POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE85Abbey argues that in naming the natural world “we are lost,” but Aldo
Leopold is more precise and pragmatic in acknowledging that because
“we grieve only for what we know,” names and naming are also an
essential part of an environmental ethic.^3
Though awareness of animals as belonging to kinds, particularly spe-
cies, is in some sense innate and pragmatic, it is also cultural and his-
torical. While Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have insisted that the
animal is a sign of a loss of specificity and identity,^4 being animal for
most of our cultural history has meant belonging not just to the vast
otherness of the nonhuman but also to an order of seemingly Platonic
types. The possibility of becoming anything other than a completely
typical representative of a kind is reserved for humans alone. Even with
pets, whom we allow some individuality, our obsession with creating
and defining breeds reveals our desire to understand animals through
some essence of collective identity. Culturally, the importance of an
essentialist conception of species reveals itself in Genesis, with Adam
naming the animals at the level, more or less, of species, rather than with
the greater precision of proper names or the broader scope of classes.
(We might wonder why it never occurred to Adam to name individual
creatures.) The seemingly essential nature of species is at the root of the
worldview of the great chain of being, the idea of a fixed hierarchy of
creatures, with each filling a particular niche in the world and the hier-
archy. The animal allegories I discussed in chapter 1 are also reflective
of our fixation on animal species, our desire to resolve our awareness of
the creaturely world at the level of species. That species seem essential,
fixed in the natural world, and have an inherent and readily available
meaning is what allows us to allegorize them.
As historians as varied as Michel Foucault and Harriet Ritvo have
pointed out, the representation and understanding of animals as species
changed with the great taxonomic projects begun by Carl Linnaeus
in the eighteenth century, which seemed to allow for an essential link
between a system of naming and a complex order of the natural world—
an order rooted in the reality of species.^5 The taxonomic drive spurred
by Enlightenment natural historians is crucial to the rise of the species
poem, as we will see. It created a broad movement among professionals