Apparently, wars in Israel and Ukraine, mass starvation in Yemen, slaughter of Christians in Nigeria, and chaos on our southern border are so well under control that we should be spending time and energy changing bird names. I wrote two years ago how those meddling powers-that-be at the American Ornithological Society wanted to change the monikers of any birds named after people. The Society claimed this was necessary because many of these people supposedly had connections to slavery — or were just white men. According to NPR, we’re now moving ahead with those name changes, continuing our gleeful scrubbing of all history that makes social-justice activists uncomfortable. Terrible judgment abounds in NPR’s essay, by Nell Greenfieldboyce, and also in the broader treatment by woke naturalists, but I quibble with three main points.
First, Greenfieldboyce says that, according to the society’s president, “concerns about injustice wasn’t a traditionally accepted reason for changing bird names,” but
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