I recently read Naming Nature by Carol Yoon, which is ostensibly about taxonomy but turns out to be about umwelt. After reading the book I thought I understood this concept, but having just scanned a portion of its Wikipedia page, I’m dubious. Herein I will follow my original impressions, but please don’t regard this as reference material.

Living creatures create hierarchical maps that categorize and describe other living creatures, both flora and fauna. We can only imagine the umwelten of creatures that live underwater, say, or hunt by echolocation, but the umwelt of humans appears to be consistent throughout history, with diverse populations of humans using essentially identical models of life. While cultural variation of course exists, overall every human group has devised groups such as mammals, fish, birds, bugs, trees, shrubs, flowers, and so forth. That it is not obvious that this should be so is best illustrated by the rare exceptions, such as the tribes who classify a cassowary as a mammal, or various orchids as human body parts.

That umwelt is innate is also suggested through rare medical cases, the sort of thing you may remember if you read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. People suffering from damage to certain brain areas can easily name any manufactured item, such as a pencil or a car, but are at a loss for the name or even purpose of any living item, such as an apple, or a cat, or an oak tree. One hospitalized patient was found attempting to eat his bedsheets, because although starving, he was unable to identify food.

This points us to the value of the umwelt: it allows us to sort the world into categories so we know how to interact with, well, every living thing we encounter. Some things are edible, some might eat us, or poison us. Some are useful for building boats, some cure diseases, or provide shade, or are appealing and rare enough to be traded for something someone else has that we want.

For most of human existence we only had to know about a few thousand other forms of life because most of us didn’t travel too much. As transportation modes developed, more folks traveled, and as communication became global, those were able to report their findings of nature’s enormous variety to everyone else. Being umwelt-driven, we categorized the new stuff initially into relationships that were subjectively determined, mostly by observable characteristics, and that aligned pretty closely with our umwelt. A lot of this work can be credited to Linnaeus. Darwin pushed for an evolution-based sorting, but we didn’t figure out how to do that until we could read DNA, which allowed us to create a hierarchy based on molecular evidence.

Yoon posits that this classification transition, from that’s-a-butterfly to sequence-a-sample-in-the-lab, has effectively severed humanity’s connection to nature, taking away our ability to make sense of our world. For example, if a fish is something that looks like a fish, then a lungfish, a salmon, and a whale would all be one, and for most of our existence, they were. Now scientists tell us that whales are mammals, and lungfish are evolutionarily closer to cows than salmon, so actually “fish” is not a category. We can all see that there are fish, yet science is so sure that there aren’t any, so we sort of give up on the natural world. Post-genetics, it doesn’t make sense to us in any useful way.

It’s true: current scholarship does not recognize “fish” as a meaningful word in science.

These may seem like radical ideas, but this is the second book I read on this topic–the other is Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller–and the arguments resonated for me. It explains why people resist evolution, and why perhaps we should. Since the umwelt is innate we can’t not have one, and, in a horror-movie-level twist, Yoon proposes that those of us in the most “advanced” civilizations have substituted brand identification. She claims that while four-year-olds raised in natural environments can identify 300 plants, the same age-group raised in artificial environments can identify 300 logos. Yipes.

My late friend Jackie, a somewhat business-oriented engineer, who often said Yipes, liked to assert that Marketing Works, but she could never definitively explain why. Maybe this does.

Finally, Yoon also attributes lassitude over climate change to umwelt disruption. Picturing all these different species, thousands of them, most of them meaningless to us in any practical sense, that are now threatened is, well, abstract at best. Even if we want to care, how can we? Why should we?