All Creatures: Naturalists, Collectors, and Biodiversity, 1850–1950 (review)

Had this book been a television broadcast, it might well have been one of those backstage documentaries that provides a behind-the-scenes look at the making of another production. Backstage, in this case, turns out to be the great American survey expeditions sponsored by museums and governments during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which, according to Kohler, gathered the data that formed the foundation of twentieth-century natural history.

As Kohler describes them, these survey expeditions differed in several significant ways from the kind of collecting that preceded them. First, they took place in what Kohler calls the "inner frontier" spaces of the United States, rather than in the "unexplored" and now vanishing wilderness. This inner frontier comprised a patchwork landscape of relatively undisturbed natural environments that existed even in close proximity to human activity. Second, they aimed for a synoptic completeness rather than the more scattershot efforts of earlier collectors. Third, they aspired to a methodological uniformity that would give the information collected a greater scientific rigor and value.

What Kohler presents is not so much a survey of these surveys, but an anatomy of them. The book is divided into six thematic chapters and an epilogic "envoi." These chapters consider, in turn, the landscape in which the surveys occurred, the changing cultural values of being "outdoors," the sponsoring of the expeditions, the organization necessary to carry them out, the actual fieldwork and the careers built from them, and the knowledge that these survey expeditions produced.

As the lesson unfolds, Kohler provides a number of fascinating and astute observations. Among them is the assertion that these survey expeditions resulted at least as much from a new middle-class culture of "nature-going" shared by "fagged-out professionals and office workers" as by the imperatives internal to natural science (90). Kohler also argues that changes in museum display practices—a switch from the glass case to the diorama—"transformed museums from passive recipients of objects into active sponsors of collecting" (111). While asserting the significance of this survey collecting, Kohler also reminds us that "taxonomic categories arose and fell with changing collecting practices," not vice versa (230).

Kohler insists at the outset of this study that he is interested in how we find, collect, identify, and order the vast diversity of species on the planet, not in the ethical questions raised by these practices—fair enough, given that his is the first examination of these collecting practices. Still, the ethical questions beg to be considered, and they even intrude on Kohler's story, as when several of his actors wrestle with the efficacy of killing rather than photographing their quarry. In this sense, All Creatures anticipates its sequel, a behind-the-scenes study of how the science of collecting contributed to the politics of the environment in the twentieth century.