Calling Them By Name
On a clear, crisp afternoon in the first week in September, I spotted my first Monarch of the year over a meadow of white boneset and goldenrod at its peak. The butterfly's presence prompted me to search for its favorite food, milkweed, and sure enough, we found it growing nearby. In my biology classroom a few days before, I had talked about the relationship between this very insect and plant, and so this sighting was a well-timed. Twenty of my students were with me in the field at just that moment to see these creatures together first hand-and for my students, to give these creatures names for the first time. Over the course of that hour outdoors, I held up, pointed out, and indentified a couple of dozen flowering plants and trees. One young lady afterwards asked if we were going to be doing this kind of hands-on outdoor study again. "This is the way I learn best" she said, a fact about herself as a student it seemed she had only that hour discovered.
Only two of a hundred and twenty students had raised their hands on the first day of class when asked who would be able to name a single wildflower in bloom in the nearest forest or pasture. For too many young Americans, back yards and woodlots have become an amorphous tangle of undistinguishable green-a sea of anonymous plants sheltering equally nameless animals. It is as if the greater part of the living world has become invisible and irrelevant. My students, like most, don't see very deeply into nature because they've not had much encouragement to look there. So many electronic and virtual distractions compete far too successfully for their attention. They have grown up in an era when our language in the digital world has grown rich while our vocabulary in the real world of nature has become sadly impoverished.
Beyond the shrink-wrapped plants and animals in our grocery store taxonomies, many of us no longer can call our fellow creatures by name, and there are costs to our ignorance. The naming of things contributes to our understanding of them and to knowing our place among them. Maybe it is significant that God set man the task of naming the creatures early on in Genesis. It was the first and necessary part of assuming our responsibility as stewards. What we have names for we are less likely to ignore, abuse or take for granted. It makes me sad that the eastern hemlock trees are dying. For my students, who have never distinguished hemlock from tulip poplar, this is an irrelevant abstraction. We know our friends by name, and attend to them better than we do rank strangers. We'd be better stewards if we knew nature's citizens on a first name basis, and knew more about their families and their kin.
But we've gradually neglected the memory of the names by which our grandparents knew their world. We don't know nuts or herbs or medicinals. We don't recognize forest trees or know how to use or enjoy their wood or fruits. None of my students could name wild grape, wild lettuce, walnut or cherry. Not a one knew what locust wood is 'good for' and only one recognized poison ivy climbing up a sycamore by the river. Nature-awareness once carried a high value, both for survival and toward an appreciation of personal ecology in the larger world. I think that certainly it still does--or could--if we'd make it an important part of a holistic education again.
I wish that, in our grade schools, we'd take imaginations and curiosity outdoors at recess, and take field trips to actual fields. Computers have their place in our classrooms, but let's use them to identify insects, leaves and flowers only after students have touched and smelled them with the sun on their shoulders. We should resist substituting the counterfeit experience of visiting Charlotte's Webpage for touching Charlotte's actual web in real barns, with real pigs and rats, and grappling with real relationships. I'd like to see a return to the education of naturalists in our colleges and universities where the study of life is too often reduced now to a mathematical model or a sequencing of the DNA mailed in from real creatures from disappearing rain forests. One can get a PhD in biology these days without getting his hands dirty with actual nature. And for our own parts, as touring nature consumers, let's not be content to stop at scenic overlooks and see the forest, but miss the trees entirely. We buy a few postcards of waterfalls or orchids to show the folks back home, not even knowing we've walked right past an endangered twayblade by the visitors' center sidewalk.
But what can a parent, a teacher or a newly-enlightened field trip student do to reclaim the names of the things we've forgotten and ignored from the places just beyond our classrooms, shopping malls and speeding cars? Can we learn to be at home in meadow or forest where our children are so sadly out of touch? Yes, I think we can. Let me suggest this as a first step: teach yourself to see by nurturing intentional vision.
Go slowly in nature and stop often. Look for the particulars. Take notes and draw sketches. Learn a dozen trees and recognize them in leaf, fruit and branch in every season. Learn a dozen wildflowers from spring, from summer and from autumn. And rekindle curiosity and wonder. Each insect or flower holds its own mystery and unique design. Be able to name a dozen birds, first by sight, then by their call alone. Know some salamanders-while they last-and a few dragonflies and even some common spiders and snakes.
Then, teach your children to see deeply. On regular walks around your back yard, pasture or woods show them your own attention to detail and watch how quickly they come to see the small world at their feet and call its creatures by name. Pick twigs from plants like spicebush, sassafras, and teaberry; scratch and sniff them and resurrect the neglected sense of smell that so powerfully builds memories in the out-of-doors. Turn rocks, and pluck blooms (not entire plants.) Use a hand lens to see more detail, and after seeing, find the names for the things you see. This has never been easier to do. The computer is a quick and convenient tool, but my first advice would be over time to accumulate a library of field guides you can carry with you and hold in your hands over the years. Study what you have found while sitting in the grass under the trees and ask for help from your children. Even the smallest can compare pictures.
Never before has the natural world needed each of us to know it, care for it and act on its behalf in such a way as it does in our times. We cannot be responsible stewards of a threatened planet if its creatures are distant, anonymous and irrelevant strangers. Be more aware than you've ever been in this cathedral made without hands, as John Muir called our world. Make friends of its inhabitants and know them by name.
Comments
Outstanding post! I'm am woefully guilty of nature ignorance. I am working to correct it but I have a long way to go. Do you have any guides you would recommend?
Posted by: Jeremy Abel | October 3, 2005 1:29 PM
Fred - I still have monarchs at my garden - this year my garden has been certified as a Monarch Waystation by the U. of Kansas which has a Monarch Watch Program..............This past weekend I started cutting down the plants in my garden .......I was about to cut back the fennel when I noticed 4 black swallowtail larvae........these larvae should munch on the fennel until they are about 2 inches long & then travel about 50 feet to trees at the back of my yard to form chrysalis' & overwinter - I just hope I can find them as I did last year.......I am going to send via e-mail a pic of a monarch I took this weekend.......
Posted by: Dottie | October 3, 2005 11:58 PM