7 May 03
The Ghost of Emmett Reid Dunn
The following is inspired by the recent discussion at
Field
Notes and Fragments from Floyd about a troubling tourism poster from the North Carolina Department of Commerce.
In the summer of 1986, in the interregnum of my life between college and graduate school, I went off to the mountains of North Carolina to take a field biology course on plethodontid salamanders. This is the largest family of salamanders in the world, and a major center of diversity for the group lies in the Southern Appalachians, with about 29 species currently described from the North Carolina mountains. My interest in the group came from taking
In our first field trip for the course we went to Great Smokies National Park, and there on the road to Clingmans Dome, we were asked to imagine what it would have been like for the young herpetologist Emmett Reid Dunn (1894-1956) to explore the fauna of these mountains for his first time in the early 1900s. When he was eighteen the naturalist Leonhard Stejneger of the Smithsonian encouraged him to take up the study of salamanders, and that study was to occupy much of his career. A note in this brief biography of him says that in 1917 he “failed for a commission in the army, because his week-end pursuit of snakes and salamanders was unbecoming to an officer candidate.” It was around this time he began his explorations of the Southern Appalachians, which would result in his discovering or describing four or five new species of salamanders. He writes of his 1916 discovery of Plethodon yonahlossee in his eloquent foreward to his 1926 monograph on the Plethodontidae: “And I remember…how, on the slopes of the Grandfather, some chance-turned log disclosed the red band on the back of yonahlossee, and I knew that an unknown species was before me.” Later in our class we went to Grandfather Mountain where we too saw this strikingly-colored species.
We step forward in time to the poster from the North Carolina tourism office,
where a marquee reading “Now Showing: Sunset and Clouds” has been dropped into the view from a mountaintop bald, which according to Fred of Fragments is likely Bald Mountain on the North Carolina-Tennessee border. The disconnect between the world view of Emmett Reid Dunn, and that of the tourist office and their target audience, is total. It is not surprising that 7 of 11 posters in the series are devoted to golf. The vast majority of tourists pass through the mountains unaware of the diversity Dunn, or for that matter we 1980s field biology students, came to study. At best they will see the display in the park visitors’ center describing the numbers of amphibians, and move on to the postcards.
Yet I am not entirely convinced that the gap between Dunn and his peers who went off to war is narrower than the disconnect between today’s naturalists and our tourists. As Fred points out, natural history curricula are disappearing from
universities in favor of the gene-splicers and the computational biologists. But
to some extent this is ameliorated by the naturalists in academia shifting over
to more applied departments, or realizing they have to tie their studies to the
latest fads in ecology, evolution, or conservation biology. More significantly, I think the locus of natural history knowledge in this society has shifted away from academia. The good naturalists these days don’t find careers in academia, but instead often become biological consultants, many working on environmental impact reports. And as birders will tell you, amateur natural history is quite vibrant today. It’s significant that UC Press is continuing to
publish new natural history guides in these desperate times for university presses. There’s a market for this stuff.
That said, the chasm between the naturalists and mass culture remains, and is deeply troubling.
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Do the nature docu-dramas on TV (The Nature Channel, Discovery et cetera) do anything more than entertain? Do you think this kind of media mediated nature helps, or hurts… do they increase or decrease the divide between the two groups you mention looking at each other across the chasm?
My sense is that the two main paths into the naturalist camp is either to have an innate bent towards natural history that emerges early on in life, or that a socialization process happens later on (e.g. getting excited about birding because of a friend who happens to be a keen birder.) The docu-dramas don’t create this sort of socialization, so they will be minimally helpful at best.
She loves to watch Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel, and though she also loves the Power Puff Girls, she’ll trade dessert for Jeff Corwin’s show. The shows feed her innate curiosity about nature.
For the rest, who don’t have that natural bent, I think those shows probably engender some instinctual nostalgia for a time we the living have never known in some, serve as entertainment for many, and I don’t see how they could hurt overall.
But I’m not considering the alligator-wrestlers. That is pure “entertainment” which turns both animals and man into circus performers. If we’re calling that a nature show, then I think we’ve got to call the Survivor-type shows documentaries.
Lisa’s niece seems to score almost off the charts in this category. I’d like to know more about how well-distributed these intelligences are in the general community. Obviously, if you were a member of the K:ung people in the Kalahari and were not highly gifted as a naturalist, you’d die pretty quickly. So a lot of it is cultural. I suspect in our culture these skills often get transferred to things like cars—some kids can tell you exactly the name and year of a car the way others can tell you in precise detail the difference between this or that dinosaur.