James Prosek has a wonderful article in the current issue of Orion about taxonomy. He's a great nature artist and while I wasn't so keen on his last YA title (it seemed like it was forced into a YA category - if it had been written for adult audiences I think it would have worked far better), his natural history titles have never failed to impress me. What he writes about in the article are the changes in trout taxonomy and how studying animals finds constant shifts in how they relate to each other. Here's a bit:

I began to understand that species were less static than the fathers of modern taxonomy—those like Carl Linnaeus—once believed. That nature was static and classifiable was an idea perpetuated by the natural history museum (repository for dead nature), the zoo (repository for living nature), and the book (repository for thoughts and images related to nature). These mediums were all distillations of nature, what individuals of authority deemed an appropriate cross section to present to the public. None had adequately represented Nature—at once chaotic, multifarious, and interconnected.

The vision of shifting names - or the not knowing of how everything relates to each other - is deeply interesting to me. Our assumptions that we know so much are constantly challenged in the natural field when we pay attention and ask questions; something we must remember to always do.

In Susan Brind Morrow's The Names of Things, she takes this curiosity a step further and challenges names for many things, both in her own home of upstate NY and far away in Egypt. (Morrow also wrote Wolves and Honey which takes her deeper into the natural history of the NY Finger Lakes region.)

The naming of things seems so easy and effortless, but in truth it is far more complex than we realize, particularly as it applies to taxonomy. Naming is a fluid thing, ephemeral. I like that idea of the truth always floating around the fringes of our attempts to tie it down. We know we have a fish, we know it is a trout but beyond that; we are uncertain:

Some trout had been named a separate species and subsequently renamed a subspecies, placed in a different genus, or just pushed into a category with allied species. The history of the naming became as interesting to me as the physical diversity of the fishes themselves, which I loved to paint.

James Prosek has a children's book due out next year.
[Post pics from James Prosek.]