Two Million Wondrous Nature Illustrations Put Online by The Biodiversity Heritage Library

Are we tru­ly in the midst of a human-caused sixth mass extinc­tion, an era of “bio­log­i­cal anni­hi­la­tion”? Many sci­en­tists and pop­u­lar sci­ence writ­ers say yes, using terms like “Holocene” or “Anthro­pocene” to describe what fol­lows the Ordovi­cian, Devon­ian, Per­mi­an, Tri­as­sic, and Cre­ta­ceous peri­ods. Peter Bran­nen, author of extinc­tion his­to­ry The Ends of the Earth has found at least one sci­en­tist who thinks the con­cept is “junk.” But Bran­nen quotes some alarm­ing sta­tis­tics. Chill­ing, even. “Until very recent­ly,” he writes, “all ver­te­brate life on the plan­et was wildlife. But astound­ing­ly, today wildlife accounts for only 3 per­cent of earth’s land ani­mals; human beings, our live­stock, and our pets take up the remain­ing 97 per­cent of the bio­mass… almost half of the earth’s land has been con­vert­ed into farm­land.”

This state of affairs does not bode well for the mil­lions of remain­ing species get­ting edged out of their envi­ron­ments by agribusi­ness and cli­mate change. We learn from extinc­tions past that the plan­et rebounds after unimag­in­able cat­a­stro­phe. Life real­ly does go on, though it may take mil­lions of years to recov­er. But the cur­rent forms of life may dis­ap­pear before their time. If we want to under­stand what is at stake besides our own frag­ile fos­sil-fuel based civ­i­liza­tions, we need to con­nect to life emo­tion­al­ly as well as intel­lec­tu­al­ly. Short of globe-hop­ping phys­i­cal immer­sion in the earth’s bio­di­ver­si­ty, we could hard­ly do bet­ter than immers­ing our­selves in the tra­di­tion of nat­u­ral­ist writ­ing, art, and pho­tog­ra­phy that brings the world to us.

The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library (BHL), an “open access dig­i­tal library for bio­di­ver­si­ty lit­er­a­ture and archives,” has for many years been mak­ing it easy for peo­ple to con­nect to nature through nature writ­ing and illus­tra­tion. In 2012, they announced the “suc­cess sto­ry” of their Flickr streams, both con­tain­ing thou­sands of illus­tra­tions and pho­tographs uploaded by the BHL staff and read­ers from their huge col­lec­tions of books.

The first stream, cur­rent­ly at 122,281 images, has been care­ful­ly curat­ed, and includes search­able gal­leries and albums divid­ed by book title or sub­ject, such as “Exot­ic botany illus­trat­ed,” “The Birds of Aus­tralia v.1,” and “Bats!” The sec­ond stream, con­sist­ing of over 2 mil­lion images, is a mas­sive grab-bag of pho­tos, ill­lus­tra­tions from nature, adver­tise­ments, and imag­i­na­tive ren­der­ings.

Though far less use­ful for the scholar—or the very pur­pose­ful user—this sec­ond pho­to­stream offers more poten­tial for chance dis­cov­ery, through the aim­less wan­der­ing that often leads to serendip­i­tous­ly sub­lime expe­ri­ences. The for­mal BHL stream does not dis­ap­point, though it may offer few­er sur­pris­es. Both of these image archives offer expan­sive views of human­i­ty’s encounter with the nat­ur­al world, not only through sta­tis­tics and aca­d­e­m­ic jar­gon, but through the artis­tic record­ing of won­der, sci­en­tif­ic curios­i­ty, and deep appre­ci­a­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 50 Hours of Nature Sound­scapes from the BBC: Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly Proven to Ease Stress and Pro­mote Hap­pi­ness & Awe

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

Down­load for Free 2.6 Mil­lion Images from Books Pub­lished Over Last 500 Years on Flickr

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness