On a Wednesday afternoon in March, the Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church, in Denver’s South Park Hill neighborhood, was packed. The local chapter of the progressive group Indivisible was sponsoring a mayoral-candidate forum. Five candidates had been invited to attend. The moderator asked the usual questions about crime and public safety, homelessness and guns. Then came a question comprehensible only to a close observer of Denver politics: “Do you support releasing the city-owned conservation easement on the Park Hill Golf Course to allow the currently proposed redevelopment of this site?”

Four candidates raised their hands, a couple only halfway, as if that sign of reluctance might lessen the coming disapproval. It didn’t. The crowd booed.

In 1997, Denver paid the owners of the Park Hill Golf Course $2 million to place a conservation easement on the property, limiting how it could be used. More than 20 years later, Westside Investment Partners bought the by-then-defunct golf course for $24 million. After a contentious community-input process, lawsuits, and allegations of stolen lawn signs, the company settled on a proposal to build 2,500 homes (including a significant number of affordable, family, and senior units) as well as some commercial space. It also promised to reserve two-thirds of the 155-acre property as open space. In 2021, Denver voters approved a ballot measure giving themselves the power to decide the easement’s fate.

On April 4 of this year, voters declined to lift the easement. The split was 59–41, not exactly close. Some observers have taken this outcome as a signal that the people of Denver (or, at least, the fewer than 100,000 who voted down the proposal) reject new development. But in that same election, voters sent two candidates who supported the proposal to a mayoral runoff. Back in the 2022 statewide election, almost a quarter million Denver voters supported Democratic Governor Jared Polis, who campaigned on increasing housing supply and dismantling local roadblocks to construction in order to get a handle on Colorado’s housing-affordability crisis. Also that year, nearly 1.3 million Coloradans voted to dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars to increasing affordable housing. In Denver, the measure won 70–30. Deciding “what the people believe” is not so easy.

Colorado is short an estimated 127,000 homes. The Denver metro area alone is short nearly 70,000 homes. The housing shortage is the main driver of the region’s affordability crisis, and housing-policy experts—though they remain divided on many questions—are nearly unanimous in their belief that resolving it will require bringing many more homes to market. From 2012 to 2017, the region permitted only one new home for every 5.4 new jobs; over the same period, home prices in Denver jumped by 50 percent.

When someone who favors new development in theory opposes a specific project near where they live, we call them a NIMBY. NIMBYism is regularly characterized as a case of revealed preferences: Talk is cheap, and support for policies in the abstract is worthless. Voting for a candidate who champions pro-housing policies is one thing; agreeing to new development in your neighborhood is another.

Conflicting desires do not by themselves prove hypocrisy, however. Some people really do want to see more housing in general, even if they don’t want construction next door. The problem is that the local institutions charged with land-use decisions are attuned to parochial complaints, not large-scale needs.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Housing breaks people’s brains]

The level of government at which we choose to resolve a conflict shapes public opinion and the eventual outcome. The same question posed at a town hall, at a county-council meeting, in the governor’s office, or by Congress will not be answered the same way in each venue. The tools available, the norms of debate, and the architecture of accountability change drastically from place to place. Americans believe that housing is a local issue. And it is a local issue. But it is also a regional issue, a state issue, and a national issue. By restricting the debate to the hyperlocal level, we’ve blocked out our big-picture values.

Across metro areas, in states led by Democrats and Republicans alike, the same pattern emerges: Local governments decide what gets built and where, and they use that power to ban multifamily housing, entrench economic segregation, and perpetuate a national affordability crisis.

It’s tough to admit, but sometimes NIMBYs have a point. In Denver, I spoke with dozens of community leaders, elected officials, and voters who live near the Park Hill Golf Course. Opponents of the project raised concerns about preserving open spaces, about gentrification, about the democratic process itself.

Former Mayor Wellington Webb told me he opposes developing the Park Hill site because it’s “the last piece of open space, land, in Denver.”

Leslie Herod, a Colorado state representative and an unsuccessful candidate in this year’s mayoral race, also opposes the proposal. She told me she had identified more than 80 underutilized city-owned lots already zoned for residential development where she would rather see housing built.

The Denver city-council member Candi CdeBaca made a version of the “other places” argument too, questioning why development efforts are never focused on wealthy neighborhoods. “We’re not talking about development in places where people have privilege,” she told me. “Those places are protected with their zoning, those places are protected with their level of engagement, those places are protected by the people they have elected to represent them.”

Some voters told me they simply distrusted the process. “There’s no guarantee that if the conservation easement is lifted that the [developer] will honor what they’ve said with creating a park, creating affordable housing,” a landscape architect with an antidevelopment yard sign said.

Of course, no project can solve every problem or skirt every concern. Comparison shopping for umbrellas is fine on a sunny day. When you’re caught in a torrential downpour, it’s wise to take what’s available and run for cover.

For their part, proponents of the Park Hill project, in their eagerness to win votes, tended to oversell what it could accomplish. Some described it as a blow against racism or climate change, or a way to help the working class. In my conversations with the plan’s backers, I sometimes had to remind myself that we were talking about a 155-acre lot, not the fate of the republic.

