Reviewing Biodiveristy: Reckoning with a portrait of the past

An essay on my work and the Biodiversity Heritage Library Collections.

Before working on this review, I was in a unique position in my digital humanities class. I was the only natural scientist in class, desperately finding a way to make my interest in humanities relevant to my work and my science to the class. In conversation with the professor, we first brainstormed what to do for the review; a few ideas came to mind knowing how disparate the sciences can be from the humanities. However, we converged on an exploratory analysis of the Biodiversity Heritage Library Database. I agreed because, upon glancing at the site, I saw portraits of plants and a naturalist perspective of flora and fauna. This satiated a long-held but limitedly researched interest of mine in plant humanities, and it seemed like a positive direction to pursue. Though that turned out to be true, it didn’t actually work out as I had anticipated, and the conclusions I am going to draw in this review were not the ones that I anticipated.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library Database holds a total of 61 collections of heritage data related to biodiversity and the natural world. This includes encyclopedic entries, anthologies of the natural world, naturalist portraiture, rare art on biological specimens, conversations on early speciation, the collected library of Charles Darwin, and many other holdings. This was immediately very interesting because, unlike other websites I had visited in search of something to review, the charge of this database was narrow and yet encompassed more information than I could look at in a lifetime.

I looked at several collections, including the collected works present in Darwin’s library. I am a noted fan of the history of Darwin, and so I was fascinated to see the scope of what he had read. Or at least what was sitting on his shelves. However, I was also interested in understanding why a humanist would consider compiling a database on biodiversity within the natural world. The library was nothing like I expected it was; the data looked so different than what I am used to, though not less interesting. One of the collections I was most interested in what the Latino Natural History collection. This composite database included lots of documents, but one I was attracted to was the Album of Abyssinian Birds and Mammals painted from live examples by Louis Agassiz Fuertes (example of paintings below included below). Essentially the album is a chronicle through paintings of species he encountered live and depicted while on expedition to Africa. The album is held at the Field Museum of Natural History and includes images of many animals, including the Gelada Baboon and the Crested Raven I include here. Both of the images struck me as very artistic and interesting representations of the animals and the “lively” encounters he identified them in.

While also looking through the collections, I noticed that this database, in contrast to other institutionally held ones, has partnerships with numerous institutions, including the Smithsonian libraries and museums, universities, and special private foundations. This changed my outlook about what this repository was and how it came to be constructed. Thematic repositories do not seem to always need an institutional affiliation since, arguably, some of the items that should be considered for archiving will not be at that specific institution. I also learned that they have, in the last year, adopted a harmful content statement addressing the fact that earlier work on biodiversity and naturalism often included harmful comparative and illustrative depictions of people and comments on society that today serve to reify the pejorative oppression of marginalized communities. This was a novel and critical addition to contextualizing the collected works within contemporary narratives of restorative scholarship and acknowledging that a lot of early collections could be useful and impactful today. This idea is hotly debated in areas of ethical scholarship, particularly in anthropology, and it was refreshing to find examples of it elsewhere. Lastly, I liked that the repository has contributed over 300,000 illustrations to Flickr.

The more I experienced the library, the more my initial questions about the preservation of biodiversity and its impact today continued to surface in my thoughts, especially the image of the baboon that I have included here. In the 1930s, when this was first published, few people had likely seen a baboon, and works like this worked tremendously hard at exposing the biodiversity of the world to people who could not possibly access it in real-time or expend field expeditions to explore the world themselves. Biodiversity heritage began as an exploratory project, and numerous people throughout time have contributed to its development, including settler-colonists.

Today, our exploration into biodiversity has grown exponentially with the development of science and more investment in exploring the earth than we ever had before. But preserving the previous history of exploration is equally important. I ask myself, what might people have thought about the artistic depictions of Fuertes and particularly of the baboons in the 1930s? Some may have said they look angry, stern, and solitary. Though those behaviors might be true of Gelada Baboons, there are also a plethora of behaviors that were occluded through this live painting, and anger seems to be given forward preference. The very nature of why and how biodiversity data was collected in the past is an important question not only because it gives us a greater perspective on the behavior of naturalists but because reconning with the way in which these species are described and depicted artistically serves to heal some of the harm that biodiversity data collection has inflicted previously. Indigenous communities throughout the globe were also “collected” by naturalists (and later by anthropologists) in the same way that the baboons painted here were, and it is this legacy of oppression that must be combated.

At the start of this review, I suggested that I did not expect the conclusions I would discuss in this review. That is because I was initially expecting to create a synthesis about how beautiful and elegant the combination of science, art, and humanities could be, and while I think that is true, this library sent me in a different direction. Biodiversity heritage conservation can both preserve the past and provide opportunities for conservationists and field researchers to reckon with the past that buttressed their disciplines and deliver moments of restorative justice to communities and relationships that have been historically harmed by the collection of biodiversity data.