Tag Archives: History of Animals

A photograph of the Parade of African Mammals in the Grand Gallery of Evolution at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris taken by the author from the 3rd floor.

On Systems of Knowing

On Systems of Knowing – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I argue that we must have some degree of artifice to organize our thoughts and recognize the things we see in our world.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:%5B1%5D For my recent essays referring to this current historiographic project see “On Sources,” Wednesday Blog 6.22, “On Writing,” Ibid., 6.27, and “On Knowledge,” Ibid., 6.29.[2] Lee Alan Dugatkin, Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose, (University of Chicago Press, 2009).[3] Staffan Müller-Wille, “Linnean Lens | Linnaeus’ Lapland Journey Diary (1732),“ moderated by Isabelle Charmantier, virtual lecture, 12 May 2025, by the Linnean Society of London, YouTube, 1:04:18, link here.[4] Jason Roberts, Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, (Random House, 2024), 45–49.[5] Roberts, 20.[6] Roberts, 115–125.[7] Roberts, 109.[8] André Thevet, Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique, (Antwerp, 1558), 16r–16v. The translation is my own.[9] Roberts, 109.[10] Damião de Góis, Chronica do Felicissimo Rei Dom Emanuel, 4 vols., (Lisbon, 1566–1567).[11] Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 190.[12] Roberts, 110.[13] Michael Wintroub, A Savage Mirror: Power, Identity, and Knowledge in Early Modern France, (Stanford University Press, 2006), 42.[14] Roberts, xii.[15] Roberts, 107.[16] Roberts, 96–98.[17] Michael Allin, Zarafa: A Giraffe’s True Story, from Deep in Africa to the Heart of Paris, (Delta, 1998).
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This week, I argue that we must have some degree of artifice to organize our thoughts and recognize the things we see in our world.

Near the end of June on a Sunday afternoon visit to the Barnes & Noble location on the Plaza here in Kansas City when we were picking out books to gift to family, I espied a copy of Jason Roberts’s new paperback Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life. In the Plutarchan model it is a twenty-first century Parallel Lives of Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), two of the eighteenth century’s most prolific naturalists. I saved it as fun reading once I thought I’d done enough of my proper historical work. That moment came after I finished writing the first draft of the new introduction to my dissertation, a rather large addition to my doctoral study which is mostly historiographic in nature.[1] I’ve been reading Roberts’s book in my free time and delighting in the vibrant portraits he paints of the two men in question. I am a newer Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, elected in January 2025, and so I arrived to this particular book with a happy perspective on Linnaeus, whose Systema Naturae is cited in my dissertation as the first identification of the three-toed sloth by the genus Bradypus. At the same time, I’ve referenced Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle far more frequently in those moments when I’m following the legacy threads of my own Renaissance naturalists into the Enlightenment. After all, Buffon cited Thevet on several occasions where the savant referred to the same animals which the earlier cosmographer described two centuries before.

In spite of my own Linnean affiliation, and my use of Buffon’s corpus in the earliest stages of my broader historiography, I am still largely unfamiliar with these two men. I first knew of Buffon for his famous comments on his presumption of the diminutive nature of American animals when compared with their Afro-Eurasian counterparts, to which Thomas Jefferson retorted by sending Buffon evidence of an American moose.[2] I also know very little about Linnaeus, most of what I know of the Swede comes from lectures presented at the Linnean Society online including a recent lecture given in May by Staffan Müller-Wille, Professor in the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences at Cambridge about Linnaeus’s Lapland diary from his northern expedition in 1732.[3] There is a new biography of Linnaeus by Gunnar Broberg titled The Man Who Organized Nature: The Life of Linnaeus which I have an eye on yet haven’t gotten a copy of quite yet. So, reading Roberts’s book is a quick introduction for me to this man who for me is most influential with his method of binominal taxonomy which has appeared time and again here in the Wednesday Blog. Yet this system followed after Linnaeus’s earlier alphabetical system for identifying plants by sexual characteristic. The basic premise here is that if there are 26 letters in the alphabet, we can then use that familiar framework to organize other complicated concepts for easy recognition. Linnaeus used this to categorize plants by their male and female sexual characteristics in his 1730 booklet Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum, or Prelude to the Betrothal of Plants.[4] Therefore, Linnaeus could go around the botanical garden at the University of Uppsala in 1730 and quickly identify a plant as a J plant or a G plant. First reading this I thought of the way that letters are used by the Federal Reserve System to identify specific regional branches. Thus, J represents the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and G the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. 

I like the idea behind Linnaeus’s alphabetic system yet having only 26 categories to describe the entire plant kingdom seems doomed to be flawed as it relies on a belief that all the plants that are known to exist are the ones that exist, that there’s nothing new under the Sun to be discovered. Roberts frames this in a biblical context, describing how Olof Celsius (1670–1756), one of Linneaus’s first professors, met the young Linnaeus when he was working on a project called the Hierobotanicum or Priestly Plants which was intended to be a compendium of all 126 plants mentioned in the Old and New Testaments.[5] Why would Linnaeus need more than 26 categories to contain all the plants known to the Ancients and to the Bible? Naturally, the flaws were apparent in this from the start by using a system of knowing which originated in the more arid landscape of the Levant rather than in the cooler and damper climate of Sweden. I’ve noticed this in my own life, how many cultural elements which we practice in the United States, notably the seasons, better fit the natural climate of New England and England proper than they do here in the Midwest with its far more variable conditions depending on the time of year, or even the given hour. Roberts deconstructed Linnaeus’s early efforts near the end of Part I of his book when he described Linnaeus’s first scholarly collision with Buffon after the Frenchman’s appointment by Louis XV to the position of Intendant of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.[6] In a debate which Roberts calls “the Quarrel of the Universals” Linnaeus argued that species could be recognized from individual type specimens while Buffon countered that this ran the great risk of minimizing the diversity of life and eliminating potential variations in nature.

This got me thinking about systems of knowing, thus I decided to render the title of the original file for this blog post that you’re now reading (or listening to) De Systemarum Scientis in the full Latinate tradition of my own scholarship, or “On Systems of Knowing” in English. Why is it, for instance, that our Roman alphabet begins with A and ends with Z? The first half of that question is easier to answer: the Romans adapted our alphabet from the Greeks who started it off with α alpha, β beta, thus the noun alphabet itself. Yet the Greek alphabet ends with ω omega rather than ζ zeta, so why does ours end with Z? What I’ve heard about this is that the Greek letters that were adopted into the Roman alphabet were tacked onto the end of the line, or at least this is what I remember being taught when I learned to recite the alphabet in French in my undergraduate years. French calls the letter Y y-grec, or the Greek i. Likewise, everyone except for we Americans call the final letter of the Roman alphabet some variation of zed, which is a shortening of the Greek zeta. This better reflects that letter’s original sound in Greek, just as the cursive lowercase z is the lowercase Greek ζ just adopted straight into the Roman alphabet without any major changes.

