SEPTEMBER 2022:
NATURALLY ACTED CRAWDADS…
The critical reviews for Where The Crawdads Sing seemed to have underperformed at keeping film viewers from attending the theaters. Based on the box office performance of the summer film, film viewers were not that worried about the fact that the film was at a slower pace than the superhero movies that usually dominate the summer season at the theater. The film’s success despite the tepid reviews from critics concerning the packed plot and underperforming script adaption proves that there is room for non-superhero films at the theaters that can have a female-focused plotline and no CGI action sequences. The film over-performed in early box office projections and caused those projections to be redone based on its preview screening Thursday and July weekend release. The film blew past its budget and was praised for its cinematography with beautiful scenes of the marshlands that Kya Clark called home.
NATURALIST VIEWING…
From film viewers who read the New York Times Best Seller of 2018 before watching the film adaption, to film viewers who saw the film and then read the Delia Owens novel some were left wondering about the Kya Clark’s of the world. The rare aspiration of people we refer to as Naturalists, and what it is to be someone who studies the patterns of nature by living in and among it and surviving off of it. When they think about studying nature, most people think of it in the sense of any study, which is usually spending the most time in a classroom reading on the subject of study or working in a lab to understand the subject. But the best expert naturalist has never spent a day in a classroom.
HISTORICALLY NATURAL PRESENCE…
Natural history relates to the area of study involving organisms, that include animals, fungi, and plants, within their natural environment. You could compare this domain of inquiry with that of observational study more than an experimental method of study. And a person who studies within this area is referred to as a natural historian or a naturalist. Naturalists work to observe the relationships between plants, trees, and ecology that are interconnected to help us better understand the past, present, and future, along with their global environments. On the surface, it seems simple to be a naturalist, but there is more to it than people realize.
PHILOSOPHICALLY NATURAL…
Natural history began with Aristotle and other ancient philosophers who analyzed the diversity of the natural world. Pliny the Elder understood natural history covers anything that could be found in the world, in a published work dated c. 77 to 79 AD, Pliny the Elder wrote of natural history in an encyclopedia on natural history and the historical work covers astronomy, geography, humans and their technology, medicine, and superstition, the encyclopedia also covered the areas of animals and plants.
NATURALLY INFLUENCED…
There was little movement in the European Middle Ages for the progressiveness in the study of natural history, but it did move at a much faster pace to progression in the Arabic and Oriental world. By the 13th century, Aristotle’s work was being adapted rigidly into Christian Philosophy, particularly in the studies of Thomas Aquinas, forming the basis for natural theology. Scholars, herbalists, and humanists during the Renaissance began to directly observe plants and animals for natural history once again, as a result, many began to accumulate large collections of exotic specimens and unusual monsters. It brought about the founding of the study of botany, it was founded by Leonhart Fuchs, Otto Brunfels, and Hieronymus Bock. And other contributors to the study of botany that followed included: Valerius Cordus, Konrad Gesner, Frederik Ruysch, and Gaspard Bauhin.
