Pulling Down Our Monuments

July 22, 2020 9:11 AM

As Latinx people involved in conservation share their work for "Latino Conservation Week" one of the giants of the conservation and environmental world, The Sierra Club, announce a new reckoning with the history of the organization regarding racist ideals and members. Meanwhile,"The Bird World Is Grappling With Its Own Confederate Relic" and a petition is now circulating advocating for the end of eponymous and honorific names and instead "Bird Names for Birds."

Part of the Sierra Club's new commitment to racial and environmental justice includes specific changes to leadership and allocation of funds: "To begin with, we are redesigning our leadership structure so that Black, Indigenous, and other leaders of color at the Sierra Club make up the majority of the team making top-level organizational decisions. We will initiate similar changes to elevate the voices and experiences of staff of color across the organization. We know that the systems of power that got us here will not enable the transformational change we need.

Pending approval from our board, we will shift $5 million from our budget over the next year -- and more in the years to come -- to make long-overdue investments in our staff of color and our environmental and racial justice work. "

posted by primalux (19 comments total)

Well, there's a warbler named after a despicable human being, for one. Also a mole, chipmunk, big-eared bat and more, named after the same guy.

Lots of birds are named after people who really shouldn't be being honored, as the link explains. Call that warbler the Yellow-striped warbler or something, it'd be more accurate.
posted by Lexica at 9:29 AM on July 22, 2020 [4 favorites]

Mod note: One deleted; if you wonder what a link is saying, please click the link and find out rather than leaving a comment asking?
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:34 AM on July 22, 2020 [4 favorites]

Birds, like awards, shouldn’t be named after people, who inevitably manage to disappoint. Birds don’t deserve that.

Does anyone else think that Wilson’s Warbler looks like a tennis ball with a fashy haircut?
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:34 AM on July 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

Humans love to go around naming birds after themselves but they get so mad when they find out that on Rigel VI they're called Zeeplorx's Ape.
posted by theodolite at 9:35 AM on July 22, 2020 [23 favorites]

It's been great seeing these weeks highlighting contributions of different groups to different kinds of science - I've followed a bunch of exciting new to me people over the past few weeks, and I really appreciate their work, which is helping me diversify the science and scientists I'm learning from.

Pleased, to, to hear that the Sierra Club is acknowledging the racist past of the US conservation movement. Hopefully this is a meaningful, impactful reckoning that brings legitimate and lasting change to environmentalism in the US and elsewhere.
posted by ChuraChura at 9:47 AM on July 22, 2020 [6 favorites]

Here's an actually nice thing I found out just today.

There is a bird native to Sub-Saharan Africa called the Klaas's Cuckoo. It's notable to me because my last name is Klaas, my dad is a retired Ornithologist, and I am a self-described bird nerd. I looked into the name origins of my eponymous feathered friend, thinking a brutal racist colonialist from Europe was a sure bet. Nope!

"French explorer François Le Vaillant named the Klaas's Cuckoo after his Khoikhoi servant. Le Vaillant was the only colonial biologist to name some bird species after local people.

Le Valliant called his companion Klaas his brother and his equal and was one of the first to describe a close relationship between Western explorer and an indigenous man."

Hot damn, I think this one can stay?

Feel free to dump the others.
posted by mcstayinskool at 10:00 AM on July 22, 2020 [30 favorites]

Very pleased to see that the Sierra Club statement names the actual actions and budget reallocations they're making at the top of the organization instead of the toothless "we are listening" statements that many other predominantly white organizations have been making.
posted by mostly vowels at 10:10 AM on July 22, 2020 [18 favorites]

In response to one biologist's suggestion, under the hashtag #bidnamesforbirds, "Idea: A Decolonized Field Guide to Birds, that includes native names and cultural significance for each species", I came across this very eye-opening thread by Katherine Crocker (Indigenous biologist / Decolonizer): "Yikes please do not propose this sort of thing".

It goes well beyond just names...
posted by progosk at 11:09 AM on July 22, 2020 [9 favorites]

Seeing this kind of agonizing reappraisal and actual commitment to confronting "how we got here" and changing "how we move forward" has literally been among the handful of things that may help get me through to the other side of these times (ie., Trump, corona). While tired of the phrase transformational, it best embodies the tipping point leverage we are witnessing on an almost daily basis as organizations and corporations - and the executives and board members who occupy their highest positions of power and influence - are brought to face head on the challenges laid down by BLM and forced to be better humans. For my money, it's akin to seeing Obama's rise and election on the one hand - and witnessing a man walk on the moon on the other .... or welcoming the demise of monuments to white supremacy. We are moving forward and can, thankfully, simply never be the same.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 12:35 PM on July 22, 2020 [6 favorites]

Renaming McCown's Longspur is a good start. But ultimately it's not just about the names, it's about the power to name -- Adam's power -- and who gets to exercise that power. (And that doesn't just affect eponymous common names, it affects the whole system of Linnaean binomial nomenclature, which is so entangled with the history of European imperialism that some historians have described it as a form of imperial biopower.)
posted by verstegan at 1:52 PM on July 22, 2020 [4 favorites]

(As an example of revisited thinking about how to encode biological knowledge into printed volume, this project for a literary field guide for 'Cascadia', where endemic/iconic species are presented in "kinship clusters", sounds interesting via the thread I linked above.)
posted by progosk at 3:12 PM on July 22, 2020

I mean, splitting and merging of various species and subspecies is pretty much constant, so renaming is already happening all the time anyway... And the 'named for people' thing just really isn't helpful for identification; descriptive words and place names are great.