So, when it comes to the organization of our knowledge there are things that we know in this same alphabetical order or in relation to this alphabetical order. Because the Roman alphabet is written left to right, we know that when it’s used to set up a coordinate system on a printed map that A will always appear to the top left, orientating the way the map should be held. Likewise, a reader can quickly scan through an index in any language written in the Roman alphabet by following along with the order of the letters. How individual languages index objects from that point on differs, but the foundational element remains the same. The Roman alphabet works best for Latin, the language for which it was originally developed, so it tends to be adapted in its phonetic values depending on which language is using it. This is why English uses the letter W to represent a [w] sound while German and in loanwords French uses W to represent a [ˈv] sound. Meanwhile, Irish represents the [w] and [ˈv] sounds with two digraphs, bh and mh that represent both depending on the context. Typically, bh represents [ˈv] while mh represents [w], but it depends on context. The reasoning behind this is that when the Roman alphabet was adapted by Latin speakers to fit Old Irish in the fifth and sixth centuries CE they approximated the phonology of their Latin in rendering the Roman alphabet usable for Irish. So, to these monks the Irish [ˈv] sound in a Gaelic name like Medbh sounded enough like how the letter b was used at the time that they used that letter to approximate this [ˈv] sound. It’s notable to me that in Modern Greek the letter β is today pronounced veta and in the Cyrillic alphabet the letter В represents this same [ˈv] sound while the letter Б represents the [b] sound that we English-speakers associate with the letter B. Cyrillic and its predecessor the Slavonic alphabet were being developed around the same time that the Roman alphabet began to be used for Irish so there must’ve been something going on with the pronunciation of people’s Bs becoming closer to Vs in late antiquity. Thus, the ways in which our alphabets represent specific sounds today reflect the prestige dialects of our two classical languages–Latin and Greek–as they were spoken over a millennium ago.

Consider then how we distinguish technical, scientific, or artistic terminology depending on the prestige language of that field. History has largely become a vernacular field, where we adapt terms that will be more familiar to the non-professional enough to initiate them into what Ada Palmer calls the History Lab. Yet often these terms will have etymologies beyond English itself. Consider the word photograph, or its more common shortened form photo. This word comes purely from Greek, the classical language more associated with science and technology. It blends the Greek φωτο-, the blending form of φῶς (phôs), or light with the suffix –γρᾰ́φος, from the verb γρᾰ́φω meaning to draw, sketch, or write. So, photography at its core is light writing. Neat! The word photography entered English from the French photographie, that etymology referring to the French origins of the art and craft of photography itself in the middle of the 1820s. Yet the linguists who modernized Irish a century ago decided to favor indigenous terminologies, rendering this word grianghraf using the Irish word grian for Sun instead of a variation of φωτο- (light) while adopting the Greek –γρᾰ́φος suffix to center this new Irish conception of the term within the same technological corpus as the English photograph. While consequential to have a particular Irish name for this technology that elevated the Irish use of photography as equal to any other culture’s photography and particular within the Irish language, it still remains rooted in the same western tradition of grounding our names for scientific and technical things in Greek.

Language directly influences how we know things because it is the vehicle by which we recognize those things around us. I know that a photograph is something made by “light writing” therefore I will also recognize that anything else beginning with “photo” also refers to “light” and that anything ending with “graph” refers to some form of record or writing. I come from a culture where light is connected with goodness and dark with ill. Likewise, for me I think of blue and green as happier colors rather than red or orange which are angrier colors. There is safety in light, in the daytime we can see people or things coming toward us easier than in the dark of night. At the Easter Vigil the celebrant lights the Paschal Flame which is then passed around the church so that we all share in the Light of Christ (Lux Christi) returned to the world with the Resurrection. The central question in my dissertation is linguistic: what did André Thevet (1516–1590) mean when he referred to the Americas overall as sauvage? This French word translates into English as both savage and wild, yet I chose to retain the original French to better represent the original concept which encompasses both concepts in English. This word was not necessarily racial in the modern sense, rather Thevet used sauvage to describe people, places, and things which existed beyond civilization. This word itself betrays its original meaning, that is city life. Thevet himself understood the sauvage to be the antonym of this city life. I describe it in the introduction to my dissertation in terms of light and dark, following the cultural connotations already illuminated: the city is the sun whence radiates the light of civilization. The further one goes from that sun, the darker things become and the less civilized they remain. Thevet’s sauvage existed at that furthest extreme in the dark. I imagine the character of Gollum in this sort of darkened existence, deep beneath the Misty Mountains uninterested in light save for the Ring of Power which consumed his day rendering it eternal night. In the literature of Thevet’s time a fine sauvage characterization is Caliban in Shakespeare’s Tempest, wild as the waters which wrecked King Alonso and his men on the island in Act 1 of that play.

Roberts notes how these linguistic attributes influenced Linnaeus’s systemization of humanity in the 1735 second edition of his Systema Naturae. The Swede divided humanity into four subcategories described by color over any other facet.[7] Roberts spends the following five pages questioning Linnaeus’s methodology, asking “why four?” and why these specific colors? There is some historical context for Linnaeus’s choice to refer to Black Africans, even Thevet referred to the varied peoples of Africa as “black” in his Singularitez de la France Antarctique. Thevet hints at a possible environmental cause for blackness, writing that the peoples “of Barbary” who are “the blackest” are “of the same manners and conditions as their region is hotter than others.”[8] Thevet’s understanding of African geography is somewhat uncertain, so his definition of Barbary may not align with the Berbers from whom the Barbary Coast of the Maghreb was named. Still, it hints at an understanding that the hotter, or more torrid, the climate got the darker the skin of the people would become. Roberts notes that the Portuguese were the first to use the “word negro to signify African origin or descent” in the middle of the sixteenth century.[9] This makes sense considering the Portuguese were the first European power to sail down the West African coast in the fifteenth century. That Roberts notes this Portuguese definition of blackness first appears in the middle of the sixteenth century likely refers to Damião de Góis’s (1502–1574) Chronica do Dom Emmanuel I of 1566 to 1567 which is an early source that I’ve consulted for information on the voyages of Vasco da Gama (d. 1524).[10] Geraldine Heng, the leading authority on medieval notions of race, wrote in her 2018 book The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages that blackness was already well established as an element in religious and secular iconography by the beginning of the First Age of Exploration.[11] Roberts concludes his discussion of this particular racial element of Linnaeus’s great contribution to taxonomy sullenly noting that it’s thanks to Linnaeus that this cultural connotation of blackness with darkness was given scientific credence which continues to support racist ideologies to this day.[12]

