Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish doctor, professor, writer, and biologist who lived in the 1700s. He is most famous for inventing the taxonomy (scientific system of hierarchical classification) for plants and animals that is still used today. Linnaeus first published this system in Systema Naturae, in 1735. Linnaeus continued to update and expand this text over the next two decades, publishing 13 editions in all. Linnaeus—and the later scientists who continued to work on and refine this taxonomy—used the physical structures of plants and animals to consider how they are related. Today, we understand this relationship as deriving from evolution, although this principle was not known in Linnaeus’s time.

Before Linnaeus’s system, the naming and classification of plants and animals was chaotic from a scientific perspective. Species names arose from many sources and often a single species would have several different names. In Linnaeus’s time, Latin was a highly-regarded language among the intellectual class and was the shared language of scientists from many different countries. Accordingly, when he set out to systematize naming and classification, he created a Latin binomial system (two-part names derived from Latin). The first word in each name indicates a specie’s genus (larger category), and the second word indicates its name within the genus.

Ironically for a man who devoted his career to assigning a single scientific name to each species, Carl Linnaeus himself went by several different names in his lifetime. He was born Carl Linne, but he Latinized his name to Carl Linnaeus. He sometimes used an even further Latinized version of his name—Carolus Linnæus—and, after the Swedish king made Linnaeus a nobleman, Linnaeus was known as Carl von Linné—a name he then Latinized as Carolus a Linné. Kimmerer points to this irony in “The Standing Stones” when she is discussing the significance of names and the fact that many mosses have no common names, only Latinized names that come from Linnaeus’s system.

Charles Darwin was an English naturalist, biologist, writer, and geologist of the 1800s. He is best known as the creator of the theory of evolution, which states that all species descend from a common ancestor, changing over time due to natural selection, as environmental pressures shape which traits fit a species best to its habitat. Darwin drew on many sources of inspiration for his groundbreaking theory. He traveled for five years as a ship’s naturalist and saw many new species firsthand. He visited the London zoo, talked to leading scientists of his day, and visited breeders of dogs, pigeons, and horses. Two decades after he began working on his theory of evolution, the great English thinker and naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace sent Darwin a paper detailing a similar theory. The two immediately teamed up to refine the theory and present it to the wider scientific world. The theory of evolution has enormous scientific and cultural importance: It fundamentally changed both scientific and popular understanding of human beings and their place in the natural world.

In “Sexual Asymmetry and the Satellite Sisters,” Kimmerer mentions Darwin during her discussion of adaptive radiation. She says that “Adaptive radiation, whether in Darwin’s finches or in Dicranum, creates new species that are well adapted for specific ecological niches” (30). She then briefly explains the connection between Darwin’s observation of finches and the adaptive radiation of Dicranum, but she assumes a certain level of scientific literacy in her audience and does not elaborate on who Darwin is or why he is significant to the field of evolutionary biology.

Edward Osborne Wilson (1929—2021) was a highly-regarded writer, Harvard professor, and natural scientist. He is considered a pioneer of environmentalism and was especially focused on preserving biodiversity. Wilson researched all over the globe, developing foundational concepts such as the theory of island biogeography and contributing significantly to the fields of chemical ecology and sociobiology. In addition to many scientific honors—such as the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the National Medal of Science—Wilson also won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for his books The Ants and On Human Nature.

Like Kimmerer, Wilson grew up in a rural environment and developed an early fascination with nature. His first subject of study was ants—small creatures that are often overlooked, just like Kimmerer’s mosses. The essay “In the Forest of the Waterbear” begins with an epigraph from E. O. Wilson: “Mysterious and little-known organisms live within reach of where you sit. Splendor awaits in minute proportions” (52). Wilson’s quote introduces the idea of the world in miniature, an idea developed at length in Kimmerer’s essay. The quote is from Wilson’s Biophilia (1984), a highly personal book in which the great biologist explores his own relationship to nature and offers commentary on the ethics of conservation. The title, Biophilia, is a word that Wilson coined to refer to an affinity for living things—a trait that Wilson believed innate to humans.

Wilson’s background, choice of study subjects, and beliefs are all similar to Kimmerer’s, making it natural that she would feel an affinity with him and choose one of his quotes to use for an epigraph. His reputation as one of the preeminent biologists and conservationists of all time also means that including Wilson’s words lends ethos to Kimmerer’s own arguments. Invoking Biophilia in particular—a book in which Wilson approaches science writing with the same mixture of subjectivity and objectivity that characterizes Gathering Moss—helps to support Kimmerer’s theme of Making Room for the Nonmaterial in Science.