Philip Sugg | Blog

James Scott writes convincingly about the tendency of large institutions, like states and private enterprises, to pursue their own interests by abstracting away the complexity of the actual world: The necessarily simple abstractions of large bureaucratic institutions, as we have seen, can never adequately represent the actual complexity of natural or social processes. The categories that they employ are too coarse, too static, and too stylized to do justice to the world that they purport to describe.0{#ffn1 .footnote}^ According to Scott, any organization that works on a large scale, across different populations or a wide geographic area, will find systematic ways to work on its own terms. This could be people, natural resources, land–it doesn’t matter. The point is that large organizations work with the tools they have available: standardization, which is achieved through quantification and measurement, and control over the environment that makes up the local system. Large organizations pay very close attention to all these variables so that they can exclude or pay a lot less attention to everything else on the ground. Scott argues that no state has ever come into existence through asking all its people what they need and want. Instead, it brings people under its control, who already have purposes, goals, and ideas of their own , and treats them according to what it thinks they need to do and be. In the past, this meant making them grow crops or serve in a military. Today, these same states might get people ready for compulsory schooling, provide employment, and supervise their health and wellness. Read more →

I started looking at the birds more during the pandemic. So did a lot of other people. Most field guides about birds are written for one purpose: to identify them. Birding is easy to distill to its basics: you look at a bird, you figure out the name that somebody else gave it, and you keep lists of what you’ve seen. But it would be deflationary to leave it there, that birding is about mere bird identification. It doesn’t account for why there are so many people who are very serious about identifying birds in particular. Sure, almost every branch of nature has people who take an interest in it.0{#ffn1 .footnote}^ But I know of no other outdoor nature activity centered on identification that generates anywhere near the same excitement as birding. One of the most thoughtful teachers of birding I’ve found in print is Ken Kaufman. His Field Guide to Advanced Birding is a good place to start figuring out what birding is really about.0{#ffn2 .footnote}^ The “advanced” part of the title is somewhat misleading. The book is not really trying to define a bar for experts so much as give a more systematic account of the practices of modern birding, organized by case studies on, say, a specific feature (e.g., “Plumages, Molt and Wear”), a habitat type (e.g., “Learning to Identify Seabirds”), or a genus (“The Empidonax Flycatchers”). Kaufman writes in the introduction about his experience in the field teaching beginners to bird: One revelation was the importance of understanding. Read more →