Tag Archives: Natural History

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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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.

Fighting African Elephants in Stanley Field Hall. Taxidermy by Carl Akeley . 41411 is on the left with two tusks and its trunk is raised. 41410 is on the right, with one tusk. Photo credit: (c) Field Museum of Natural History - CC BY-NC 4.0.

Elephant Tails

Photo Credit: Fighting African Elephants in Stanley Field Hall. Taxidermy by Carl Akeley. 41411 is on the left with two tusks and its trunk is raised. 41410 is on the right, with one tusk. © Field Museum of Natural History – CC BY-NC 4.0.

Elephant Tails – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some animalistic thoughts. Photo credit: Fighting African Elephants in Stanley Field Hall. Taxidermy by Carl Akeley . 41411 is on the left with two tusks and its trunk is raised. 41410 is on the right, with one tusk. (c) Field Museum of Natural History – CC BY-NC 4.0 — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, some animalistic thoughts.

I wonder if the reason why we take our children to zoos and natural history museums to see the animals is because there’s a deep sense where we recognize our own animality? I still go to these places today, to revel in the same sense of wonder I felt at spying the animals, living and dead, that grace the halls and paths of these scientific institutions. For me and many others these are places where we were first introduced to wild things when we too were wild in our own way.

On Tuesday morning I made one of my regular visits to the Kansas City Zoo, to enjoy a cool late summer morning, and yes to see the animals who live there. I’ve come to appreciate more elements of these zoo visits the older I’ve gotten, where before I might love to see the lions and imagine them in the hunt; today, I admire the power, strength, and grace of their forms, and their wisdom at sleeping for nearly 20 hours per day. On this visit the African elephants were out on a morning buffet run through their long enclosure, while families and zookeepers gazed on from the footpaths that line the west side of the elephant enclosure. We didn’t stay long at the elephants on this visit, instead watching them as we passed by. These animals are intelligent and powerful and reflect some of the noblest values we cherish in our fellow humans in their own way.

Perhaps that is why we seek after collecting other animals and housing them in zoos while living or in museums after they are dead. Jay Kirk’s biography of Carl Akeley (1864–1926), the father of American taxidermy, described how on 24 June 1910, while on a collecting expedition for the American Museum of Natural History in Kenya and Uganda, Akeley was taken by surprise by a great bull elephant.[1] Akeley had the distinct impression that he “was being hunted as well, and was now engaged in a mortal contest with this bull.”[2] In the furor of the moment the safety of his rifle caught, after which he threw it aside and grabbed hold of one of the elephant’s tusks “as it lanced past him with the force of a sharpened swinging log.” Akeley held on between the two tusks as the elephant “plowed him into the ground,” and gored off part of his face, breaking enough of his body to convince the Kikuyu porters who joined his expedition 14,000 feet up Mount Kenya that he was dead.[3] Thankfully, Akeley wasn’t dead, and by the end of the expedition had gathered enough mammals to begin building his African Hall of Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York where many generations of visitors have learned about these species in the century since.

I see an educational purpose to zoos and museums; they allow us to view these animals up close where otherwise we would have to travel to their native habitats or watch nature documentaries of their lives. These are places where the city dweller can explore the natural world in a controlled and comfortable manner. We demarcate ourselves from the rest of nature by our inventions and our buildings and our tool-use, yet other animals have been seen to do all these things in their own way. What sets us apart perhaps is that we build worlds meant only for ourselves in which we expect other species to exist on our terms. My parents didn’t buy new rugs for their house until after our last two pets, Noel the shih-poo and Kitty the American shorthair cat both died of old age, knowing that those two and our other dogs, cats, horses, goats, ponies, and even a turtle were going to do what they needed to when and where they needed to.

The same goes for these animals living in zoos: today they have enclosures that seek to mimic their native habitats, and to keep them busy and engaged in the thrill of life even while in captivity. Where once they were kept in cages, now they are housed in enclosures. The good people of Kansas City therefore are able to see Sumatran tiger, Red pandas, and Orangutans all in the same general vicinity of each other in the Asian zone of the Kansas City Zoo with minimal risk to life or limb. I say minimal because for all the efforts to contain the natural ways of these animals, we still have the human factor to consider.

