‘Every Living Thing’ by Jason Roberts: Cataloguing all living things

In an age when we can identify a plant or insect with a quick snap of our smartphone, it is easy to forget that the system ordering the natural world was born from ferocious ambition, bitter rivalry and immense human sacrifice. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography ‘Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life’, author Jason Roberts resurrects the titanic 18th century endeavour to catalogue all creation, a quest that was as much about personal glory and philosophical conviction as it was about science.

At the heart of this epic narrative are two intellectual giants, both born in 1707, yet polar opposites in every other respect. In one corner stands Carl Linnaeus, a poor and prodigiously arrogant Swedish doctor who believed nature was a divine, static system that could be neatly boxed and labelled. Armed with his binomial nomenclature, the two-part naming convention we still use today, he saw himself as a second Adam, tasked by God to name every living thing.

In the other corner is Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic French polymath who presided over the King’s royal garden, the Jardin du Roi. For Buffon, life was not a fixed set of categories but a dynamic, ever-changing swirl of complexities. He scoffed at Linnaeus’ rigid system, viewing it as an oversimplification of a world in constant flux. His work, the multi-volume ‘Histoire Naturelle’, was a testament to his belief in a more fluid, interconnected web of life. His ideas laid an early foundation for Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Their intellectual clash soon evolved into a high-stakes race. Both men began with the assumption that cataloguing all of Earth’s species was a daunting but achievable goal, underestimating the planet’s staggering biodiversity. Linnaeus dispatched a team of young, devoted students he called his “apostles” to the farthest corners of the globe. Their instructions were simple: collect and send back specimens of every plant and animal they could find.

Which is where the race became ‘deadly’. The young men faced disease, shipwrecks, pirates and hostile encounters in their pursuit of new species. Roberts recounts their often-fatal adventures with the pace of a thriller, transforming the history of taxonomy into a gripping saga of exploration and survival. Fewer than half of the apostles who set out would return alive.

Ironically, the posthumous fate of the two men would be a complete reversal of their living reputations. During their lifetimes, Buffon was widely celebrated, while the abrasive Linnaeus was often dismissed. However, the French Revolution, which saw Buffon’s legacy tarnished by his association with the royalty, combined with the practical utility of Linnaeus’ system, ensured that it was the Swedish doctor’s framework that would shape the future of biology.

While Linnaeus’ system ultimately triumphed, Roberts does not shy away from the darker aspects of his legacy. He meticulously details how Linnaeus’ classification of humans, rooted in the prejudices of his time, provided a pseudoscientific basis for modern racism. Buffon, by contrast, emerges as a more humane figure, a passionate opponent of prejudice who even warned of humanity’s potential to alter the global climate. Their legacies ripple into today’s debates on species classification and ethical science, amplified by advances such as DNA research and AI.

Perhaps most compelling is the book’s meditation on the limits of human knowledge. Despite their ambition, both Linnaeus and Buffon fell far short of their goal. The planet held far more species than they could have imagined. Yet, in their failure, they laid the groundwork for future generations.

— The reviewer is an outdoor enthusiast and climate expert