In Genesis, God divides dark and night, earth and sea, then gives Adam the job of naming Eden’s creatures.
In Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1985 short story “She Unnames Them,” Eve, dissatisfied with the arbitrariness of the whole set-up, frees the birds and beasts from Adam’s labeling. Nobody really minds.
James Prosek understands both Adam and Eve.
“Without names, we can’t communicate,” Prosek said at the Westport Library last week. “But it can create these separations.”
Prosek — acclaimed as an artist, writer and naturalist — gave the Caryl & Edna Haskins lecture for the Aspetuck Land Trust, which serves the towns of Westport, Weston, Easton, Fairfield and Monroe. It was the first time the land trust held a public event since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and the library’s lecture space was nearly full for Prosek’s talk.
It was titled “Trespassing and Conservation” and throughout it, Prosek returned to the push and pull of thinking beyond accepted ways — to trespass — and relying on those ways to communicate our shared experience — to conserve.