How do we use our own words to describe things to which they are not suited, in turn transforming the nature of those things that they may become part of our own world? My research is most interested in understanding these questions of how those things at the boundaries of knowledge were understood by André Thevet using the tools afforded to him during the French Renaissance of the sixteenth century. Thevet used the word sauvage to do this and create a category of life against which he could measure and proclaim the existence of something civilized closer to home. Michael Wintroub, Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric at Cal-Berkeley, wrote in his 2006 book A Savage Mirror that Thevet’s countrymen sought to “civilize the barbarians” to make up for an insecurity they felt at being called barbarians themselves by Italian intellectuals at the turn of the sixteenth century during the French invasion of Italy under King Charles VIII (r. 1483–1498).[13] As long as there was someone else who the French could look down upon beyond their own cities they felt secure in their own civility. Yet the sauvage exists within a larger framework of singularities, a word which is central to Thevet’s cosmography. Thevet used the word singularity to describe those things which were exotic, wonderous, and immensely collectable in his eye and hopefully in the eyes of potential readers who would buy his books. I see various layers and categories of singularities in Thevet’s cosmography, for instance he only included images of certain animals in his book of the same name, the aforementioned Singularitez of 1557. The sloth and toucan were depicted as well as described, yet the mysterious Ascension Island aponar remained a bird worthy only of a textual description. This suggests that somethings were more singular than others, or more worthy of attention and the money needed to produce these woodcut images than others. These systems of knowing framed around the singularity are the subject about which I intend to write my first academic monograph. Classifying something as singular gives it an appeal which sets it aside from both the civil and the sauvage as belonging to a higher level of category which can include both the urbane and the agrestic.

Jason Roberts describes Buffon and Linnaeus’s mutual missions to make something of themselves and to rise above their provincial origins to the heights of society. I laughed out loud reading Roberts’s introduction to Linnaeus’s character, what felt like an iconoclasm of sorts for this Fellow of the Linnean Society. “Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish doctor with a diploma-mill medical degree and a flair for self-promotion, who trumpeted that ‘nobody has been a greater botanist or zoologist’ while anonymously publishing rave reviews of his own work.”[14] Buffon by contrast took advantage of a golden opportunity to build his own demi-paradise at his manor in the Burgundy countryside until his good reputation as a botanist brought him to royal attention and the appointment as Intendent of Jardin du Roi.[15] The Jardin des Plantes, as Buffon’s charge is today known, is perhaps a better place to conclude than most. Situated in the Fifth Arrondissement across Boulevard de l’Hôpital and Rue Buffon from Gare d’Austerlitz, the Jardin is an urban oasis created for the purpose of crafting systems of knowing. Its original intent was to serve as a medicinal garden existing beyond the purview of the Sorbonne, Paris’s sole licensed teaching medical school in the seventeenth century.[16] I’ve spent several happy hours wandering through the Jardin, home to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle’s Grande Galerie de l’Évolution, the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie compare, and the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes, which was home to Paris’s first resident giraffe whose story is delightfully told by Michael Allin in his 1998 book Zarafa: A Giraffe’s True Story, from Deep in Africa to the Heart of Paris.[17] While Allin’s heroine Zarafa is not today on display in the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution (she is instead today to be found in the Muséum d’Histoire naturelle de La Rochelle), the taxidermy in the Parade of African Mammals that is the centerpiece of the Grande Galerie represents a system of knowing animal life in itself.An elephant leads the parade followed by hippopotami, zebras, and giraffes with two such camelopards standing erect their long necks rising toward the upper galleries at the center of the procession. Behind them come the horned mammals, rhinoceroses, and at the rear a crouching lion watching its prey. This is a system that Buffon would have appreciated more than Linnaeus, one which represents the nature of individual beings more than species. Each stuffed specimen seems to have its own character, its own personality. They look about as one would expect they would in life. The great artifice of this is the idea of a parade itself, a very human notion indeed, and one that is infrequent enough to be nearly singular in character, a reason for a day out, worth putting in the social calendar of a city, town, or village no matter how large or small. A parade is its own system of knowing.

[1] For my recent essays referring to this current historiographic project see “On Sources,” Wednesday Blog 6.22, “On Writing,” Ibid., 6.27, and “On Knowledge,” Ibid., 6.29.

[2] Lee Alan Dugatkin, Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose, (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

[3] Staffan Müller-Wille, “Linnean Lens | Linnaeus’ Lapland Journey Diary (1732),“ moderated by Isabelle Charmantier, virtual lecture, 12 May 2025, by the Linnean Society of London, YouTube, 1:04:18, link here.

[4] Jason Roberts, Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, (Random House, 2024), 45–49.

[5] Roberts, 20.

[6] Roberts, 115–125.

[7] Roberts, 109.

[8] André Thevet, Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique, (Antwerp, 1558), 16r–16v. The translation is my own.

[9] Roberts, 109.

[10] Damião de Góis, Chronica do Felicissimo Rei Dom Emanuel, 4 vols., (Lisbon, 1566–1567).

[11] Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 190.

[12] Roberts, 110.

[13] Michael Wintroub, A Savage Mirror: Power, Identity, and Knowledge in Early Modern France, (Stanford University Press, 2006), 42.

[14] Roberts, xii.

[15] Roberts, 107.

[16] Roberts, 96–98.

[17] Michael Allin, Zarafa: A Giraffe’s True Story, from Deep in Africa to the Heart of Paris, (Delta, 1998).

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A figure from Raphael's "The School of Athens" variously identified as Francesco Maria della Rovere, Pico della Mirandola, or Hypatia of Alexandria.

On Knowledge

On Knowledge – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I want to address how we recognize knowledge in comparison to the various fields of inquiry through which we refine our understanding of things.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkaneArtRaphael, The School of Athens (1509–1511), Apostolic Palace, Vatican Museums, Vatican City. Public Domain.Sources“On Writing,” Wednesday Blog 6.27.Surekha Davies, Humans: A Monstrous History, (University of California Press, 2025).Marcy Norton, The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492, (Harvard University Press, 2024), 307.Dead Poets Society, (1989) "What will your verse be?" Video on YouTube.
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This week, I want to address how we recognize knowledge in comparison to the various fields of inquiry through which we refine our understanding of things.

Lately my work has been dedicated to a thorough review of the historiography within which I’m grounding my dissertation. I wrote about this two weeks ago in an essay titled “On Writing.”[1] My research is historical, yet it touches on secondary literature which operates within various fields within the discipline of history. These include Renaissance history, and its larger sibling early modern history, the history of cartography, the history of animals, the history of botany, and more broadly the history of early modern science. Methodologically, I owe a great deal to two great twentieth-century Francophone anthropologists, Alfred Métraux (1902–1963) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009). While Métraux and Lévi-Strauss aren’t considered directly in the historiographic section of the new introduction that I’m writing for my dissertation, which is limited to sources published since the millennium, they nevertheless stand tall in the background of my history.

