in a window box, he suggests, and your gratification will not be delayed, or not much, that is.
“You get to see an almost instant reaction, an increase in abundance in your corner of the world,” he said in an interview last week.
“You don’t have to be in Yellowstone or Yosemite to have an experience;” you can peer at the small wonders outside your door: those long-haired hippies enjoying your blooms.
Hanson’s desire is to help us cultivate our natural curiosity. When we connect with the nearby natural world, he said, we feel a burst of new energy.
Ironically, this scientist connects with people through his books and lectures, which tend to happen indoors.
“Read this book,” he’s fond of saying, “then put it down and go outside.”
Hanson joins a long history of Huntingford Humanities lecturers. Authors Daniel James Brown (“The Boys in the Boat” and others), Sherman Alexie (“The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”), Jess Walter (“Beautiful Ruins”) and Anchee Min (“The Cooked Seed: A Memoir,” among others) have come to Chimacum High School during the past decade. As is traditional, the guest speaker’s books will be for sale at Thursday’s event, and he’ll be available to sign copies after his talk.
The Huntingford program is named for Sara L. “Sally” Huntingford, a teacher and mother who helped form the library district in 1978. She believed in the power of a library — and of diverse ideas — in a rural place such as this.
Tamara Meredith, director of the Jefferson County Library, said she chose Hanson this year for his depth of experience. He’s studied hulking apes and everyday bugs, and written nonfiction for grownups as well as younger readers. His “Bartholomew Quill” is an illustrated children’s book that tours the animal kingdom from a crow’s point of view.
Hanson has a reputation as a dynamic speaker, she added, and “the fact that he’s from the Pacific Northwest is an extra bonus.”
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Diane Urbani de la Paz, a former features editor for the Peninsula Daily News, is a freelance writer living in Port Townsend.