(or we just revert to latin names, where the names are often pretty descriptive. but in latin. apodiformes for the win, though i suppose the root in this case is actually greek. and a lie.)
posted by kaibutsu at 3:47 PM on July 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

Changing a bird name takes time

Let me introduce Major Mitchell's Cockatoo, by all accounts an extremely good bird. They're big, pink, noisy, they've got a spectacular crest, they go about in gangs, they're smart, strong, very destructive, endemic to desert Australia. Alas, Major Thomas Mitchell, for all his undoubted technical skill, and sometimes sympathetic observation of and collaboration with Aboriginal people, was also a killer and a bad person—and recognised as such even in his own time. OK, well how about the scientific name? Loprochroa leadbeateri, after the British naturalist and taxidermist. Oh.

'Pink cockatoo', well that's descriptive, and pretty unarguable? Hold the phone—by the OED, the first use ('cacatoe') in English was 1634, its origin a borrowing from Dutch kaketoe, and is probably from the Malay 'Kakatuwah', from the word for a vice or grip tool (referring to the birds' 'powerful bill'). So a completely non-Australasian imposition, care of the Dutch East India Company via British travellers' narratives. Hmmm. There must be parrots with better names, what about the galah? Also pink (and grey), also a parrot, a completely different species but also a very good bird, also endemic to Australia, this time probably from gilaa, a word in Yuwaalaray and other languages. Fine, but there are many hundreds of other Indigenous languages, and probably as many names for birds that have a range across a continent—the reason 'galah' stuck in English was its use by naturalists in colonial NSW.

What about nicknames in [dated] vernacular use, like 'wee juggler' for the Major Mitchell? According to 1931 newspaper notes, 'Mr. A. S. Austin, of Willaura, says that when he lived as a young man in New South Wales he was told that the blacks called this bird a weejee galah, and that this name was gradually corrupted by bushmen into wee juggler. The explanation, he says, may not be correct, but it sounds likely'.

Huh. This might take time.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:36 PM on July 22, 2020 [3 favorites]

This is good to see from the Sierra Club. Hopefully they continue to acknowledge their sins of the last, because that is a necessary step to healing. One of them was opposing the return of land to the Havasupai tribe back in the 1970s; they circulated rumors that the tribe had plans to create a resort on the rim in an effort to block the expansion of the reservation. (It was a massive expansion, as well - from a few hundred acres to well over 100,000. The opposition was from the national chapter. The state chapter initially opposed it until talking with the tribe, then they supported it.)

(I often see people praising Edward Abbey as a champion of the land. He was indeed. He was also a raging racist and did not shy away from it either. He also constantly belittled Native Americans while enjoying and waxing poetic about the lands that were stolen from them.)
posted by azpenguin at 6:05 PM on July 22, 2020 [7 favorites]

Pleased, to, to hear that the Sierra Club is acknowledging the racist past of the US conservation movement.

Well, conservation Vs "environmentalism" in particular. Especially after Lois Gibbs, when conservationists defined themselves as white land owners in contrast to white suburban moms who were becoming leaders.

Even today, there tends to be a large divide between the groups that own and control land Vs groups that organize people.
posted by eustatic at 5:58 AM on July 23, 2020 [2 favorites]

But on the naming front, this is interesting. In most places there are native names for animals, and any support that can be given to trying to reinvigorate the old languages than the old cultures is needed.

There's so many names that appear to be geographical on the surface, but are historical. Can anyone tell me why "virginiana" is such a common species name?
posted by eustatic at 6:10 AM on July 23, 2020

I ran into these issues while trying to summarise a recent paper detailing how one of the oldest living species on the planet, a desert gymnosperm, is now at demonstrable climate risk of extinction. The plant - one of Rachel Sussman's Oldest Living Things in the World - goes by Welwitschia mirabilis (sometimes bainesii) and the actual details of its "scientific" naming were a little involved: the botanist whom this monotype's genus (and indeed, its family and order) is now named after, had originally suggested a local moniker, tumboa.

But once you look into those a little closer, you find there are multiple local names in the languages of the various people that know it: khurub [Nama], !kharos [Nama/Damara], nyanka [Damara], onyanga [Herero], tumboa or n’tumbo [Angolan], tweeblaarkanniedood [Afrikaans] (literally "the two-leaved cannot-die"). So... whose story of this millennia-old plant do we choose to tell? How do we deal with these explorer-botanists' legacies?
posted by progosk at 6:49 AM on July 23, 2020 [2 favorites]

(Here, for example, couched in more colonial history about Welwitsch's endeavours, is an example of local storytelling about the plant.)
posted by progosk at 7:10 AM on July 23, 2020

Can anyone tell me why "virginiana" is such a common species name?

Depends on when it was first described and by whom; historically, at a certain point in the early 17th century, "Virginia" was pretty much synonymous with "British North America", and even later on the borders of the colony and later state of Virginia were much more extensive (at various times including "Illinois County", which later became the Northwest Territory, most of what is now Kentucky and part of what is now Tennessee).
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 3:33 PM on July 23, 2020 [1 favorite]