Mary Batten
AUTHOR

Mary Batten

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I have spent most of my career writing nature/science books for adults and children, television documentaries, and magazine articles. My work deals with animal behavior, including humans, ecology, plants, health, disease, stars and galaxies – anything and everything in the natural world. Until now, all of my work has required a lot of research, interviewing scientists and visiting field sites. But with one of my newest books, A MATTER OF BREEDING: RACE & RACISM IN OLD SCHOOL SOUTHERN STORIES, I have turned to fiction and memoir. This book didn’t require research. It is written from my lived experience growing up on a farm in the South when segregation was the law of the law, a heinous skin-color prejudice based on the lie of white supremacy. As a white child growing up in the complex, contradictory environment of segregation, I felt there was something terribly wrong with the divided way we were living. Segregation exposed its injustice and inhumanity to me even as a child. A MATTER OF BREEDING explores through fiction the consequences of racial segregation on the lives of both blacks and whites. These consequences are still affecting us today.

In my science writing, I have turned toward the planetary threat of climate change. Oceans are warming, sea levels rising, weather becoming more extreme. In recognition of these changes, I created a series called "Life in the Extreme." The first book in this series, LIFE IN A FROZEN WORLD: WILDLIFE IN ANTARCTICA, (Peachtree 2020), explores the amazing adaptations, such as fish with natural antifreeze in their bodies, that creatures have evolved to cope with life in the ice and the threats from warming seas and atmosphere that now imperil their survival. The second book in the series, LIFE IN HOT WATER: WILDLIFE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN, (Peachtree 2022), explores the scalding hot, toxic world of hydrothermal vents, the most extreme environment on Earth. Yet an entire ecosystem thrives here where no life was thought possible. The discovery of these vents in 1977 is one of the greatest adventures in science. This book was selected for the National Science Teaching Association’s 2023 list of Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students K-12.

When people ask why I write about science, my answer is that the real world is far more fascinating, wondrous, and bizarre than those any fiction writer could invent. Imagine creatures that live in water hot enough to melt lead, fish that change sex, plants that trick and seduce insects, animals that have both male and female genitals. All of this is real, some in your own backyard!

My first "field station" was the farm in Smithfield, Virginia, where I grew up. I played in the woods, waded through forest streams, and learned to respect and appreciate animals, plants, and the cycle of seasons, planting, and havesting. I believe there is something in all of us that yearns for wild nature because it is in wilderness that we can feel a connection with our ancient hunter-gatherer past encoded in our genes. I try to convey the excitement I feel about our extraordinary planet, the diversity of life, and the responsibility that humans have to care for each other and the variety of living things with which we share our global habitat.

I am honored that my books have been reviewed in The New York Times and I appeared on OPRAH for my book, Sexual Strategies: How Females Choose Their Mates. In addition to my books and more than 100 magazine articles, I have written some 50 nature documentaries for television series, including the syndicated WILD WILD WORLD OF ANIMALS (Time-Life Films) and others for National Geographic and Disney Educational Films. I was nominated for an Emmy for my work on the Children's Television Workshop's science series 3-2-1-CONTACT. My magazine articles have appeared in Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, Science Digest, International Wildlife, and others. Currently I am working on a memoir and a collection of essays about growing up on a small family farm in the American South.
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