literature

  • literature,  muskox

    Native, introduced, reintroduced or missing

    A few weeks ago I was giving a guest lecture on databases and how they work for participants in a Digital History PhD course. I called up the IUCN Red List website as an example of a database that is retrieving and displaying information online. I was showing them around the site using the entry for muskox (Ovibos moschatus) when one of the students looked at the species distribution map on the screen and said, “But wait, there’s no muskox showing in Norway.” “What?!” I replied. Then I looked closer and indeed, there was no indication of muskox living in Scandinavia. What was going on? I didn’t have time to look…

  • literature

    A few of my favourite words

    A recent article in the New Yorker by Brad Leithauser discusses writers’ use of pet words. Beginning with the observation that Shakespeare used the word ‘sweet’ and its variants nearly a thousand times, Leithauser goes on to argue that looking at a writer’s lexicon can tell you about the writer’s outlook on the world. The writer himself is often oblivious to these pet words until they have been pointed out by someone else. So I decided to take a look at my own writing on this blog to see if I too have pet words. I took all the text in the posts to date and ran the text through…

  • literature

    The article writer’s craft

    In history, we are in the business of communicating the past, hopefully with some messages for the present and future. The primary way we do that is through the written word. For a long time, that written word of the historian appeared primarily in the form of long monographs, but article-length scholarship has boomed in the last few decades as more and more journals have become available, particularly recently with the growth of online-only journals. I’ve quite pleased with the growth of article scholarship for several reasons: It presents research results in bite-size forms. To be honest, I am much more able to fit in reading (or writing) an article…

  • literature

    Reintroduction and The Lorax

    I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. / I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues. Dr. Seuss’ classic tale The Lorax from 1971 is frequently used in environmental education to stress the ecological benefits of forests (the Truffula trees and their fruits), ill-effects of pollution (those poor Humming-Fish gulping gunk and Swomee-Swans sucking in smogulous smoke), and what can happen if we get too greedy (everyone doesn’t actually need a thneed). Hannes Bergthaller in Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies has argued that The Lorax is an allegory of postmodern ecology: rather than a plea for nature-centered values, the story cannot help but argue in the language…

  • literature

    Speaking for the animals

    There’s a children’s song “If we could talk to the animals” that asks us to think about how great it would be if we could converse with the non-human world as equals in language: If I conferred with our furry friends, man to animal, Think of the amazing repartee If I could walk with the animals, talk with the animals, Grunt and squeak and squawk with the animals, And they could squeak and skwawk and speak and talk to us! I do indeed wonder what things we might learn if that was an option. We make assumptions about what is best for them, either as individuals or as a species,…

  • deextinction,  literature

    Losing control of the Aepyornis

    I read a fabulous short story by H.G. Wells titled “Aepyornis Island” which was printed in Pall Mall Budget in December 1894. You can read the story via Classic Reader. It is a story about a de-extinction story told by an old sailor. In the tale, a sailor who collected island specimens to send back home to English gentlemen collectors had an adventure with de-extinction in Madagascar. He had been collecting eggs and bones of the extinct Aepyornis maximus, a giant flightless bird native to Madagascar, when he became marooned on a nearby small island. This part of Wells’ story is clearly based on fact. According to Edward Hitchcock, Outline of…

  • images,  literature

    Wilding the domesticated

    When I was at Wicken Fen near Cambridge last week, I bought a full color, glossy brochure titled Guide to the land mammals of Britain published by the Field Studies Council (an educational charity) for my daughter. She likes animals so I thought it would be a good lightweight, easy to carry gift. And she did indeed find it interesting. I found it interesting as well, but for a different reason. I looked closely at the animals that had been included in the brochure, which features photos on one side and a paragraph write-up of each animal on the reverse. It turns out that 10 of the 36 animals pictured…

  • beaver,  literature

    Memories

    I read an article today about potential reintroduction of animals on the Arabian Peninsula (Stanley Price 2011). The author discusses the successful reintroductions of the Arabian oryx and the Houbara Bustard (a bird) and advocates further reintroductions from ex-situ populations and the development of larger conservation areas in the region. But what struck me was this statement at one point in the text: If a species has been absent for probably little more than one human generation, it will progressively drop from the cultural heritage and oral traditions of any society. Based on this assumption, Stanley Price argues for reintroducing recently extinct or threatened species, noting that the Arabian oryx had…

  • beaver,  literature,  wild boar

    A mixed population

    Today I taught an advanced undergraduate class on Ecosystem Management here at UmU and gave a lecture on reintroduction then led a discussion section. The discussion centered on Martin Goulding’s “Native or Alien? The Case of the Wild Boar in Britain,” which is one of the bright spots in the Invasive and Introduced Plants and Animals: Human Perceptions, Attitudes and Approaches to Management edited collection that I criticised in a previous post. In our discussion, one of the students commented on how strange it was that the wild boar were seen as aliens and rejected when they were thought to be hybrid animals (wild boar crossed with domestic pig) but after genetic…

  • literature,  museum

    Naming and claiming the last

    In April 1996, two men working at a convalescent center wrote a letter to the journal Nature proposing that a new word be adopted to designate a person or individual of a species that is the last in the lineage: endling. This had come up because of patients who were dying and thought of themselves as the last of their lineage. The suggestion of endling was met with counter-suggestions in the May 23rd issue of Nature: ender (Chaucer used it to mean he that puts an end to anything), terminarch (because it has a more positive ring than endling which sounds pathetic according to the respondent), and relict (which means…