guillermo rodriguez Response Questions

1. Aristotle looked to study animals and classify them into categories based on characteristics such as number of limbs, blood-bearing or "blood-less", animals that lay eggs, animals and give live birth, etc. Pliny and Aristotle both included information on organisms they had heard or read about, accounts that may have been exaggerated or vague in certain parts of their descriptions, or descriptions drawn purely from animal remains, which led to a good amount of imagining of what these creatures really looked like, which in retrospect we can now identify as these "wonder-people."

2. Ships had made it easier to travel large distances and for the first time people were seeing more organisms than they normally would in their lifetime living in a particular region. There was a need to change the way we classify and name these organisms to be able to clearly establish what organism people from different regions were describing and how all these creatures fit in relation to each other. They called him Little Oracle for his ability to solve enigmas when it came to naming or classifying certain species of plants, as he first exhibited to Olof Celsius.

3. 'Joes & Annies' (Harry Greene) "An organism at a time, at a place, doing something and the whole thing recorded and archived so that someone else can use the information." 'Intentional Attentiveness' (Tom Fleischner) "A practice of a focused intentional attentiveness to the more-than-human world guided by honesty and accuracy. Not a body of knowledge, not a body of facts, it's a practice."
'Your Dentist Is A Naturalist' (Clare Walter Leslie) "It's the recognition that we're all naturalists. And to me, that's the problem with the word 'natural history,' it sort of freezes it in the past."
I thought these quotes on the definition of natural history were the most interesting as they best helped me to view natural history as a relevant, current and ongoing practice, and not just a part of these institutions (zoos, museums) that house natural history.

4. "Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair." This quote stood out to me as it pertains to the temporality of nature. It speaks of the changes that happen, and it's these changes that help me notice something and look closer, or those things that are only happening for a brief period that others point out. Typically things such as spotting an animal that might not be in that observable space much longer, or what the sky looks like, which could change drastically in a matter of minutes.

-guillermo