John James Audubon (1785-1851) was a mixed-race (French/Creole) son of a West Indies planter and slave owner. Growing up in France he became a painter. Birds were his specialty and his passion. At 18 he moved to North America, eventually becoming an art teacher and professional portraitist of people and of birds. His avian drawings were well-received in Scotland and London, then published in book formats with text 1831-39 and now universally recognizable. Later Audubon moved to New York and brought out more bird books in partnership with other ornithologists, which led to the use of his name by the first Audubon Society in 1896.
Many regional and national Audubon Societies were formed, but as John Audubon has in recent years been called a racist white-supremacist, by 2023 many of the societies had dropped his name. Others haven't, because to them the name "Audubon" stands for conservation, not racism.
Plant and animal names derived from the names of those who first described them (genus and species nomenclature devised by Carl Linnaeus), have also come under attack. Many naturalists involved in description and nomenclature have been accused of "colonialism".
But it isn't only individuals coming under attack; Science is as a whole. We'd expect scientific classification to be above or outside of identity politics ... but it's not allowed to be. Nothing is. Science, learning and study may no longer be a-political. Everything has to be absorbed by the Culture Wars.
Many European naturalists whose names were attached to plants and animals became "colonials" when 18th - 19th century shipping technology made it possible to travel the world collecting specimens from distant regions which contained earlier settlers, the ab-original ones (the Latin prefix "ab" meaning before). "Our ancestors had already discovered those plants and animals", say their descendents. Of course they must have, but they didn't devise a scientific classification system for them -- they hadn't devised written language at all. The Linnean system is about species themselves and their biological descent, not about the people who brought the specimens from the field to the laboratories of Europe (where the microscope had also been invented, which made detailed description possible).
Like other aboriginal people, in Celtic lands the pagana ("women of the countryside") knew all about native herbs and their properties for good and ill, health and disease. Plants, roots, leaves and berries could heal, or poison. Pagana, knowing which was which, were powerful and others might revere or fear them. Accordingly they were called wiccans, druids or witches. They were anonymous like the native peoples of the New World ... but the official classification of species was done later by biologists. It was never about race-politics.
Yet now, not only are Audubon, Linnaeus, and specimen collectors black-listed; the names of plants, birds and animals themselves are being laundered by Correctness. There are offenders in your own garden that you may have to re-name, or dig up. No longer will you be able to host fuschias (named after German botanist Leonhart Fuchs) or dahlias (named for the Swedish botanist Anders Dahl). And abandon your forsythia, named after the 18th century Scottish horticulturalist William Forsythe, and your gunnara, after Johan Erntegunnerus, the Norwegian bishop who compiled Flora norvegica, 1766-72.
Bannish any Clarkia you host, named for Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. But would your Echeverria be okay, named after Mexican botanist/artist Echeverria y Godoy? He drew the plants of Mexico and perhaps kept any views on slavery to himself. He might fare better than John Audubon. Lady Sarah Amherst, like Audubon an ornithological artist, painted her namesake-pheasant (and other) illustrations while living in India: terribly colonial. But no doubt "Joe Pye Weed", a lushly-purple pollinator-attractant, will be allowed to keep its name, as Joe Pye was a Mohican chief born in the northeast US in the 18th century.
There's a Cooper's hawk, a Harris hawk, and a Wilson's warbler -- common names all, so who knows which are infamous, and what for? How about the Rivoli hummingbird and the Anna's hummingbird, named for the Duke of Rivoli and his wife Anna? Do the name-censors know for what crimes they might have their names struck off the bird list? Or why an American Quaker naturalist and a Surgeon-General should be?
How far will this censorship go, we might ask? We can assume that in the present heated climate (societal, not planetary) it will spread like dandelion weeds. But Audubon Societies are conservation societies, and we should ask, given that 29% of all Earth's species are facing extinction, which is more urgent -- species-conservation, or race-activism?
In any case, for many peace-loving gardeners uninterested in the Culture Wars, a dahlia will always be a dahlia and a fuschia always a fuschia.