In the last week I’ve read a fair bit on chaos theory, first devised by meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the 1960s to describe seeming anomalous elements in weather patterns. Lorenz defines chaos as having a “sensible dependence” which is inherently deterministic by its sensibility.[4] Chaos “appears to involve chance,” which can be statistically estimated, yet those results are mere estimates.[5] One might say that the size of the human species alone, all 8.2 billion of us, would be enough data points to fulfill the conditions for chaos. Yet even then, there is a finite number which can be calculated, so even the uncertainty of the human factor in building environments for safe encounters between the rest of nature and ourselves for the mutual benefit of all is not uncertain enough to fulfill the need for an infinitely large sample size required for chaos to exist.[6]

Perhaps then, the best way to try to quantify the roots of chaos in the human factor would be to attempt to quantify the countless thoughts of we 8.2 billion humans? I imagine it like filling Stanley Field Hall at the Field Museum in Chicago and the balcony galleries above it to just beyond the fire code maximum capacity and then trying to count the number of thoughts each individual there might have in a given moment. In order to safely move those people out of the building to avoid overcrowding you not only would need to coax each individual to move in such an unsafely large crowd, but you’d need to keep all of those individuals calm and compliant to avoid a panic and stampede. At the end of the day, we are all humans, and humanity is inherently animalistic. A chaotic system is one dependent less on external factors, the fire marshal on a bullhorn directing the crowd out the north and south doors, and more on interior changes in initial conditions.[7] External changes then are predictable, while the human consciousness remains a wonder and a liability in situations when too many of us are in the same place at the same time. It’s a real wonder that the 2016 Cubs World Series Parade, which saw 5 million of us humans gather along the route from Wrigley Field down to Grant Park, didn’t result in any casualties or fights. I’ve argued before that this event is a sign of the inherent benevolence of the human spirit, and that we evolved with good intentions first and foremost.

Here though we’re moving from my philosophical interpretation of a branch of mathematics into matters of theology; and that doesn’t feel like an appropriate direction to take this, so I am avoiding matters of faith this week. When done right our museums and zoos allow us to learn about the rest of nature at a distance, a safe distance for both ourselves and everyone else. With all I’ve read in the last few weeks about polar bears, I’d rather just view them at the zoo, or the standing bears frozen in taxidermic eternity behind glass at the Field Museum. They might appreciate meeting me in life during their summer fast, though that’s entirely irr-elephant.

[1] “Akeley Expedition to British East Africa (1909-1911),” American Museum of Natural History Archives, https://data.library.amnh.org/archives-authorities/id/amnhc_2000084.

[2] Jay Kirk, Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man’s Quest to Preserve the World’s Great Animals, (New York: Picador, 2010), 220.

[3] Kirk, 221-222.

[4] Edward N. Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 8.

[5] Lorenz, 9.

[6] Lorenz, 10-12.

[7] Lorenz, 24.

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Dúlra

Dúlra – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how it’s good to pause and notice the ways we supersede older things with the new while benefiting from the old all the same. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, how it’s good to pause and notice the ways we supersede older things with the new while benefiting from the old all the same.

One thing I seek to understand the most about the Irish language is how different external influences have changed the language. I first learned the word nádúr before learning dúlra. Both words mean the same thing on a broad level: they both refer to the concept of nature. Yet nádúr comes from the Latin nātūra with the early medieval monks. It was an import to Ireland that arrived with Christianity and the Latin alphabet, a Roman concept of nature that perhaps fits better in the classical sense of civilization than the Gaelic model which was highly developed around forts and homesteads rather than cities or towns. I’ve often challenged my students to consider that while civilization at its core refers to cities, the ways in which it has developed around the globe differ in their own methods.

Take, if you will, the different origins of writing. Whereas our own Latin alphabet derives from a Mediterranean sphere of the written word whose roots trace back to Egyptian hieroglyphs, the history of writing in East Asia goes back to the earliest forms of writing in ancient China on the oracle bones. In the countries whose writing systems derive from this Chinese source, they still largely use logographic or syllabic forms of writing while there is a greater diversity of form among the descendants of these old Egyptian hieroglyphs. We, the Greeks, and Cyrillic writers, have devised alphabets in which both consonants and vowels are written out. Other cultures that have adopted this Mediterranean tradition of writing only write the consonants, as in Arabic and Hebrew. Still others have syllabic systems in which individual written characters represent a syllabic sound: a consonant and vowel combination.