Today we often talk within academia about a desire for interdisciplinarity in our work and our research. We’ve found ourselves too narrowed by our ever shrinking fields and seek greener common pastures for grazing as our intellectual and pastoral ancestors alike once knew. In my case, this interdisciplinarity lies more in my efforts to incorporate historical zoology into my work, a methodology which seeks to use zoological methodology and theory to explain historical animals. I have friends who study many things. Among them is one whose passion for history, classics, and mathematics has come together to craft a dissertation which seeks to demonstrate the intersections between those three to better understand the great transitions in human inquiry. Another seeks to follow the medical connections across oceans between disparate regions in the Americas and Europe that nevertheless existed even if they seem remarkable today. Still more, I have a friend who applies basic economic need to explain a complex diplomatic situation that once existed between the Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire in the Adriatic Sea. All of these historians of whom I write are applying a degree of interdisciplinarity to their work that reflects their own disparate interests and curiosities. In early modern history we talk about curiosities as objects which were collected from disparate and exotic lands into cabinets to display the erudite collector’s prestige and wealth. I say our curiosity is something to be collected by those worthy archives, libraries, museums, or universities that will employ us in the near future and for us to feed with new ideas and avenues of investigation that we will never be bored with life.

In all of these things, there is an underlying genre of knowledge which I am addressing. I’ve written thus far about history alone, yet it is the same for the anthropologists, astronomers, planetary scientists, and physicists who I know. Likewise for the literature scholars and the linguists. Our fields of inquiry all grow on the same planet that comprises of our collected knowledge. In English, this word knowledge is somewhat nebulous. To me, it says that we know things broad or specific. In London, for instance, the Knowledge is the series of tests which new cabbies must complete in order to learn every street within a certain radius of Charing Cross. The Latin translation of this word, scientia, makes things even more complicated as that is the root of the English word science. Thus, when we refer to Renaissance science, there is always a caveat in the following sentence explaining that “this is not science as we know it but a sort of protoscience.” I was advised, similarly, after a particularly poorly received presentation at a workshop at the Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels in October 2023 that I shouldn’t refer to “sixteenth-century conservation” because no such concept existed at the time; instead, it would be better to discuss a “genealogy of conservation.” This sense that modern terms, in use since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, ought not to be pulled further back into the past I think loses some of the provenance of those terms and how the Enlightenment philosophes first came across them. 

I find it telling that the Ancient Greek translation of knowledge, γνῶσις (gnôsis), is a word with which I’m more familiar from theology and the concept of Gnosticism whereas scientia reminds me of philosophy and the other fields of inquiry which grew from that particular branch of the tree of human curiosity. One might even say that philosophy and theology are a pair, siblings perhaps? They seek to understand similar things: on the one hand an inquiry into thought, and ideally wisdom, and on the other a search for the nature of the Divine, which at least in my Catholicism we can know because we are made in the Image of God. The division here between the Ancient Greek term being affiliated with faith and the Latin one with reason I think speaks to the Latin roots of my own education in Catholic schools and at a Jesuit university, where I learned about Plato and Aristotle, yet I recognized Aristotle’s Historia animalium (History of Animals) by its Latin name by which it was generally known in Western Europe for centuries before the rise of vernacular scholarship rather than by its Greek original Τῶν περὶ τὰ ζῷα ἰστοριῶν (Ton peri ta zoia historion). Note that the English translation of this title, History of Animals reflects better the Latin cognate of ἰστοριῶν rather than the better English translation of that Greek word, Inquiry.

Added onto these classical etymologies, in my first semester Historiography class at Binghamton University I was introduced to the German translation of scientia, γνῶσις, and knowledge. Wissenschaft struck me immediately because I saw the German cognate for the English word wizard in its prefix, and because I knew that the -schaft suffix tends to translate into English as -ship. Thus, my rough Anglicization of Wissenschaft renders Wizardship, which is rather nifty. Yet this word Wissenschaft instead was seen in the nineteenth century as a general word which could be translated into English as science. This is important for us historians trained in the United States because our own historiographic tradition, that is our national school of historians traces our roots back to German universities in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century. I remember long sessions of my historiography class at UMKC discussing the works of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), the father of research-based history. I felt a sense that this concept of Wissenschaft seemed relatable, and as it turned out that was because Irish has a similar concept. 

Whereas in English we tack on the suffix -ology onto any word to make it the study of that word, in Irish you add the suffix -ocht. So, geology is geolaíocht and biology is bitheolaíocht. Yet note with the second example that the suffix is not just -ocht but an entire word, eolaíocht. This is the Irish word for science, added onto the end of bitheolaíocht to demonstrate that this word refers to the study of bith- a prefix combining form of the word beatha, meaning life. So, biology then is the science of life itself. Powerful stuff. I appreciate that Irish linguists and scholars have sought overall to preserve our language’s own consistency with its scientific terminology. It means that these fields of study, these areas of knowledge, can exist purely within the purview of the Irish language without any extra need to recognize that their prefixes or suffixes come from Latin, Greek, or English. There are some exceptions of course: take zó-eolaíocht, the Irish word for zoology, which effectively adopts the Greek word ζῷον perhaps through the English zoo into Irish. Would it not have been just as easy for whoever devised this hyphenated word to instead write ainmhíeolaíocht, translated into English as the science of animals? Here though I see more influence from English because this language adopts as much as it can from other languages out of prestige and a desire for translingual communicability. As an English speaker, I find scholarly works often easier to read because we share common etymologies for our words relating to knowledge. English’s science, geology, biology, and zoology are French’s science, géologie,biologie, and zoologie. In English, we drop any pretense of Englishness to clothe ourselves in a common mantle familiar to colleagues from related cultures around the globe. In academia this is to our mutual benefit, after all so much of our work is international. I’m regularly on webinars and Zoom calls with colleagues in Europe for instance. I believe this is the lingering spirit of the old scholarly preference for Latin as a lingua franca which at least to me seems close enough in the past that it’s tangible yet realistically it’s surely been a very long time since any serious scholarly work beyond classics was published in Latin for the benefit of a broad translingual readership?

I for one admire the Irish word eolaíocht and its root eolas, which translates into English as knowledge, that is an awareness of things because eolaíocht represents a universal concept while retaining its own native nature. So often in my research I am discussing the early assimilation of indigenous cosmovisions, to borrow a Spanish word put to good use by Surekha Davies in her latest book, into the nascent global world centered on Europe.[2] I see how these cosmic conceptions faded until they were rendered in Gothic or Latin letters on the voluminous pages of encyclopedic Renaissance general and natural histories which remain among the most often cited primary sources for these indigenous cultures who Marcy Norton argued in her 2024 book The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492 had their own classical past made remote from their colonial present by European contact, conquest, and colonization.[3] Seeing these indigenous perspectives fade into their categorized and classified statuses within the cosmos defined by Europe’s natural philosophers I feel fortunate that my own diaspora (which was also colonized) has retained this element of our individual perspective. I first came across the -ocht suffix in the word poblacht, the Irish word for republic. A famous story from the birth of the Irish Free State during the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations in 1921 tells of British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George, a Welsh speaker, remarking to Michael Collins, an Irish speaker, that their choice of a republic was unusual because none of the Celtic languages naturally have a word for republic. That word evokes its Roman roots in the ancient Res publica Romana, the Roman Republic, whose northward expansion across the Alps led to the gradual death of the Continental Celtic languages, whose speakers’ descendants today are largely the Western Romance speakers of French, Romansh, Occitan, Catalan, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese, among others. Romance languages are noted for their common descent from Latin, whence they all derive variations on the Latin word scientia; English gets science through Old French. “How are you going to name your new government in the Irish language?” Lloyd-George asked. Collins replied something along the lines of “a kingdom is called a ríocht, so this government of the people (pobal) will be called a poblacht. Thus, the Republic of Ireland is named in Irish Poblacht na hÉireann. Naturally, this word pobal derives from the Latin populus, so the shadow of Rome hovers even over unconquered Hibernia. Yet that is another topic for a different essay.

