Naming Nature by Carol Kaesuk Yoon

Author:Carol Kaesuk Yoon [Yoon, Carol Kaesuk]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2009-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

ONE OF THE ODD THINGS about realizing that we live every day looking at life through the lens of our umwelt is that you begin after a while to see the umwelt’s effects, powers, influences, wherever you look. When I first started to understand that there was this universal vision of life, and how potent it was, I was like a woman possessed. Every day, whether I was reading or interviewing someone or shopping for groceries, I found myself saying, “Look! There it is again! Umwelt!” The next day in some other situation, I’d be poking Merrill, saying, “Will you look at that! It’s the umwelt again!” Even while quite actively trying not to think about umwelts, playing around with my kids (or maybe especially then), I was unable to stop seeing it. And that’s because it is children, the world’s ubiquitous and wonderful children, who are most actively, vitally in love with their umwelts. You don’t need to travel to the wilds of New Guinea or trek up into uncharted Mexican highlands to see the power of the umwelt at work. You can see it anywhere you find kids. Because young children, especially those too young to have had their attention entirely diverted from the living world to the human-made world, exhibit a natural and irrepressible fascination with living things. They fixate on the world of their umwelt deeply and regularly.

When my son Erik went through an intense dinosaur phase, of exactly the sort that so many children go through, I had no idea that I was watching his childish umwelt kicking into high gear. In fact, I thought very little of it, except to enjoy it and be typically impressed at his ability to learn the taxonomy of these beasts. It is such a standard rite of passage that most of us don’t really register what’s going on. Isn’t it a little strange that these small people are so obsessed with learning the taxonomy of long dead giant reptiles? In these wonderful and too short-lived phases, we see the umwelt quite openly at work as children go in search of a hierarchy perceived—the natural order among dinosaurs. As anyone who has seen a child in the throes of dino-obsession knows, it’s not a blanket concern with all things dinosaur. Children in a dinosaur phase are not necessarily that interested in, say, fictional stories featuring dinosaur protagonists. They are fixated instead on studying dinosaurs’ forms, behaviors, and names with an eye toward ordering them, toward learning how to recognize particular species or genera of dinosaur. If Erik had been born in a wilder place to hunter-gatherers, he would have learned to order and name the living things all around him as adeptly as such children do. He wouldn’t have bothered with oversized extinct lizards. But he was born and raised an American city boy, and so he, like so many such children desperate to populate their umwelts, focused on the most diverse set of organisms regularly encountered: dinosaurs.

Children will even fixate on pseudo-organisms, so desperate are they to taxonomize.

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