A NOTE ON THE TREATMENT OF PLANT
NAMES
We accept with nary a thought that the names of people are
capitalized. To write “george washington” would be to strip that man
of his special status as a human. It would be laughable to write
“Mosquito” if it were in reference to a flying insect, but acceptable if
we were discussing a brand of boat. Capitalization conveys a
certain distinction, the elevated position of humans and their
creations in the hierarchy of beings. Biologists have widely adopted
the convention of not capitalizing the common names of plants and
animals unless they include the name of a human being or an
official place name. Thus, the first blossoms of the spring woods
are written as bloodroot and the pink star of a California woodland
is Kellogg’s tiger lily. This seemingly trivial grammatical rulemaking
in fact expresses deeply held assumptions about human
exceptionalism, that we are somehow different and indeed better
than the other species who surround us. Indigenous ways of
understanding recognize the personhood of all beings as equally
important, not in a hierarchy but a circle. So in this book as in my
life, I break with those grammatical blinders to write freely of Maple,
Heron, and Wally when I mean a person, human or not; and of
maple, heron, and human when I mean a category or concept.