Let me conclude with a comment on the difference between knowledge and wisdom, as I see it. The former is far more tangible. We can know things through learning embodied best in living and in reading. I know for instance to look both ways before crossing a street because plenty of people in the last 140 years have been hit by cars, buses, and trucks, and you can never be too careful. Likewise, I know everything I do about the things I study through reading what others have written about these topics. It’s my job then to say what I will. In Whitman’s words made immortal by our recitation, the answer to the eternal question, “that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” That’s history, people! Reading the powerful play of what others have written and summoning up the courage to take the podium and have your say. I first heard this particular poem, as did many in my generation, recited by Robin Williams in the 1989 film Dead Poets Society. Knowledge is the recitation of these facts we’ve learned. Wisdom is understanding how these facts fit together and speak to our common humanity. What makes us human? I believe it’s as much what we know as what we remain ignorant of. Our ignorance isn’t always a curse, rather it’s another foggy field we’ve yet to inquire about, a place where someone’s curiosity will surely thrive someday. It is another evocation of eolas still to come in our long human story. How wonderous is that?

[1] “On Writing,” Wednesday Blog 6.27.

[2] Surekha Davies, Humans: A Monstrous History, (University of California Press, 2025).

[3] Marcy Norton, The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492, (Harvard University Press, 2024), 307.

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A landline telephone in a classroom.

Electronic Signals

Electronic Signals – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, the coalescence of my thoughts over the last few months about how the way we communicate today in 2025 is so rooted in our technology.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, the coalescence of my thoughts over the last few months about how the way we communicate today in 2025 is so rooted in our technology.

For most of my life I tended to write a lot of ordinary quotidian things out by hand on paper either in notebooks, on notepads, or on the backs of receipts, envelopes, or whatever paper I had around. I kept up a good cursive hand and used it on a regular basis. Yet in the last decade technology has caught up to the humble notepad; a decade ago when I was living in London and trying to write out ideas for my first round of graduate essays on my phone’s Notes app while I was on the train or walking about, I often found that app in particular drained my phone’s battery at a considerable and worrisome rate. Then again, that particular smartphone tended to die if the battery dropped below 40 percent, so it had a bad battery. Still, that led to me continuing with the practice of keeping notes and scribblings in little notebooks or on notepads that I carried with me in a pocket. 

It’s funny then that it’s only now in 2025 that I notice how little I write these same notes anymore by hand; in 2021 when my Mom came to visit me in Binghamton, she brought me a couple of notebooks emblazoned with pictures of various national parks on their covers, a new trend in notebooks that began around then. I was a little taken aback by this gift because by that point I’d largely done away with handwritten notes all together. In fact, my Binghamton years launched me head-first into doing as much as possible on the computer so that I’d have less paper and books to carry back and forth between Upstate New York and Kansas City. Like printed books over digital ones, when I returned to Kansas City I began to write handwritten notes again. This is largely thanks to my employers at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts; in our department we still carry around paper performance notes on our shifts. When I started, I was surprised to realize that at some point in the last 5 years I’d stopped carrying a pen with me on a daily basis. Since then, in April 2023, I’ve always had a pen in my pocket.

The pandemic reinforced our digital communications in ways which pushed us firmly forward toward more frequent videocalls and texting to the detriment of the telephone in particular. Most of my friends and family tend to prefer text messages over phone calls, especially among my fellow millennials, to the point that I often second-guess myself as to whether I should try calling someone in the first place. Is a phone call intrusive, whereas a text message is like a telegram or a letter? It can be replied to in the recipient’s own time, though with a text the response time is usually expected to be faster than with a letter that’ll take days to arrive, or even an email, which I see as slightly more formal. Since the invention of Samuel Morse’s electrical telegraph in 1838, our communications have moved into a realm of electricity which was foreign to our conversations and our lives beyond lightning strikes and the daily shocks one gets in a dry climate.

This Spring then, when I was regularly on videocalls–usually over Zoom–with friends, colleagues, and family alike a thought occurred to me that all of our communications are being translated down to electrical signals being sent over wires from one person’s device to another. Those messages, no matter the content, all buzz and fizzle through our wireless data signals and across our telephone wires, through our data centers and bouncing off our satellites all to better communicate to anyone whether on the planet or high above us in orbit or beyond. It’s made us all so much closer to one another. Today, I’m regularly in contact with people in North America, Europe, and Asia and that contact is often almost as instantaneous as if we were together in the same room. It’s what makes my solitary life feel lived in community with the people I like. And yet it’s also spoiled us for the slower communication of the written letter or even the face-to-face conversation that started all these “words, words, words” as Hamlet says that we “might unpack my heart with words.” We communicate to do just that: to speak our thoughts and to live in the strange and beautiful worlds we build around ourselves. So often now, those conversations are not only occurring with the aid of the electrical signals pulsing about our minds telling us how to react and what to say and do, but also through their extracorporeal currents which connect us through our technology across vast distances to one another.

You are listening to my voice filtered by the microphone and my audio editing software being transmitted to anyone with an internet connection. While naturally we aren’t supposed to hear it, as my hearing isn’t quite as good as it should be, I can now hear the differences between sound frequencies in a finer detail yet to the point that if two voices are speaking with the same frequency, I only hear ringing at that frequency and no words or other noise. This was demonstrated to me with dramatic and terrifying effect several years ago when I was nearly t-boned by a Kansas City fire engine roaring along at full speed because I didn’t hear its siren, which wails at the same frequency as the particular section of the 1st movement of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto that I was listening to in my car at the time. So, when you hear my voice what you’re hearing is an electronic recording of my voice being transmitted to you. Often, I sound higher pitched on the recording even by just a half-step, than I do to my ears when I’m doing the recording. I’m a tenor, so I’m okay with that. Still, it’s noticeable especially if I record later in the day or at night, or if I’m nervous.