Each system is equal in its utility, and each represent the diversity of human experiences with their own worlds. They are each their own response to a common question. So it is with nātūra and dúlra, one is a Latin way while the other a Gaelic one. Nature, in this Latin perception is quite monolithic and abstract in my view; I’m thinking of Lucretius’s book De rērum nātūra, or On the Nature of Things, whose title I’ve surely ripped off a good many times in the last fifteen years. We can talk about nature this and nature that, yet we need further context to properly understand what is meant by nature. It could be a reference to the non-human world, places untouched by civilization. That certainly fits the Renaissance perception of nature which I study. Or it could stand in for instinct and feeling. My Instagram feed was filled earlier this week with videos of people who have pet panthers and tigers for some reason. Sure, they may seem like big, cute kittens but unlike domesticated cats (Felius cattus) these animals don’t have generations of domestication and breeding to be willing to live around humans like their smaller distant cousins do. So, pets they may be, but they are still pets that could, and quite likely will, rip your face off if given the chance.

What I like about dúlra is that it comes from another Irish word, dúil, which is a very abstract concept in English yet specific in that it refers to the most fundamental aspects of one’s nature. Dúil can be used to refer to the elements of one’s existence, or to a creature as something created. In English we have several words that all generally refer to other fauna: there’s animal, the most common one which has the Latin anima meaning “spirit” at its core, creature, which sounds slightly more menacing yet at the same time speaks to the thing’s nature as a created being, and finally beast which comes into English through French from the Latin bēstiawhich implies a strong sense of danger in its name. These three words offer a gradient of distinction from humanity, and even a scale by which we humans have judged each other. Dúil then fits closer to the English word creature in the sense that a creature is created and is constituted of elements which allow it to exist.

Are these elements then immutable, or can they change with their experiences? There is a story in the March/April 2024 issue of Smithsonian Magazine by conservation journalist Ben Goldfarb about the negative impacts that roads are having on the forests of the American West. In many places roads were the forward guard of civilization, along those roads came the hunters and loggers, the miners and sightseers all of whom transformed these forests to better fit that classical view of a civilized and maintained wilderness that isn’t truly wild. Today, Goldfarb writes, in the contiguous United States “it is impossible to travel further than 22 miles (35 km) from the nearest road.” Think about that for a moment: in the Lower 48 states, which occupy an area of 3,119,884.69 mi2 (8,080,464.3 km2), you can’t go very far from running into a road. I’ve often noticed how if you look at a road map of the 48 states you’ll see how tightly packed the roads are in the eastern half of the country, and once you go out further west they are still there but often more in a clear grid pattern. Goldfarb describes how Idaho’s Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forests have a road density which exceeds that of New York City even.

These roads then are not natural to the landscape, and those which were built on older Native American footpaths and trade routes are now so widened and imprinted upon the landscape as to make them less thoroughfares through the woods and more barriers for the denizens of the woods going straight through their home turf. Think of Arthur Dent’s exasperation at waking up in his comfortable English house to find a bulldozer outside his front door ready to pull the house down to build a bypass. The same goes for the bears and birds and deer and all the other wild things that live in this continent’s forests.

Roads often stand for a level of sophistication and civility which hearkens back to the Romans, whose roads famously all led to Rome. Like the Roman coloniae which reshaped the great forests of Northern and Western Europe two millennia ago, our own settlements changed this continent in a way which better reflects the aspirations of one society seeking to assert their sense of civility and right upon all others they encounter. Roads are tangible symbols of empire which aid the movement of goods and people from one place to another. They tie this continent together in its most fundamental way, before the railways or airways brought us even closer together. Yet Goldfarb makes a good point: at what cost have we strung these ribbons of highway across the North American continent?

The suggestion which Goldfarb describes is pulling out less used roads, old timber roads no longer operated by the companies who built them, and letting the wilderness restore itself. At first, I was hesitant to support this cause, after all how else would I, a city guy, be able to venture out west into the woods to see nature and admire the wonders of the Rockies? Yet as I read his article which features conservationists in Idaho and Montana, I began to see his point. These roads are destructive, and perhaps the better way to see nature, to experience dúlra in its fullness on this continent is to pull out some of these more remote roads, let the brush take over again, and force any would-be visitors to hike in and out. Let it be a reminder that whenever we are in that world that we are guests in someone else’s house.

