environment, a place that exists in theory but that none of us can truly
know given the inherent limitations of our respective umwelten. In
addition to being delightful words to say, umwelt and umgebung offer a
framework for exploring and describing the experience of other creatures.
In the umgebung of a city sidewalk, for example, a dog owner’s
umwelt would differ greatly from that of her dog’s in that, while she
might be keenly aware of a SALE sign in a window, a policeman coming
toward her, or a broken bottle in her path, the dog would focus on the gust
of cooked meat emanating from a restaurant’s exhaust fan, the urine on a
fire hydrant, and the doughnut crumbs next to the broken bottle.
Objectively, these two creatures inhabit the same umgebung, but their
individual umwelten give them radically different experiences of it. And
yet these parallel universes have many features in common: both dog and
mistress must be careful crossing the street, and both will pay close
attention to other dogs, if not for the same reasons. One way to envision
the differences between these overlapping umwelten is to mentally color-
code each creature’s objects of interest as it moves through space; the
graphic potential is vast and fascinating, and it can be fine-tuned by the
intensity of the given color, the same way an infrared camera indicates
temperature differences. For example, both dog and mistress would
notice the restaurant exhaust fan, but the dog would attach a “hotter”
significance to it—unless the mistress happened to be hungry, too.
Uexküll had a broad romantic streak, but it was tempered by discipline
and scholarship and, at the University of Hamburg, where he was a
professor, he founded an environmental research institute (Institut für
Umweltforschung) in 1926, which was the first of its kind to apply these
methods.* The umwelten Uexküll sought to describe and illustrate
covered the living spectrum from humans and jackdaws to ticks and sea
cucumbers. Based on the latest information about these creatures’
biological processes, his narrative descriptions are not only fascinating
reading but remarkable feats of empathic thinking: “The eyeless tick is
directed to [her] watchtower by a general photo-sensitivity to her skin,”
he writes.^5 “The approaching prey is revealed to the blind and deaf