After I began my graduate studies in History back in August 2017, I started making a practice of recording any conference presentation or invited lecture I gave. I’d usually only make a sound recording, not wanting to deal with a camera. This way too, if someone missed a talk and wanted to see it, I could lay the slides over the recording in iMovie and turn it into a video to send around. This has turned into a wonderful tool for listening to changes in my voice over the years. Yet it’s also interesting now because I not only use this tool for recording the actual performance but also the rehearsals as well, and sometimes when I’m editing papers. I gave a lightning talk last week that was part of a webinar hosted by the Graduate Student Advisory Committee of the Renaissance Society of America about animal intelligence titled “Animals Adapting to Changes in Nature: Perceptions of Animal Intelligence in the Renaissance?” The paper itself was pretty quick and easy to write; it maybe took me an hour to make the first draft several months ago. Yet I began recording rehearsals and making edits after each one up to the minutes before I went live on Thursday morning. I was a bit nervous when I presented, so in the end the cool and practiced pace I’d planned with a mid-range voice ended up being a minute faster than expected and closer to my upper register. When I’ve thought about what to do if anyone asked to hear this talk after the fact, I’ve considered possibly sending out my last rehearsal recording from an hour before the performance, after all many speakers would in decades past make a separate recording of their lectures & speeches from the actual live reading. Yet to keep it authentic to the talk as it went ahead, I also feel inclined to send out the one that I gave on Thursday morning to the 16 other panelists and organizers on the call and the 35 attendees listening in from around the globe. This question gets to the heart of my talk because I made the case that André Thevet’s sloth showed signs of intelligence by refusing food it didn’t want to eat and not falling to the same bad practices as the Frenchmen who captured it or the native Tupinambá who were more familiar with it. Those practices, human faults one might say, include indecision.

Rather than flip a coin or pick another method of choosing, I’m instead going to play for you now the last rehearsal recording for one very simple reason. The main benefit of my recording of the actual talk is that it ought to have captured the organizer’s introduction and the questions that followed my presentation. Yet, my phone’s microphone couldn’t pick any of that up because my computer’s sound output was going into my headphones. So, without any more gilding the lily here are my thoughts on Renaissance sloths adapting to changes in nature, brought to you through a most electronic form of communication.

~

Animals Adapting to Changes in Nature:

Perceptions of Animal Intelligence in the Renaissance?

I want to begin by thanking the members of the RSA Graduate Student Advisory Committee for holding these lightning talks and accepting my proposal among the speakers today. When considering this question of animal intelligence, I’m drawn back to the Aristotelian notions of the animal sensitive soul in contrast to the human rational soul; Erica Fudge put it well, writing that animals can feel, perceive, and move, yet humans are the only natural beings to express intellect.[1] Animals were used as stand-ins for humans in allegory and vivisection, and an over-exertion of passion could drive a human into a state of animality, yet the human was understood to be fundamentally different because of our facilities of reason developed through experience over one’s lifetime.[2]

Newly encountered American animals played a disruptive role in this dynamic. Anatomically, many such animals defied European expectations for their size, or their chimerical character appearing as a composite of unrelated creatures known to exist in the wider Mediterranean World. Chief among these in my research is the three-toed sloth which was described by the French cosmographer André Thevet (1516–1590) in his 1557 book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique. There are many different aspects of Thevet’s sloth which allowed it to stand out as a singularity among singularities from its appearance as a bear-like ape to its vocalizations “sighing like a little child afflicted with sorrow” to its general disregard by the indigenous Tupinambá people who explained aspects of its manner to Thevet.[3] I’ve written and spoken extensively about this, I know several of you have heard me talk about Thevet’s sloth at a number of conferences in the last several years. Today though, I want to discuss something I haven’t addressed yet in all these presentations; namely the signs in Thevet’s text which point toward some sense of the sloth’s intelligence.

The sloth’s intelligence is seen in its abstention from eating the food Thevet provided it. Thevet wrote “I kept it well for a space of 26 days, where I knew that it never ate or drank, but was always in a similar state.”[4] This reaffirmed Thevet’s assertion that “this beast has never been seen to eat by a living human,” either by the Tupinambá or the French.[5] This abstention from eating could well be understood as a sign of the sloth’s lack of a rational soul which would know to eat; yet I think it is better to perceive the sloth’s abstinence as an active choice made by an animal who didn’t favor the food it was offered. Thevet wrote that “some believe that this beast lives solely on leaves of a tree named in [the Tupi language] Amahut,” which is one of the Cercopia species known to live along the Brazilian coast.[6] Yet a 2021 sloth behavioral study published in the journal Austral Ecology has proven that this claim is less grounded in the genus’s actual experience.[7]

Perhaps the sloth can be best contrasted with the dogs which killed it at the end of that 26-day captivity, or even with the accused descent from humanity by first the Tupinambá and later the French in accusations of cannibalism. Unlike the humans who occupy these stories from France Antarctique who so often fall so far from their rationality to eat each other, the sloth simply refused to eat at all. This small creature, taken from its forest home and left in the care of an unfamiliar human who didn’t know what to feed it, chose to preserve its nature and not eat what was foreign to it. The sloth adapted to changes in the nature around it and expressed an intelligence perhaps more elevated than the humans who captured it. I’m drawn to one of the most poignant lines in Montaigne’s essay “Des cannibales” in which the erstwhile political animal himself wrote “I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling.”[8] In all of the variations on his sloth account, Thevet published this same story twice first in the Singularitez of 1557 and later in the Cosmographie Universelle of 1575, the dominant sense I get from Thevet’s text is one of befuddlement at an animal that defied his expectations in so many ways. In the tradition of animal allegories from Aesop to Renyard the Fox the sloth fills the role of an exotic oddity, a stranger in the canon of European natural history which didn’t quite fit any mold available. Even after Thevet’s sloth was christened by Conrad Gessner an Arctopithecus in 1560 and by Carolus Clusius as an Ignavus in 1605, this fact that it refused to eat or drink what Thevet offered it for 26 days remained a constant in its story. I see in the sloth a sign of intelligence beyond expected human norms and rules which rendered it exceptional. Any assimilation of the sloth was an artifice laid over its character, a colonial imposition. Still, its abstinence fit the framework of the sensitive soul, reflecting a delicate sensitivity toward things it found unfamiliar.

~

How does a 450 year old sloth’s intelligence have any bearing on the electronic signals which carry our communications in this new century? I wouldn’t have been able to study Thevet’s sloth in the way I have without the internet and all our technology. So much of my work is with digitized primary sources, mostly printed books, that I do almost all of my research on the computer. It’s a rare occurrence that I get to go into an archive to look at a source in the flesh. Yet I think there’s another interpretation we can take here: like the sloth we choose how much we are in touch with each other, how much of our lives are spent with our phones in our hands. My weekly screen-time report tends to fall in the 3 hour range per day. Yet I’m not only checking my social media accounts or texting with people on my phone, but I’m also reading books and writing notes and ideas down on my phone or using the camera to try and capture an artful reflection of the lived world around me. Recently on Instagram I saw another person’s screen-time report say they spend 14 hours on their phone per day, which is essentially the entirety of my waking hours. To me that is unhealthy to an extreme. Yet that’s how that individual has chosen to live their life.

