The Compleat Conservationist, part I
By: Michael Reinemer
Tags: Indigenous People, Environmental Issues, Conservation, Taxonomy, Botany

What books, journals, apps, websites do naturalists use for go-to guides and inspiration? Here is a handful of books I’ve found useful or inspiring.

Naming Nature, by Carol Kaesuk Yoon (2009, Norton)

In the midst of an accelerating mass extinction where we are losing species much faster than science can identify them, this is an engrossing look at taxonomy, or how we organize life on earth.

Yoon laments our disconnects from nature. A child living among the Indigenous Tzeltal Maya people in Mexico can identify about 100 different plant species, Yoon says. How many American adults can do that?

She provides an account of “folk” taxonomies that are binominal, two-word descriptors the predate Carl Linnaeus, the botanical whiz kid from Sweden who published Systema Naturae in 1735. That system laid out the framework that most of us learned, the Linnaean hierarchy — kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. (Of course, we use that every time we select an unadulterated native plant for our garden, relying on the scientific name — genus and species — rather than a vague or even misleading common or commercial name. Don’t we?)

Later schools of thought refined how we might arrange living things. Well into the 20th century, “cladists” organized the tree of life around the branches (clades) based on evolutionary relationships. They famously declared that, technically, fish don’t exist. Lungfish, they would explain, are more closely related to cows than they are to salmon. That news would have been nonsensical to Linnaeus, and perhaps blasphemous to Izaak Walton. Walton described his 17th century meditation on conservation, The Compleat Angler, as a “Discourse of Fish and Fishing.” In any case, the cladists’ fish-dissing were fightin’ words to other taxonomists. With breezy, engaging insights, Yoon chronicles the debates.

The Living Landscape, Rick Dark and Doug Tallamy (2014, Timber Press)

Doug Tallamy’s earlier Brining Nature Home has informed folks about the importance of native plants for pollinators, wildlife generally and healthy ecosystems. This collaboration with photographer Rick Darke provides coffee-table-book glimpses of what we can do with gardens and parks to restore land to a more natural, critter-friendly state. You’ll find abundant ideas, photos and tables that list native plants, their characteristics and species that need them.

A New Garden Ethic, Benjamin Vogt (2017, New Society Publishers)

In a similar vein, inspired by Tallamy, Benjamin Vogt makes a plea for more thoughtful gardening in his 2017 book, A New Garden Ethic. He ties his book directly to “The Land Ethic” chapter of Aldo Leopold’s classic Sand County Almanac in which Leopold writes that a land ethic “changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”

Vogt says we should foster places that are attractive and useful to us, “but that are equally if not more attractive and useful to other species…. We need urban gardens that exuberantly embrace wildness in its complex fullness, not in a watered-down echo that does us little good.”

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2014, Beacon Press)

To fully understand our lands and waters, we should know the history of North America’s original hunters, anglers, farmers and engineers who have lived here for thousands of years. The Indigenous people also practiced savvy forest and wildlife management. Controlled burns opened up forest clearing for attracting game and growing corn, squash and other crops.

When Europeans arrived, they entered a continent that already featured a long history of advanced agriculture, trade and stewardship of the land. Some regions had hundreds of miles of roads and irrigation canals.

More important, for those of us taught U.S. history solely focused on European settlers, this is a detailed, eye-opening, gut-wrenching account of genocide, abuse and discrimination. The full story of what happened to these Indigenous nations, people and culture should be woven into history lessons at every school level.

Dunbar-Ortiz admits that revealing the history of these nations and cultures is an arduous task. It may take generations to do it justice.

More books and other resources later. Some of the categories missing here are the best guidebooks and grand explorations of life and ecology by E.O. Wilson and others.