Taxonomy

Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World
(author: Carol Kaesuk Yoon)

It's a bit of a clunky title, but a very interesting article about the underestimated importance of what scientists would call taxonomy, but what any person might call "naming the world." Recognizing, organizing, and naming all of the diverse living things we encounter appears to be a human universal with many common features across all cultures. It's something that I've touched on before in my blogs about human evolution - the vital importance of learning to name and identify the myriad plants and animals around us, the knowledge that can spell life or death for a hunter-gatherer. Perhaps the survival imperative to learn plants and animals is gone for most of us, but it's still a built-in drive, and something that can enrich our life enormously - in fact, I would say it is necessary to truly inhabit our natural world.

"No wonder so few of us can really see what is out there. Even when scads of insistent wildlife appear with a flourish right in front of us, and there is such life always — hawks migrating over the parking lot, great colorful moths banging up against the window at night — we barely seem to notice."

Most people - myself included, though I'm trying to remedy it - walk past the same plants and animals every day and never really see them. The same trees, bushes, flowers, birds, insects, small mammals.... Our eyes graze over them every single day, and yet they slide past like a meaningless artificial backdrop to the supposedly grand drama of our human concerns. The vast network of living organisms means nothing. We don't have to interact with it; we don't depend on it for survival (or so we believe). Thousands of times, someone may walk past cedars, madrona, poplars, firs, and never notice them or think to identify or categorize them. You could take that person somewhere else, stand them in front of one of those trees, and say, "does this grow in your neighborhood?" They wouldn't be able to answer. They'd make a guess - hem and haw - "it looks a bit familiar, maybe" - but nothing approaching certainty. This incredible, living and breathing world that we inhabit is passing us by without notice.

I don't want to quote the whole article, but the author makes a suggestion at the end, and I have to back it up: "Just find an organism, any organism, small, large, gaudy, subtle — anywhere, and they are everywhere — and get a sense of it, its shape, color, size, feel, smell, sound. [...] meditate, luxuriate in its beetle-ness, its daffodility. Then find a name for it. [...] To do so is to change everything, including yourself. Because once you start noticing organisms, once you have a name for particular beasts, birds and flowers, you can’t help seeing life and the order in it, just where it has always been, all around you."

Once you've pinned down one organism - anything - and scrutinized it, thought for a moment about the colour of its leaves or wings, its size and shape, its roots or feet or claws, and then given it a name... You'll start to see it everywhere, with a burst of familiarity and recognition when you spot it again, as though it were a secret friend in the chaos of the world. To see a small brown bird and know what it is, to call it by name when you see it perched on the edge of a garbage can or swaying on a windblown tree branch, is to make a part of the world your own.