![Portrait by Heinrich Füllmaurer, Tübingen, 1541, Leonhart Fuchs, sometimes spelled Leonhard Fuchs[a] and cited in Latin as Leonhartus Fuchsius, was a German physician and botanist. His chief notability is as the author of a large book about plants and their uses as medicines, a herbal, which was first published in 1542 in Latin. It has about 500 accurate and detailed drawings of plants, which were printed from woodcuts. The drawings are the book's most notable advance on its predecessors. Although drawings had been used in other herbal books, Fuchs' book proved and emphasized high-quality drawings as the most telling way to specify what a plant name stands for. Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons](https://i1.wp.com/moviestohistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Leonhart-Fuchs-680x1024.jpeg?ssl=1)
![Conrad Gessner (/ˈɡɛsnər/; Latin: Conradus Gesnerus[a] 26 March 1516 – 13 December 1565) was a Swiss physician, naturalist, bibliographer, and philologist. Born into a poor family in Zürich, Switzerland, his father and teachers quickly realised his talents and supported him through university, where he studied classical languages, theology and medicine. He became Zürich's city physician, but was able to spend much of his time on collecting, research and writing. Gessner compiled monumental works on bibliography (Bibliotheca universalis 1545–1549) and zoology (Historia animalium 1551–1558) and was working on a major botanical text at the time of his death from plague at the age of 49. He is regarded as the father of modern scientific bibliography, zoology and botany. He was frequently the first to describe species of plants or animals in Europe, such as the tulip in 1559. A number of plants and animals have been named after him. Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons](https://i1.wp.com/moviestohistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Conrad_Gesner_by_Tobias_Stimmer2.jpeg?ssl=1)
![Frederik Ruysch (Dutch: [ˈfreːdərɪk ˈrœys]; March 28, 1638 – February 22, 1731) was a Dutch botanist and anatomist. He is known for developing techniques for preserving anatomical specimens, which he used to create dioramas or scenes incorporating human parts. His anatomical preparations included over 2,000 anatomical, pathological, zoological, and botanical specimens, which were preserved by either drying or embalming. Ruysch is also known for his proof of valves in the lymphatic system, the vomeronasal organ in snakes, and arteria centralis oculi (the central artery of the eye). He was the first to describe the disease that is today known as Hirschsprung's disease, as well as several pathological conditions, including intracranial teratoma, enchondromatosis, and Majewski syndrome. Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons](https://i1.wp.com/moviestohistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Frederik-Ruysch.jpeg?ssl=1)
NATURAL EXPANSION…
The rapid increase in the discovery of a number of known organisms prompted many attempts at classifying and organizing species into taxonomic groups, which culminated in the system of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, and Chinese naturalist Li Shizhen, whose achievements in natural history relating to the Ming Dynasty translated to many different languages and helped directly influence many scholars and researchers.
![Table of the Animal Kingdom (Regnum Animale) from the 1st edition of Systema Naturæ (1735). The establishment of universally accepted conventions for the naming of organisms was Linnaeus's main contribution to taxonomy—his work marks the starting point of consistent use of binomial nomenclature.[160] During the 18th century expansion of natural history knowledge, Linnaeus also developed what became known as the Linnaean taxonomy; the system of scientific classification now widely used in the biological sciences. A previous zoologist Rumphius (1627–1702) had more or less approximated the Linnaean system and his material contributed to the later development of the binomial scientific classification by Linnaeus. Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons](https://i2.wp.com/moviestohistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Carl-Linnaeus-Taxonomy-Stystem.png?ssl=1)
NATURALLY INDEPENDENT…
Among independent scientists in history, many of them contributed to both fields of study, and papers published early in the era were both commonly read at professional science society meetings, that included the Royal Society and the French Academy of Sciences, which were both founded in the 17th century. The longest-lasting of all natural history books, De Materia Medica, was written between 50 and 70 AD by Pedanius Dioscorides, who was a Roman physician of Greek origin. It is considered the longest-lasting natural history book because it was widely read for more than 1,500 years until supplanted by the Renaissance.
NATURALLY PRACTICAL…
From the ancient Greeks up until the work of Carl Linnaeus and other 18th-century naturalists, a major principal concept in the study of natural history came from the scala naturae or Great Chain of Being, which is an arrangement of minerals, vegetables, more primitive forms of animals, and more complex life forms on a linear scale of possible increasing perfection, culminating in our species. Natural history had been encouraged by practical means of society through such examples as Linnaeus’ aspirations to use it of improving the economic condition of Sweden, and the Industrial Revolution prompted the development of geology through the process of finding mineral deposits.
NATURAL DIVISIONS…
Knowledge was considered to have two main divisions in Medieval European academics. The two divisions consisted of the humanities, or what is known as classics, and divinity, with science being studied predominately through texts rather than through observation or experiments. While the study of nature wasn’t as popular before the 1900s, it found a revival in the Renaissance, elevating it to the third branch of academic knowledge. It was divided as a study by itself by being a descriptive study of natural history and natural philosophy, along with the analytical study of nature.
![Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses (Juno, Minerva, and Venus), by Isaac Oliver, c. 1558.
Divinity or the divine are things that are either related to, devoted to, or proceeding from a deity.[1][2] What is or is not divine may be loosely defined, as it is used by different belief systems.
Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons](https://i1.wp.com/moviestohistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Divinity.jpeg?ssl=1)
CONTRIBUTING NATURALLY…
Within English natural history, one of the biggest contributors of significance was made by parson-naturalists such as Gilbert White, William Kirby, John George Wood, and John Ray who mutually wrote about plants, animals, and other aspects of nature. The motivation at the time to write about nature was to make the natural theology argument for the existence or goodness of God. There were many contributions made by women of the time period in the field of botany ranging from authors, collectors, and illustrators but were not as well documented due to the nature of a woman’s place in society in past history. Through this progression of natural history studies in modern Europe, along with botany, the professional disciplines of geology, mycology, paleontology, physiology, and zoology were formed.
![John Ray FRS (29 November 1627 – 17 January 1705) was a Christian English naturalist widely regarded as one of the earliest of the English parson-naturalists. Until 1670, he wrote his name as John Wray. From then on, he used 'Ray', after "having ascertained that such had been the practice of his family before him". He published important works on botany, zoology, and natural theology. His classification of plants in his Historia Plantarum, was an important step towards modern taxonomy. Ray rejected the system of dichotomous division by which species were classified according to a pre-conceived, either/or type system[further explanation needed], and instead classified plants according to similarities and differences that emerged from observation. He was among the first to attempt a biological definition for the concept of species, as "a group of morphologically similar organisms arising from a common ancestor". Another significant contribution to taxonomy was his division of plants into those with two seedling leaves (dicotyledons) or only one (monocotyledons), a division used in taxonomy today.
Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons](https://i2.wp.com/moviestohistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/John-Ray.jpeg?ssl=1)
![Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity is an 1802 work of Christian apologetics and philosophy of religion by the English clergyman William Paley (1743–1805). The book expounds his arguments from natural theology, making a teleological argument for the existence of God, notably beginning with the watchmaker analogy.
Natural theology, once also termed physico-theology,[1] is a type of theology that seeks to provide arguments for theological topics (such as the existence of a deity) based on reason and the discoveries of science.
Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons](https://i1.wp.com/moviestohistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Natural-Theology-.jpeg?ssl=1)
![A paleontologist at work at John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.
Paleontology (/ˌpeɪliɒnˈtɒlədʒi, ˌpæli-, -ən-/), also spelled palaeontology[a] or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to, and sometimes including, the start of the Holocene epoch (roughly 11,700 years before present). It includes the study of fossils to classify organisms and study their interactions with each other and their environments (their paleoecology). Paleontological observations have been documented as far back as the 5th century BC. The science became established in the 18th century as a result of Georges Cuvier's work on comparative anatomy, and developed rapidly in the 19th century. The term itself originates from Greek παλαιός ('palaios', "old, ancient"), ὄν ('on', (gen. 'ontos'), "being, creature"), and λόγος ('logos', "speech, thought, study")
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NATURALLY ISOLATED…
And while it is often believed that naturalists work in near isolation like that of the ancient Greco-Roman world, and the mediaeval Arabic world all the way through to the European Renaissance naturalists, today’s naturalists study natural history under a cross-discipline umbrella which includes many specialty sciences. Geobiology plays a large part in the study of natural history and has a strong multidisciplinary nature.
![The colorful microbial mats of Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park, USA. The orange mats are composed of Chloroflexia, "Cyanobacteria", and other organisms that thrive in the 70˚C water. Geobiologists often study extreme environments like this because they are home to extremophilic organisms. It has been hypothesized that these environments may be representative of early Earth.
Geobiology is a field of scientific research that explores the interactions between the physical Earth and the biosphere. It is a relatively young field, and its borders are fluid. There is considerable overlap with the fields of ecology, evolutionary biology, microbiology, paleontology, and particularly soil science and biogeochemistry. Geobiology applies the principles and methods of biology, geology, and soil science to the study of the ancient history of the co-evolution of life and Earth as well as the role of life in the modern world.[2] Geobiologic studies tend to be focused on microorganisms, and on the role that life plays in altering the chemical and physical environment of the pedosphere, which exists at the intersection of the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere and/or cryosphere. It differs from biogeochemistry in that the focus is on processes and organisms over space and time rather than on global chemical cycles.
Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons](https://i0.wp.com/moviestohistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Geobiology-1024x685.jpeg?ssl=1)
NATURAL MASTER…
Natural history while it does encompass scientific research, it is not limited to it. It involves the systematic definition of a study when dealing with any category of natural objects or organisms, but observing nature as a naturalist is not necessarily an intellectual or academic skill. There is no way to master natural history by sitting inside and reading about it in a book. Being a naturalist is a form of study requiring you to use every part of your brain to think in a more holistic way. This way of thinking opens your mind to understanding and has significant effects on the worldview, self-awareness, and overall success in the life of a naturalist.
NATURALLY ANTIQUATED…
While the meaning of the term “nature” has widened the meaning of the term as defined by the English has narrowed progressively with time since before 1900. Such as, when studying antiquity, the meaning of “natural history” essentially covered the areas of anything connected with nature or materials that have been used and drawn from nature, that definition has changed over time with more study correlations and evolutions of thought. Since 1900 the definitions of these studies have changed, in modern times, natural philosophy has roughly correlated with modern physics and chemistry, while natural history included the biological and geological sciences with strong associations.
NATURALLY INDIVIDUAL…
Over time modern definitions of natural history come from a variety of scientific fields of study and sources, and many of the modern definitions emphasize a more focused aspect of the vast area of study. This created a plurality of definitions with a number of common themes in the study of natural history. While the main focus of a naturalist is to observe a subject of study, it can also be defined as a type of observational study through a crafted practice in which more emphasis is placed on the observer than on the observed. But biologists, whose scientific study focuses on individual organisms in their environment, and who have studied natural history see it as the study of life at the level of the individual, what they do, how they react to each other and their environment, how they are organized into groups within that environment like populations and communities. They have also included it as the study through close observation of organisms, their origins, their evolution through time, their behaviors in nature, and their relationships with other species.
HISTORICALLY NATURAL NATURE…
Some definitions of natural history go further and focus on the direct observation of organisms in their environments, both in the past and the present. These definitions have defined naturalists as students of natural history, who study the world by observing its organisms such as plants and animals directly. And define them accordingly because organisms are functionally inseparable from the environment in which they live and because their structure and function cannot be interpreted in an adequate study without knowing some of their evolutionary histories. And these definitions are based on the idea that the study of natural history embraces the study of fossils as well as physiographic and other aspects of the physical environment.
NATURALLY EVOLVED…
Natural history was increasingly scorned by scientists of a more specialized manner through the 18th century and relegated to a less educated activity and was seen as more amateur, but its study was also believed to contribute to good mental health. With its downgraded place in the classrooms of college science professors, particularly in Britain and the United States, it grew into specialist hobbies such as ornithology, lepidopterology, malacology or conchology, coleopterology, and the study of wildflowers. Natural history plays a part in the study of biology, especially in the study of ecology, ethology, and evolutionary biology, and finds its place in modern biology through integrative organismal biology.
![Ethology is the scientific study of animal behaviour, usually with a focus on behaviour under natural conditions, and viewing behaviour as an evolutionarily adaptive trait.[1] Behaviourism as a term also describes the scientific and objective study of animal behaviour, usually referring to measured responses to stimuli or to trained behavioural responses in a laboratory context, without a particular emphasis on evolutionary adaptivity.
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NATURAL AMATEUR…
Amateur collectors and natural history entrepreneurs played an important role in building the world’s large natural history collections, such as those found in the Natural History Museum, London and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. Natural history museums evolved through history from cabinets of curiosities to playing an important role in the emergence of professional biological disciplines and research programs. Particularly as it pertains to the 19th century when scientists began to use their natural history collections as teaching tools for advancing students in their natural history science studies and was used as a basis for their own morphological research.
![The National Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum administered by the Smithsonian Institution, located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. It has free admission and is open 364 days a year. In 2021, with 7.1 million visitors, it was the eighteenth most visited museum in the world and the second most visited natural history museum in the world after the Natural History Museum in London.[5] Opened in 1910, the museum on the National Mall was one of the first Smithsonian buildings constructed exclusively to hold the national collections and research facilities.[6] The main building has an overall area of 1.5 million square feet (140,000 m2) with 325,000 square feet (30,200 m2) of exhibition and public space and houses over 1,000 employees.
Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons](https://i0.wp.com/moviestohistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Smithsonian-Museum-of-Natural-History.jpeg?resize=525%2C700&ssl=1)
NATURALLY INFLUENCED CONTRIBUTIONS…
And the naturalists that came before them were also an influence on the naturalists that came after them, for example, the understanding of “Nature” as “an organism and not as a mechanism” can be traced to the writings of Alexander von Humbolt, whose copious writings and research were pivotal influences for Charles Darwin, Simón Bolivar, Henry David Thoreau, Ernst Haeckel, and John Muir. Henry Walter Bates, and Alfred Russel Wallace were three of the greatest English naturalists of the 19th century, and each made natural history contributions that took years to discover, and in that time, they collected thousands of specimens, many of them new find in the area of science, and threw their writings they were able to advance knowledge for many remote parts of the world, that included: the Amazon basin, the Galápagos Islands, and the Malay Archipelago and were able to help transform biology from a descriptive to a theory-based science.
![Portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler (1843)
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (14 September 1769 – 6 May 1859) was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science.[5] He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835).[6][7][8] Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography. Humboldt's advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement laid the foundation for modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.
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![Darwin, c. 1854, when he was preparing On the Origin of Species for publication.
Charles Robert Darwin FRS FRGS FLS FZS JP[6] (/ˈdɑːrwɪn/ DAR-win; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor is now generally accepted and considered a fundamental concept in science. In a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace, he introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history and was honoured by burial in Westminster Abbey.
Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons](https://i1.wp.com/moviestohistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Charles-Darwin.jpeg?ssl=1)
![Portrait by José Toro Moreno, 1922.
Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios[b] (24 July 1783 – 17 December 1830) was a Venezuelan military and political leader who led what are currently the countries of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Panama and Bolivia to independence from the Spanish Empire. He is known colloquially as El Libertador, or the Liberator of America.
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![Thoreau in 1856.
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher.[3] A leading transcendentalist,[4] he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.
Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons](https://i1.wp.com/moviestohistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Henry-David-Thoreaui-707x1024.jpeg?ssl=1)
![Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (German: [ɛʁnst ˈhɛkl̩]; 16 February 1834 – 9 August 1919[1]) was a German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist and artist. He discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and coined many terms in biology, including ecology,[2] phylum,[3] phylogeny,[4] and Protista.[5] Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany[6] and developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny.
Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons](https://i0.wp.com/moviestohistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Ernst-Haeckel.jpeg?ssl=1)
![Galapagos sea lion on San Cristóbal Island.
The Galápagos Islands (Spanish: Islas Galápagos, pronounced [ˈislas ɣaˈlapaɣos], local pronunciation: [ˈihlah ɣaˈlapaɣoh]) are an archipelago of volcanic islands. They are distributed on each side of the equator in the Pacific Ocean, surrounding the centre of the Western Hemisphere, and are part of the Republic of Ecuador. Located 906 km (563 mi) west of continental Ecuador, the islands are known for their large number of endemic species that were studied by Charles Darwin during the second voyage of HMS Beagle. His observations and collections contributed to the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection.
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NATURAL SOCIETY…
When natural history gets together with archaeology it often involves the formation of societies many are national, regional, and local for what’s called natural history societies that maintain records and geological and microscopical sections for animals, birds, insects, and mammals. They also include records for fungi, plants, and other organisms. An example of these different natural history societies in Britain includes: the Natural History Society of Northumbria founded in 1829, London Natural History Society (1858), Birmingham Natural History Society (1859), and the British Entomological and Natural History Society founded in 1872.
NATURAL REVIEW…
My review for Where the Crawdads Sing is simply to ignore the negative critical reviews and watch the film if the reason is that you read the novel in 2018 when it came out and you are curious how the film adapts it then see it, or maybe your just a fan of Reese Witherspoon and want to watch it because she was the producer, all of these are great reasons to put aside the reviews and choose for yourself if it was a worthy film. I found it worthy of viewing for all the reasons above, along with the cinematic beauty of the marshlands which serve as their own character throughout the film thanks to the great work of the cinematographers. So, if you need a reason to watch the film, then watch it to see how one can become and maintain the life of a naturalist like Kya Clark, played by Daisey Edgar-Jones, and live in the beauty of nature forever.
Where The Crawdads Sing is streaming now on Netflix!