In the coming weeks, I hope to write more about this question of mine of what exactly makes us human? What is the dúil at the core of our existence? And how can we understand our own dúil, our own essence, in a way which coexists with all other life rather than living above all others as some sort of self-appointed superior? Perhaps that famous line in the Book of Genesis where God commissions Adam and Eve as stewards of the Earth ought to be understood not as “having dominion over nature” but “tending to the balance of nature.” As humanity becomes more urbanized, as civilization becomes more city-orientated, perhaps we will see the land around our cities return to the wild. The Australian mammalogist, paleontologist, environmentalist, conservationist, explorer, and science communicator Tim Flannery argues this could be the case. To conclude his book Europe: A Natural History, Flannery describes a future around 2100 where most of Europe’s human population live in cities and the open land between them has been turned into wildlife reserves, national parks, and restored to its primeval forests. As long as we can assure that our food supplies, fresh drinking water, and sanitation persist if not improve, and that overcrowding doesn’t become too much of a problem in these cities then I have little issue with this idea.

It is interesting to me that even in the context of the word dúlra there is a clear distinction between that and humanity, that dúlra represents the essence of the non-human world, something far less orderly than what we’ve created. It doesn’t necessarily follow laws in the same manner as nātūra, laws whose order can be discerned with careful examination. There is something pure to the chaotic origins of life in this word dúlra, and that’s something I appreciate.

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Natural History, Part 2

Photo by Steven Paton on Pexels.com
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I am a Historian of the History of Natural History, or a Stáir ar Stáir an Nádúir in Irish. This means that I study how animals and plants were understood by naturalists in the past, in my case during the mid-1500s, or what I like to call the Late Renaissance. Central to all of this is the fact that the animals I study are all from the Americas, so they were brand new to the French and Swiss naturalists whom I study. In a sense then, natural history seeks to provide a history on human terms for nature. It seeks to bring something so vast as nature down to our level and make it familiar.

In my research this story focuses on the maned sloth (Bradypus torquatus), a species of three-toed sloth that’s native to the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. It was first recorded in a work of natural history by the Frenchman André Thevet in his 1557 book The Singularities of France Antarctique. Thevet has become famous in the history of natural history for using local names for local animals, rather than calling it a “sloth” he called it a “haüt“, his rendering of the local Tupinambá name. To me this is critical to understanding the History of Natural History, for while you could look at an animal and call it a “sloth” because it moves very slowly another option is to turn to the people who’ve lived alongside it for generations and ask them what they call it. This is what Thevet did.

Last week I got the chance to spend a couple days down in New York City, during which time I wanted to pay a visit to the American Museum of Natural History, arguably one of the preeminent institutions dedicated to the study of nature in this country. It’s a nice enough place, though I’ll admit the exhibits tend to be a bit dated now in 2022. Still, the American Museum offers a good foundation for the layout of such museums around the country. Like its Chicago counterpart, the Field Museum, my favorite such museum, the American Museum has sections focusing on Zoology, Paleontology, Botany, Astronomy, and Anthropology. It seeks to be an encyclopedia of nature in one big building on the edge of Central Park, something it does quite well.

What has struck me the most over the last few years of choosing to visit natural history and science museums in every city that I visit is how all of them try to tell the same story, a history of nature from the Big Bang down to the present. The Field Museum does a wonderful job of capturing this in their Deep Time exhibit, the place where you can find the dinosaurs, in that it begins with that first primordial burst of energy that got everything started and it ends with a wall showing all the species that have gone extinct already in our current age alongside a ticker counting the number of species currently going extinct. We model our natural history on our own history, and frankly our own history is one bookended by a lack of life, whether it be before we exist or after we’ve died.

It’s important that we understand the fact that our perspective is born entirely out of our own experiences. So, we understand the course of time as a linear and finite thing. Past generations have thought of trees and plants as animated creatures like us, while today we recognize they are living if perhaps not as sentient as we animals are. Many among us have understood nature through faith, prescribing that energy which drives all creation to a Creator, a Divine Essence as I like to call the most paradoxical and incomprehensible. (One of these days maybe I’ll release an episode all about the idea and promise of God.)

