We will have to say goodbye, presumably, to the "Black-eyed Susan" daisy, as well as Indian plum, Oriental lily, Chinese evergreen and Japanese anemone. To refer to the China doll (Raderachera sinica) will probably be considered hate speech. Many varieties of cactus too are offensive to name-launderers: "Ladyfinger cactus" sounds sexist, "African Milk Tree" racist, and the Easter cactus and Bishop's Cap cactus are clearly offensively white-western-Christian.
But why stop at Avia and Botanica? What about farm animals? About the Rhode Island Red chicken, the Clydesdale horse, the Holstein milk cow? All white European/American place names behind those.
And what about pets? It's raining racist cats and dogs out there. The famously aristocratic superiority of the Siamese cat won't help it now to hang on to its time-honoured name. Nor will the "Russian Blue" keep his. (Russians are bear people; Russians aren't pussycats, and its racist to suggest otherwise.) And dogs? Forget you ever heard of the Pekinese. And what about the shameful national nomenclature embedded in Irish wolfhound, German Shepherd, French poodle? Possibly Australians won't be as bothered about the Australian sheepdog (being more laid-back in the out-back), and the label “English bulldog” has become a symbol of national pride. But wait, it's shamefully colonialist, isn't it?
A co-founder of the ornithological group “Bird Names For Birds” objects to naming species after humans, meaning after “folks that were involved in colonial times”. But then who wasn't “involved in the times” when they were born, when they were alive? How could they not be? That they also were the first to identify and describe a species is just a thing they did then, and attaching their name to the catalogued species not only acknowledges their contribution to science, it gives us historical and biographical markers to go with the scientific ones.
The attacks on names, as on monuments and statues, are actually attacks on historical scholarship. Will it stop? Will we even be allowed to keep our own names? If it can't be attached to a species or a street, can your name even attach to yourself? If it shows guilty association with your times, your country, your ancestry ... and hearkens back to the "Age of Exploration", dawn of democratic humanism, developed nation-hood, and famous familial names?
-- ban it. But how will we know who anyone is? Clearly, we need a new directory: Field Guide to the Culture Wars, though it's hard to see what language it could be written in -- not one using the Roman alphabet, obviously.
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