I know that no matter where I end up, I will remain connected to others through our technology. Somedays I do miss the slower pace of sending letters or calling family and friends on the phone as things were when I was a child. I’d rather talk with someone face-to-face or voice-to-voice than text. As I wrote in January, I feel that we’ve allowed texting to take the place that videocalls were supposed to hold in the 21st century. We’re not constantly talking to people over monitors beyond Zoom calls that are scheduled and with that pre-arrangement more formal than the quotidian string of text messages. Today, I do have a notepad on my desk, one that was given to me among the materials of a workshop I attended at the École des Hautes-Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris last summer. It’s gotten some use, yet one year later I’m still only halfway through the gridded pages. As with so much of life in general, I feel that I’m trying to find a balance between the digital and the manual, between life online and life in this place where I find myself in a given moment. All I know for certain is that over all else, I long for connection.

[1] Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England, (Cornell University Press, 2019), 13.

[2] Fudge, 17.

[3] Thevet, Singularitez (Antwerp, 1558), 99r.

[4] Thevet, Singularitez (Antwerp, 1558), 99v–98r.

[5] Thevet, Singularitez (Antwerp, 1558), 99v.

[6] Thevet, Singularitez (Antwerp, 1558), 98r.

[7] Gastón Andrés Fernandez Giné, Gastón Andrés, Laila Santim Mureb, and Camila Righetto Cassano, “Feeding ecology of the maned sloth (Bradypus torquatus): Understanding diet composition and preferences, and prospects for future studies,” Austral Ecology 47 (2022): pp. 1124–1135, at p. 1132.

[8] Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame, (Stanford University Press, 1965), 155.

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What’s the Difference between Beavers and Humans?

What's the Difference between Beavers and Humans? – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, to conclude a month of chaos I interviewed environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb about his book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane. Links Ben Goldfarb's Website: https://www.bengoldfarb.com NOAA Fisheries, "Oregon Beavers Engineer Better Fish Habitat, More Fish," 14 July 2016. Popular Science, "From the Archives: Do Beavers Rule on Mars?", 6 May 2022. Harvest Public Media, "The Midwest and Great Plains are gearing up for water fights fueled by climate change", 3 Sep 2024. Photo Credit: Beaver in the Pipestone Creek, Pipestone National Monument, Minnesota. Photo: Gabe Yellowhawk. Public Domain. Learn more here.
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This week, to conclude a month of chaos I interviewed environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb about his book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter.

What follows is a transcript of our conversation.

STK: This is a really fascinating book, I have to say.

STK: I was reading something back in June that was talking about the idea of the Homo faber where we should identify ourselves by our ability to build and to imagine solutions to get out of our problems. I read that and said, “that’s what beavers do to, right?” So, the premise of this one is what is the difference between humans and beavers?

STK: When you talked in the book here about the restoration of beaver dams on Bridge Creek in Oregon; could this be a model for a clearer for how humanity could adapt to cohabitate with the rest of nature?

BG: Yeah, I think so. The situation in Bridge Creek and other places like that is that humans are building beaver dam analogues to help beavers flourish. When we wiped out several hundred million beavers over several centuries in North America, we made it harder for beavers to recolonize, so when you have a healthy beaver-rich stream they are pooling that water up and pushing it out onto the floodplain. When the beavers disappear there’s nothing to cool or check the water, streams then cut through the sediment on the bottom, and they turn into these miniature canyons or ravines. That’s a hard place for beavers to recolonize because the stream is trapped in its place and that’s where these human-built beaver dams come in because we can knock some big wooden posts into the stream bed and weave some willows in there and build some stability. It’s not as good as what the beavers do but it’s a starter dam that they can come in, build off of, and advance. So, these beaver dam analogues are like beaver kick starters, and they allow them to recolonize places where they otherwise couldn’t colonize. And to your point, I think we’ve spent hundreds of years in North America making life harder for beavers in many ways, mostly by killing them directly, and this is a way that we’re making life a little bit easier for them. You can apply this model onto many other wildlife restoration projects like wildlife crossings, or the planting of oyster reefs or salt marshes. These are things which work with ecosystems rather than against them.

A beaver dam on Bridge Creek in Oregon. Photo: NOAA Fisheries, Public Domain. Learn more here.

STK: Yeah, I know they talk here about the butterfly gardens that give them a place to land and such when they migrate.

We’re the species that created the grid system whereas beavers have their own idea of fluid stability. What would you say to that?

BG: We as a species are obsessed with linearity and if Homo faber is a construction species or an infrastructure species as some historians have put it. Linear features are what we construct: highways, railroads, power lines, fiberoptic cables, just look at our crop furrows. Beavers create what looks to us like chaos, there’s water ponding up everywhere with trees dying all over the place, and there’s sediment muckiness that smells a bit. This looks to us like fluid chaos, and I think we need to recognize that those kinds of beaver-modified or beaver-influenced systems are first the historical rule rather than the exception at the time of European arrival, but more important that those beaver systems are profoundly healthy as ecosystems compared to our infrastructure which are destructive to nature. We kill more than 1 million animals per day in the U.S. alone with our cars, whereas beavers create infrastructure that is highly beneficial to other animals from salmon and trout to waterfowl to moose and amphibians. It’s hard to name a species that doesn’t benefit from beavers at some point in its lifecycle.

STK: Beavers seem to have a human attitude to modifying the landscape. It reminds me of theories of terraforming other worlds. André Thevet described how on his way back to France from Brazil in 1556 most places hadn’t been colonized yet except how the island of Haiti was transformed by the Spanish into Hispaniola, “Little Spain,” in part by the influx of pigs they brought. So, this idea of terraforming in astrobiology seems pertinent here. You have a quote here, “We are a nation of floodplain dwellers and farmers, drawn to river valleys yet intolerant of riparian anarchy.” So, are we hostile to beavers because they challenge our sense of order?

BG: Right, the whole terraforming thing is funny because there was a story in, I believe Popular Science, in the 1930s that posited that beavers dug out the canals on Mars . So, that idea that beavers are world-makers have been applied to other planets as well. I think it’s instructive to think of the ways that beaver dams and human dams both impact the landscape, especially here in the West where I live. Every single river has a colossal mega dam on it, and those dams are immense, and they create enormous, consolidated reservoirs and they take a diverse and distributed approach to building ponds. Each of those ponds are only an acre or so, but they store more water in the landscape. You think about what the future of solar energy looks like, we’re on track to build giant industrial solar farms in the California desert when we could put a panel on every roof and opting for this more distributed and dispersed approach to power generation. That’s another interesting thing that beavers teach us: the value of the energy and strength of these distributed systems rather than the hyper-centralized systems that we tend to favor out of some misguided love of efficiency.

