To so strongly experience these kinds of wonderfully shocking similarities and dissimilarities among living things is the kind of experience that has largely been the prerogative of biologists — especially those known as taxonomists, who spend their days ordering and naming the living things on Earth. But now, thanks to Mr. Cameron, the entire world is not only experiencing this but also reveling in it.
...I spent much of the last six years working on a book about exactly this, about how inside of all humans there is a deep desire and ability to really see life, to see order among living things, and about the joy that comes with it. So at the end of Naming Nature (W. W. Norton, 2009), I make a plea to readers to go out into the world and see the life and find the order in the living world around them. I may have to amend the paperback to suggest, or you may want to begin by, heading into a darkened room to see "Avatar" and have your mind blown.
...I spent much of the last six years working on a book about exactly this, about how inside of all humans there is a deep desire and ability to really see life, to see order among living things, and about the joy that comes with it. So at the end of Naming Nature (W. W. Norton, 2009), I make a plea to readers to go out into the world and see the life and find the order in the living world around them. I may have to amend the paperback to suggest, or you may want to begin by, heading into a darkened room to see "Avatar" and have your mind blown.
Carol Kaesuk Yoon summarizes her book in another article at the NYTimes, Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World:
J.B.R. could no longer recognize living things. He could still recognize nonliving objects, like a flashlight, a compass, a kettle or a canoe. But the young man was unable to recognize a kangaroo, a mushroom or a buttercup. He could not say what a parrot or even the unmistakable ostrich was. And J.B.R. is far from alone; doctors around the world have found patients with the same difficulty. Most recently, scientists studying these patients’ brains have reported repeatedly finding damage — a deadening of activity or actual lesions — in a region of the temporal lobe, leading some researchers to hypothesize that there might be a specific part of the brain that is devoted to the doing of taxonomy. As curious as they are, these patients and their woes would be of little relevance to our own lives, if they had merely lost some dispensable librarianlike ability to classify living things. As it turns out, their situation is much worse. These are people completely at sea. Without the power to order and name life, a person simply does not know how to live in the world, how to understand it. How to tell the carrot from the cat — which to grate and which to pet? They are utterly lost, anchorless in a strange and confusing world. Because to order and name life is to have a sense of the world around, and, as a result, what one’s place is in it.
Today few people are proficient in the ordering and naming of life. There are the dwindling professional taxonomists, and fast-declining peoples like the Tzeltal Maya of Mexico, among whom a 2-year-old can name more than 30 different plants and whose 4-year-olds can recognize nearly 100. Things were different once. In Linnaeus’s day, it was a matter of aristocratic pride to have a wonderful and wonderfully curated collection of wild organisms, both dead and alive.
...We are so disconnected from the living world that we can live in the midst of a mass extinction, of the rapid invasion everywhere of new and noxious species, entirely unaware that anything is happening. Happily, changing all this turns out to be easy. 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. Give a nod to Professor Franclemont and meditate, luxuriate in its beetle-ness, its daffodility. Then find a name for it. Learn science’s name, one of countless folk names, or make up your own.
Today few people are proficient in the ordering and naming of life. There are the dwindling professional taxonomists, and fast-declining peoples like the Tzeltal Maya of Mexico, among whom a 2-year-old can name more than 30 different plants and whose 4-year-olds can recognize nearly 100. Things were different once. In Linnaeus’s day, it was a matter of aristocratic pride to have a wonderful and wonderfully curated collection of wild organisms, both dead and alive.
...We are so disconnected from the living world that we can live in the midst of a mass extinction, of the rapid invasion everywhere of new and noxious species, entirely unaware that anything is happening. Happily, changing all this turns out to be easy. 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. Give a nod to Professor Franclemont and meditate, luxuriate in its beetle-ness, its daffodility. Then find a name for it. Learn science’s name, one of countless folk names, or make up your own.
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