Naming Nature
By Maddie Robbins
People have a hard time grasping that we all have different views in a world that is forever changing. There is the child who is obsessed with dinosaurs, studying the various forms, behaviors, and names of the dinosaurs that once roamed this earth. The one who is obsessed with Pokémon and spends house learning the numerous creatures, and the baby, who is able to recognize the dog or cat in their home because they’re shown stories or movies involving these animals. This obsession is the child’s umwelt, how that child is perceiving the world around them.
Carolus Linnaeus, who was born in the 17th century, published his book, Systema Naturae, identifying and classifying various living organisms throughout the world. Linnaeus’s ability to name and classify living things was all thanks to his umwelt. For him, his umwelt was able to do all the work, without him realizing it. Yoon also says that one does not need to know about umwelt to see the value of Linnaeus’s work because our umwelt, without us realizing it exists, will help us understand the living world around us. Because we so easily identify living things in our life, we don’t think that there is a thing that is doing the classifying within us.
The famous taxonomist Charles Darwin also used his umwelt to classify living things, such as barnacles, a type of crustacean different from all he had previously studied. To be able to name all the barnacles soon became an obsession of Darwin’s, all because of Arthrobalanus, a barnacle that he did not fully understand how to classify. His success out of the barnacle situation was “making was already going to be a difficult job into a monstrously difficult one” (Yoon, 2009, p.69). Darwin’s own umwelt got in his way a little bit because he became so obsessed with naming these barnacles he was like a child learning all the Pokémon’s or dinosaur names. His own umwelt creating this classification nightmare for himself without realizing it.
In class, we talked about local knowledge and how the definition of local can vary between people. For those of us in Colorado, we don’t see climate change up close and personal compared to the Inuit tribes. We see that if there’s not a lot of snow in the winter months, then that, to us in Colorado, signifies climate change. Whereas for the Inuit tribes they have seen the ice caps decreasing, felt the temperature rise and seen polar bears scrummage for food on land instead of in the water. The children within the Inuit tribe are a good example when it comes to local knowledge and how it is obtained unintentionally through doing something that seems like fun.
The Inuit tribes show their umwelt as children. They express umwelt by being curious about what the hunters in their communities are doing and how they hunt seals. With this curiosity, their umwelts took over without them realizing. The children watch and learn how the elders hunt seal, what seals they hunted, what part of the seal has the most nutritional value, and how to track them. With the local knowledge acquired with the years of learning about seals, the children who would lead the tribes later in life would notice the changes in their climate. How the ice caps are disappearing and how tracking the seals has become harder with the lack of water freezing over in the winter.
Learning about the Inuit and their use of local knowledge can help us to understand umwelt and appreciate non-Western knowledge systems. This helps foster understanding because it is shown that knowledge isn’t necessarily a thing that one knows they have gained in the Inuit tribes. Whereas in Western knowledge systems, knowledge is built not gained. Knowledge is built by schools in Western culture and not gained by being immersed in it at a young age. In our culture, we build up knowledge systems through school and how it is essential for children to attend school rather than be out in nature.
Our umwelt is our greatest power for classifying what is safe and what is not. It is also our greatest downfall because, oftentimes, we don’t know what organisms have been classified which have not. This was a common struggle during Darwin’s lifetime when amateur naturalists would go out and classify a living organism without knowing some naturalist before them had already classified the given organism.
