book: An Immense World, Ed Yong
Biologist Jakob von Uexküll coined the term umwelt (plural: umwelten), to refer to a living thing's perceptual world. The environment is rich in stimuli (sound, light, chemicals...) that a living thing may or may not perceive, and then may or may not interpret. While we all inhabit the same planet, we live in completely different umwelt — we humans walk around oblivious to sights, sounds, and smells that, to a different creature, are the basis of their understanding of the world around them (and vice versa). Yong uses this concept as the basis to this book, which describes animal senses not in the usual "Whoa!!! check out how much BETTER and COOLER this animal is (compared to a human" way, but in a way that attempts to figure out what an animal's umwelt might be like.
Yong begins with our beloved pet dogs, which serve as a good example for what the book is like. Dogs don't have very clear eyesight compared to humans; in fact, the majority of animals would be considered legally blind by human standards. Instead of vision, their world is built on smell. Smells behave differently than light — they drift, they linger. This means dogs can sense around corners, inside objects, and "in the past" (compared to the human visual-world). and when we deprive them of the time to stop and sniff, and expect them to be visual like us, they can become mentally disturbed as their umwelt shrinks and blurs around them.
Yong uses the umwelt concept to discuss human-animal relations more deeply beyond just this. for example, what we perceive our impact to be may miss out on impacts that exist in other umwelten. Sound pollution at wavelengths we can't hear. Light pollution at wavelengths we can't see.
A great read to for certain, and a refreshing one in terms of the umwelt-focus. it makes the world feel grander, more expansive. Every living thing represents an umwelt, another world. the umwelt concept in employed in such a way it usurps the feeling of claustrophobia-insignificance that many people are plagued with.
for every day, we each exist in a thousand different umwelten.
...
thanks for reading!🪱🦀
Atom feed ; RSS feed
check out my reading list while you're here :)