Thevet understood the sloth to be “most deformed” because of its strange shape and notable slowness. To his perspective it wasn’t a normal creature, natural to its own world yes, but not normal as he understood normal. We still today describe things that are “normal” or “ordinary” as things that we find familiar and comforting. I do it just as much as the next person (see the episode two weeks ago about cultural homogenization). In moderation this is a good thing, it allows us to formulate a baseline, a control, against which we can better understand the unusual and extraordinary around us. The beautiful thing about Nature is as much as our science has made great progress in seeking to describe and understand it, there’s always more out there for us to learn about.

I’m going to leave it there this week. If you haven’t noticed, my voice is failing me today. Let me finish with the thing that I myself will eventually want written as my epitaph (however many decades away that is): stay curious.

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National Mall

Mr. Lincoln

National Mall – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I want to tell you about a trip I took last weekend to Washington, D.C. Links: The Smithsonian's Futures Exhibit: https://aib.si.edu/futures/ The Planetary Society's Sailing the Light documentary premiere live stream: https://youtu.be/NnKsHlV1NhA

Of all the cities in the east, Washington remains my favorite. It’s place at the emotional heart of our republic, the center of the Union that my lifelong hero President Lincoln fought to preserve, makes me yet another Mr. Smith every time I return to the capital. This week I made such a trip back to some of my favorite museums, some powerful monuments, and some good weather after months of cold and snow in Upstate New York. I decided that I wanted to make my trip a bit of an adventure and chose to drive down from Binghamton rather than fly, an easier option. This led me to an occasionally tense journey down Interstates 81 and 83 through Pennsylvania and Maryland to the BWI Amtrak station where I decided to leave my car for the weekend, figuring it’d be better to not try to drive and park in the District if possible.

Arriving in D.C. on the Acela, currently this country’s fastest passenger train, something the train nerd in me specifically chose to do, I had a similar arrival to Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith at Union Station, its high vaulted ceilings designed by Chicago’s own Daniel Burnham over a century ago. Unlike Smith I didn’t see the capitol dome from the station, instead looking downward trying to find the nearest metro station to get to my hotel.

Seeing the monuments at night is always a special treat. As elegant as they are in the daytime, and some like the Vietnam Memorial are better seen under the Sun, there’s a special artistry in seeing the work of sculptors and architects illuminated with floodlights. That’s how I saw the Washington, Lincoln, and MLK Memorials, lit up solemnly. Mr. Lincoln and Dr. King looked as though they were great titans of antiquity in the glow of their memorials’ lights. 

At this time in our history, Lincoln’s struggle to save the Union and end slavery in this country once and for all seems all the more present. In the week since my last post (episode for those listening) the Russian military has invaded Ukraine. I alluded to those threats last week, but now threats have become a living nightmare for the Ukrainian people and a great storm cloud over the rest of Europe that threatens to engulf all of humanity. How do we embrace the true and righteous words of Mr. Lincoln to do the right thing and feel no evil towards others, even those like President Putin who have so brutally attacked their neighbors? I don’t have an answer to that question yet, nor am I certain that I ever will. But today’s feast, Ash Wednesday for us Catholics, fits well into this narrative as an annual reminder “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

I spent a good deal of time on Saturday in several of the Smithsonian museums, returning to the Natural History Museum that I visited in July to double check a label for a sloth for my dissertation, and revisiting an old favorite in the Asian Art Museum. I also visited the American History Museum for the first time in over a decade and enjoyed it quite a bit more. The previous time in 2011 it seemed to be sparse in actual history, yet this time I could notice the nuance in the stories it told in the objects on display in what little space it had available.

The most insightful museum visit though was to the Futures exhibit currently housed in the Arts and Industries Building on the south side of the Mall next to the Smithsonian Castle. This exhibit, which asks visitors to imagine how our future could be a sign of human life improving offered a much needed antidote to the troubles of the world. There were examples of carbon-neutral and renewable building techniques and materials, electric cars, air taxis, and hyperloops. There was a new model of a space suit that was far less bulky than those used by astronauts today and a model of Light Sail 2, a spacecraft sent into orbit by the Planetary Society, a space advocacy organization of which I’m proud to say that I’m a member. There is no one future but many for us to choose from. It’s up to us to determine how we want our future to be written, to be designed, to be imagined.

