Biodiversity News – Page 9 – Hoopoe

Happy 300th Birthday Linnaeus!

Carl Linnaeus was born 300 years ago!

To celebrate the life and work of the ‘father of taxonomy’ we have put together a selection of key taxonomic titles including an English translation of Linnaeus’ Philosophia Botanica and several titles about Linnaeus himself. We have included Order out of Chaos, a co-publication between the Linnean Society of London and London’s Natural History Museum, brings together for the first time information on the typification of all of Linnaeus’ plant names.

Also known as Carl von Linne´ following his ennoblement in 1761, Linnaeus’ lasting legacy is the binomial classification system used to this day. The Tree of Life is a beautifully produced taxonomic overview of the natural world demonstrating the universal utility of the Linnean system. if you need to catch up on ‘recent’ advances since Linnaeus’ day, Milestones in Systematics covers developments in systematics over the last 100 years. We have a wide range of titles on taxonomy and systematics, many related titles can be found in our botanical categories.

Christopher Helm 1937-2007

Christopher Helm, ornithologist and publisher, passed away on the 20th of January 2007. His legacy lives on in the highly acclaimed range of field guides and other natural history titles published under the ‘Helm’ imprint and well known to birders around the world. The latest Helm title, published just after the sad news of Christopher Helm’s death, is the Birds of Northern South America. Read full obituaries in the Times and Independent newspapers.

A Call to Arms for Nature Publishing

In a really excellent piece in the Guardian, Robert Macfarlane argues that we must reconnect with our environment through classic works of wildlife literature.

The suggestion – which echoes a similar call made by Lopez exactly 20 years ago in America – is that a series of classic works of nature writing from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland should be established and published. Such a series would not kowtow to the doubtful idea of a “national” literature. Instead, it would be a series of local writings, which concentrated on particular places, and which worked always to individuate, never to generalise. It would not vaunt a little-islandism, nor would it be blind to the spoliation of the landscape which has occurred. It would not adore landscape as a site for the exercise of middle-class nature-sentiment – a gymnasium for the sensitive.

It would, however, honour a form of care, and a form of attention, to the landscapes of the British Isles. It would discover in landscapes values which transcend the commercial and the consumerist. And it would restore to visibility a tradition of nature writing which has slipped from view these past 50 years.