STK: Yeah, I just read this morning that our local NPR station was reporting that there’s a bill being proposed in the Missouri Assembly to ban water exportation from Missouri to the western states anticipating that Colorado, Utah, Arizona, et cetera are going to ask for our water eventually. It’s interesting to see that, we have the Missouri River here and the Mississippi River is on the eastern side of the state, and the Missouri floods at least once a year because they release the dams from the Dakotas that get all of the snowmelt and that floods down here typically. The Missouri is very heavily managed by the Army Corps of Engineers to the point that it’s faster than it used to be, but you know, it still floods.

Kansas City, Missouri’s Riverfront Walk along the Missouri River. Photo by the author.

BG: Look, the Missouri is one of the most hydrologically modified rivers in the U.S., and it’s certainly up there, and look at the catastrophic impacts it’s had most prominently on the Pallid sturgeon, and it speaks to the impact of human infrastructure being catastrophic for nature whereas beaver ponds are the world’s greatest fish production system. Trout and salmon grow exponentially faster in beaver ponds. The Missouri is like the Colorado River, one of those rivers that was incredibly full of sediment, “too thick to drink, too thin to plough,” so by damming the Missouri we changed water flows and sediment flows as well, and I think the beavers show us what a healthier and more beneficial relationship with sediment looks like. Beavers are capturing sediment as a resource which allows them to push more water onto the floodplain; they’re managing sediment better than we are in a lot of cases.

STK: Yeah, we actually saw one a couple of weeks ago on a Sunday morning crossing I-29 in Downtown Kansas City near the river, and it flopped itself over the barrier to get off the highway. I’m hoping there isn’t too much of a fall there, it’s all brush there. It was neat to see. We’re heavily redeveloping the riverfront now, so there’s going to be a lot more people up there were previously it was [among other things] an industrial waste dump by the railroads and such.

STK: I like what you said in the ninth chapter of this book when you were over in the U.K., and I’ve thought for a long time living here in Kansas City, my neighborhood was built here 100 years ago, and there weren’t trees here before they built this neighborhood, and all of the streets are named after colonial New Englanders. I’ve said then to people offhand that the developer tried to make this area a little New England, and as William Cronon wrote, New England was built out of the forests there as a new form of England. So, I wonder there, were you getting toward saying that we could look to Britain for the inspiration for American ecological policies, and secondly that the end goal of unlimited development would be how Britain is today?

BG: Yeah, to me one of the really striking things about visiting the U.K. for the book was how biologically improvised Britain and Ireland are today, and how fortunate we are to have the wildlife here in the U.S.: we have wolves, bison, and moose which were all species that once existed there that were annihilated there. And fortunately, here in the U.S. we were colonized recently enough, and we have enough rugged and inaccessible topography to allow these animals to be conserved, and we’ve done enough wildlife reintroductions here in a way that the U.K. is just beginning to get around to with beavers, and lynx someday. So, visiting made me feel extremely grateful for everything we’ve hung onto in the U.S., and beavers are one of those organisms of an animal in the Lower 48 that we pushed to the brink of extinction, but enough beavers survived up in Canada that we were able to use reintroduced beavers from Canada and some that hung on in Yellowstone National Park to reintroduce beavers on a wide-scale here in the U.S. Beavers today aren’t as ubiquitous as they were at their peak, not by a long shot so maybe we take them for granted a little bit and have beavers in the landscape.

When I went back to England a year later on my book tour, I got to go on a nature walk where we saw beavers doing their thing and people were in tears with joy at seeing these beavers who had been eliminated from the landscape in the 1600s. It’s sort of like seeing the Loch Ness Monster, they’re these giant rodents with their paddle tails and they cut down trees with their teeth to build walls. They’re objectively these cool, bizarre, magical critters, and it was cool to be reminded of that in the U.K. where people are seeing this part of their natural heritage return to the landscape, while meanwhile they hang out in Downtown Kansas City, or Downtown Seattle, or in the Bronx River. It was a good reminder to appreciate our wildlife in general and beavers specifically.

Note that webbing. Photo by the author.

STK: Yeah, I lived in London for a year doing my first Master’s, and you’d see some nature in the parks. I was fascinated looking at the webbing on some of the duck’s feet in St James’s Park where they’ve been protected because that’s been a part of the Palace for 300 years. But if you really wanted to see nature, you’d watch Naturewatch on BBC 1 on weekday mornings.

STK: So, has colonization forever changed beavers? Are they a different animal than they were 400 years ago?

BG: That’s a good question, and I think that ecologically and biologically they’re not. You could take a beaver from the 1300s and plop him down in modern North America and he’d do his thing and build dams and create ponds. They’ve survived so much over the last handful of centuries creating the kinds of landscapes you’d have seen before colonization. I went to Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota where these animals are protected from trapping and the landscape is conducive to beaver dam building, and there were dams that were 1000 ft long and 15 ft high, and I thought it was this great glimpse into pre-colonial America and what this would’ve looked like. These animals are the same but what’s changed is our relationship with beavers where before we perceived them as commodities that we extracted on an industrial scale to make hats. In the 20thcentury beavers began to be protected a little bit, and their populations began to increase, but all of a sudden, they were coming into conflict with humans and flooding our roads and cutting down our apple trees and flooding our irrigation ditches, and so we now see them less as commodities and more as pests. So, we still kill tens if not hundreds of thousands of beavers in the U.S. per year for causing conflict when we’re the nuisance species more than they are, they were here first. So, we need to transition out of the commodity phase and out of the pest phase and into the symbiotic phase where we harness all of the ecological benefits that these animals provide for us. Their ponds filter out water pollution and create oases against drought and prevent wildfires in some cases, especially in the West. They provide incredible fish & wildlife habitat and mitigate flooding in New England. Their value is immense beyond measure and we need to recognize that and treat them as ecological partners in conservation. Indigenous people in North America had that approach. The Blackfeet didn’t kill beavers but saw them as sacred because they created water holes to help other species. Respecting and honoring beavers isn’t new to western science, we just need to rediscover what native people knew for millennia.

STK: Are you working on any big projects now?

BG: I’m working on a book about fish, about fish as ecological engineers putting my beaver hat back on. Fish as drivers of human movement and culture over the course of our species’ own history and all the ways in which we lost fish from our lives and landscapes. I’ve always loved fish, both as quarry (I’m an angler) and as beautiful special specimens, like beavers they’re both concealed by the opacity of water.

BG: I look forward to coming back and joining you when that’s out in, I don’t know, 2056!

STK: Yeah, I’ve got a couple of books that I hope will come out before 2030 hopefully.

BG: Yeah, cool, I look forward to reading about three-toed sloths in human history.

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Beaver in the Pipestone Creek, Pipestone National Monument, Minnesota. Photo: Gabe Yellowhawk. Public Domain. Learn more here.