The National Mall is the emotional heart of this country. It speaks to me of generations of memory, passion, and possibility. On this trip as well though I could imagine myself there in the future, introducing the next generation and later generations to come to that heart, to the ideals and hopes and dreams of this republic. Now at the end of my 20s, my visits to the capital mean something different to me than they did in the last decade. They represent my own future, its infinite possibilities, and how I might be able to do my part, however small it may be, to influence and improve upon our experiences.

Natural History

Fremont culture petroglyphs, Dinosaur National Monument. Photo by the author.

Natural History – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I'm thinking about how we humans fit into the structures of natural history.

There’s a big problem with a lot of older anthropology exhibits in natural history museums around the globe, namely that they were built in the last two centuries often using either old and out of date information about the peoples they seek to describe, or like the old bronzes depicting the variety of humanity in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, they were inherently racist to begin with.

Museums like San Diego’s anthropology museum have sought to rectify this with rebrandings and reorganizations. The museum in question, located in the California Tower building in Balboa Park, has recently renamed itself from the Museum of Man to the Museum of Us. Others like the Musée de l’Homme in Paris have worked to reassess how they display older historic anthropological exhibits like those old bronzes, so that today their primary message is one of “this is how people used to think, but not how we think anymore.” They’ve gone from being scientific teaching tools to historical artifacts.

There needs to be a very fine balance between lumping individual ethnicities with the rest of the natural world and actually considering humanity as a whole as part of nature. We are, after all natural beings, no matter how far we try to remove ourselves from nature with the edifices of civilization we’ve built up around ourselves. In case you’re wondering, this is a pretty central theme to the dissertation that I’m writing. In older generations, the idea of “natural humanity” was inherently understood to mean different peoples who were less civilized than others. It was used in the idea of the savage as a means of demeaning and describing the native peoples of the Americas following the beginning of the Columbian Exchange in 1492 (borrowing a term from one of my favorite historians, Alfred Crosby, here).

I’ve often thought of the world natural as being something good. Natural, or organic, food often tastes far better than the processed stuff. Natural soaps and such are less likely to harm our bodies. There’s even a style of music that I’ve called “natural” before, but only to myself. The liturgical music written by the St. Louis Jesuits, or the album Adiemus by Karl Jenkins would fall into this category.

So, if we’re natural beings, why then shouldn’t we be included in the kaleidoscope of life studied under the big tent of natural history? I for one have developed my own professional career from being an intellectual historian of the Renaissance to being a historian of late Renaissance natural history. That means I study natural history texts written between 1550 and 1600, in particular those which introduced new species from the Americas to audiences in Europe. At the time, natural history was closely related to another field called Cosmography, which while originally a theological study of the Cosmos had by the Renaissance become essentially the study of everything natural and human under the Sun. The first great proto-encyclopedias of our own modern age were descendants of the cosmographies of people like Sebastian Münster and my own focus of study, André Thevet (1516-1590), whose Cosmographie Universelle (1575) basically sought to describe everything, and yes I mean everything, that he knew about.

Today, we live at a turning point in human history. It seems like the last vestiges of the post-World War II order are finally beginning to break off, letting whatever the current century will bring be hatched from that shell born of the last century. Every century’s generations live in the shadows of their forebearers and have to figure out how to deal both with the benefits and the problems those generations left them. So, for us today talking about natural history we have the terrible realities of racism and bigotry which cloud this field and all its constituent studies. I do think humanity ought to be considered a part of natural history, ought to be studied like any other animal, but if we are going to speak of ourselves in those sorts of terms then it ought to do it in the same language across the board for all humanity, recognizing that we are all equal.

Today though, even more than any other time in our past, humanity has a critical role in the future of nature, and the stories that will be told someday in natural history. We’ve entered the beginnings of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, when we are the greatest influencers on the natural order of things. I’m seeing this in how many natural history and science museums have extensive exhibits on climate change, and even the handful of older ones on human biology, like my personal favorite at the Natural History Museum in London. We can try to ignore our part in shaping life on Earth, but at the end of the day as much as we’ll ignore it, we’ll end up like the proverbial unicorns who missed the boat. At that point, we will fall victim to our own pride, to our own endless thirst for more raw materials until the nature we need to survive has been stripped away. Human history has always been a part of natural history. Perhaps that’s a key to solving our current crises and all potential crises in the future: we must reckon with nature and our place within it.