The third of March marks the twelfth international World Wildlife Day, set up by United Nations (UN) resolution in 2013. The date was chosen for a good reason: it’s the birthday of the 1973 signing of CITES, the landmark Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, also called the Washington Convention. This year’s theme is wildlife conservation finance, exploring ways of bridging the gap between the resources needed to safeguard the world’s wildlife and what’s currently spent.
Surviving the Anthropocene
Those of us not living under a rock know we’re living through a climate emergency. When humankind suffers the consequences of wildfires, cyclones and other natural disasters, it’s splashed all over all media; when animal and plant habitats suffer damage or destruction, the silence can be deafening.
But in this geological era christened the Anthropocene, the world’s fauna and flora are enduring the sixth mass extinction (the fifth happened when an asteroid pranged Earth sixty-five million years ago and wiped out two-thirds of living species, including the dinosaurs). Scientists estimate half of Earth’s life forms will have gone extinct by 2100 if climate change continues unabated.
World Wildlife Day aims to make us all aware of the extraordinary beauty and uniqueness of those teeming life forms that are not us. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, but there are all sorts of ways to help, from joining your local wildlife trust to donating time or money to charities that protect wildlife internationally to posting on social media. Relevant hashtags include #DoOneThingToday and #WorldWildlifeDay.
But what exactly does ‘wildlife’ mean?
I don’t know about you, but the word wildlife for me evokes simply animals; it misses out the plants part. Which is perhaps not that strange given the word(s) first appear(s) as the title of an 1879 book Wild Life in a Southern County by a lyrical English nature writer, Richard Jefferies. While he writes about local people as well as local fauna, his chapter titles and summaries contain nary a reference to plants. The 1912 Wild life and the Camera by the pioneering animal photographer Arthur Radclyffe Dugmore similarly seems to be solely about animals. In this title too, wild and life are still separate.
‘Two becoming one’ is a trope of pop music. It’s also a fact of language change – what I call ‘the urge to merge’ in my book Damp Squid. In and deed were once separate, as were other and wise, port and cullis and scores of others. Conversely, the spelling alot abounds on the internet, and who’s to say it won’t someday or some day be the norm. Exactly when wildlife merged we don’t know, but suffice it to say that one corpus in Collins Wordbanks – the vast databases of examples we use to analyse English to inform our dictionaries – contains over 19,00o examples of wildlife and 186 of wild life (which my grammar checker wants to correct!).
Can other languages help us pin down the meaning of wildlife? I’m not sure this is legitimate – languages are not isomorphic – but the translations Collins offers if you look under wildlife include French faune et flore and Spanish flora y fauna, which cover both aspects but in different orders. In contrast, Danish and Dutch, at least in these translations, focus on animals: vildt dyreliv and dieren in het wild (‘wild animal life’ and ‘animals in the wild’).
Fauna and fauns
Is there a connection? Yes. Our English word faun, first recorded in Chaucer, is the descendant of the Latin faunus, rustic spirits of forests and pasture who were sort of emanations or lesser versions of the god Faunus. They were originally portrayed in Roman sculpture with human anatomy but pointed ears and horns. Later they merged with the Greek tradition of satyrs and acquired goat’s legs and tail, as you can see in the lead sculpture by Charles Hodge Mackie in the National Museum of Scotland. How’s that for a garden ornament?
Faunus’ sister was Fauna, and it is after her that we have the word for animals collectively, first used by the renowned eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White.
The other half of the wildlife equation comes in the shape of another Roman divinity, Flora, the goddess of spring and flowering plants. Her husband was Favonius, the personification of the west wind, who blew at the beginning of spring and so encouraged the plant growth that Flora celebrates.
When we divide wildlife into flora and fauna, is there an obligatory order as with fish and chips or black and white or wild and wooly – technically ‘irreversible binomials’? Collins Wordbanks data suggests there’s a strong preference for flora and fauna, in the region of 80 per cent, but it’s not irreversible.
‘Big Latin and small Greek’*
Where Latin truly comes into play, though, in discussion of wildlife is in botanical and zoological nomenclature and taxonomy (the second is from Greek). You and I will talk of cabbages, the experts, of brassicas; for you and me it’s ‘the cat family’, for conservationists the ‘Felidae’.
There’s a vivid mnemonic** I resort to when struggling to remember the taxonomy of animals: ‘King Philip came over for great spaghetti’ and variants such as ‘cried out “For goodness’ sake!”’. That gives me the basics of Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus and Species. In the case of cats, it leaves out the subfamily of Felinae, the ‘small cats’. Our beloved Tibs or Felix, Felis catus, is the only domesticated species of the Family.
Nobody’s sure how many species populate our world, but it may be as high as nine million. We have catalogued only a low percentage, and the single largest group are probably the least relatable for most of us: insects. For instance, for ants alone about 15,000 species are known – and who knows how many more unknowns.
Among the knowns is the Dracula ant, so called because the queen drinks the blood of her own larvae – spoiler alert, they survive! This ant, along with at least another hundred, is listed in the ‘critically endangered’ category of the ‘Red List’ classification by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, IUCN, ‘the global authority on the status of the natural world’.
That list ranks the extinction risk for different species. Using an expanded semiotics of traffic light colours, at highest risk, in red, are ‘critically endangered (CR)’ species. Below them come ‘endangered (EN)’ in orange and ‘vulnerable (VU)’ in yellow. At the bottom of the hierarchy come species of ‘least concern (LC)’ in green.
In the UK alone over 130 species are CR, among them the adorable hazel dormouse, the robust Scottish wildcat and the prickly bundle of joy that is the hedgehog.
It’s not all doom and gloom. One hundred million p0unds will be spent on a tunnel over the HS2 railway line to stop bats splattering themselves against trains. Every year dozens of volunteers man a stretch of road near Bath during the amphibian mating season. They gingerly scoop toads, frogs and newts up off the tarmac and deposit them in safety on the other side. This year, the road will be completely shut.
Some animals are the only member of their species. Our reliable Christmas friend, the European robin, Erithacus rubecula, for one, beluga or white whales (Delphinaptarus leucas) for another, known as ‘sea canaries’ for their 200 different vocalisations. And then there’s us, Homo sapiens. But we are no more ‘unique’ in its weakened sense than they are, and it’s incumbent on us to protect them, and all species, as far as humanly possible.
That in a nutshell is the ‘takeaway’ message of World Wildlife Day.
* A pun on Ben Jonson’s comment about Shakespeare in his ‘To the memory of my beloved, the AUTHOR Master William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us.’
** How do you pronounce a word beginning with that impossible combination mn-? Simply by pronouncing it as an n, ni-MO-nik. The only other word I can think of that begins that way and isn’t an abbreviation, is, appropriately, the name of the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne (nee-MO-zi-nee).
By Jeremy Butterfield
Jeremy Butterfield is the former Editor-in-Chief of Collins Dictionaries, and editor of the fourth, revised edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage.
All opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual writers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Collins, or its parent company, HarperCollins.