Land-use regulations and development patterns are a key driver of inequality, pollution, and financial strain. But whether or not the Park Hill plan was approved would have a negligible impact on these larger crises, which will require collective action beyond the scope of any one project. Asking a neighborhood or municipality to bear the responsibility for a housing crisis and its knock-on effects is asking for failure. Local government simply wasn’t built to do this.

Local government is about what you can do for me, right now. Because local officials have a narrow jurisdiction, engaged voters have a direct line to them and significant influence on their decisions. This tight relationship is good for handling issues like broken streetlights and potholes, but it doesn’t lend itself to managing society-wide problems, such as a housing crisis. This is why the political logic of building a lot more housing rarely carries the day at the local level.

Who would have lived in the Park Hill housing development, had voters approved it? No one knows. It could have been a recent University of Colorado at Boulder graduate or empty-nesters from the suburbs looking to downsize. Many of the people who would most benefit from the new housing don’t yet live in Denver—so they don’t have a vote.

Local housing-policy debates are thus asymmetrical. Construction projects have no readily identifiable beneficiaries, but they do levy clear harms, in the form of excessive noise and street closures and changing neighborhood aesthetics.

Just a small fraction of people even engage in local housing fights. Many of those who do are extreme voices or otherwise unrepresentative of the broader community. Look at Fort Collins, Colorado. After more than five years of community engagement, and many months of work by city planners, a 5–2 majority on the city council voted to liberalize land-use policies to allow more housing. But a small group of opponents pressured the council to reverse itself, gathering 6,500 petition signatures—this in a city of more than 160,000. And they won. The council voted again, this time 7–0 to repeal the change.

In interviews, both the head of the Colorado Municipal League, Kevin Bommer, and Denver’s current mayor, Michael B. Hancock, touted regional collaboration as a solution to the affordability crisis. But just as one town cannot ensure that the entire region maintains adequate green space while increasing density, it cannot force neighboring towns to work together to find the right balance. The incentive is too strong for an individual government to say to its neighbor, “You can have all the apartments—we’ll just keep our parks.”

In addition to the Colorado Municipal League, Colorado has several influential regional associations, including the Metro Mayors Caucus and Colorado Counties Inc. Yet greater Denver is still tens of thousands of housing units short of its needs.

The Denver metro area is particularly desperate for small multifamily dwellings (two to nine units) to meet the demand for affordable housing. According to Carrie Makarewicz, a professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, roughly 10 percent of homes in the region meet this criteria. By contrast, 85 percent of residentially zoned land is reserved for single-family homes. By this measure, too, the regional associations have come up short.

Collective-action problems require a body that can hold everyone accountable. Regional associations—which rely on voluntary participation—aren’t going to cut it.

The democratic process begins by defining the democratic body. And when it comes to housing, the body of concern does not end at a town’s boundary line. People moving to the Denver metro area look across the city and into the suburbs for a place to live. One suburb’s opposition to building more housing directly affects prices miles away, because it constrains the supply in a market that spans municipalities. Local governments, in seeking to satisfy local concerns, undermine statewide goals. At least, they do in the absence of state intervention.

State government is also about what you can do for me, but on average: That’s the electoral reality of representing voters across geographic constituencies. Governors and other statewide officials are forced to see the bigger picture because they’re accountable not only to the people who live in a particular community, but also to past residents priced out of and displaced from that community, and to future residents as well. (Nor are newcomers overwhelmingly from out of state, as many seem to believe; census data reveal that about 82 percent of moves happen within states.) Denver’s city council represents the people of Denver, not Aurora, and vice versa. The state represents them all. And in recent polling, 60 percent of registered voters supported eliminating local restrictions to allow for multifamily housing.

The Colorado state capitol is just a short drive from Park Hill and a brisk walk from city hall, but feels miles away from the thrum of local politics. I went there two days after the Indivisible forum to interview Governor Polis. From across a large round table in his office, Polis told me that “housing, transit, travel, roads: These are interjurisdictional issues because really, very few Coloradans live their whole lives in one jurisdiction.” Unencumbered by the need to defend any one project or developer, the governor reiterated a simple point: “Demand has exceeded supply for the last couple decades, and prices have gone up.” Colorado has to “create more housing now.”

Soon after providing that clean summary of what Colorado needs, Polis announced his best shot at providing it. Washington, Oregon, California, Utah, Montana, and Massachusetts have, to varying degrees, pulled authority for land-use decisions up to the state level. Following their lead, he proposed a bill compelling local governments to adjust their land-use policies to meet housing goals, a process that state officials would oversee. The bill addressed climate, infrastructure, and equity concerns; included provisions for increasing and preserving affordable and multifamily housing; encouraged development near transit; and removed onerous parking requirements.

I asked the governor how he would deal with the political opposition to his bill. “People across the board—Republican, Democrat, independent—housing costs is one of the top items of concern,” he replied. I asked again. “People understand that housing needs to be built,” he told me.

Polis’s original proposal was greeted by fierce opposition from local governments, though not because of objections to open space, affordability, or new parking rules. The fight was over where the power to make land-use decisions should lie.

Kevin Bommer, of the Colorado Municipal League, offered a pithy synthesis of local governments’ position: “Respectfully, get off our lawn,” he told me.

I asked Bommer about his policy disagreements with the governor, but he kept stressing the issue of local control. “My members statewide don’t necessarily disagree with a lot of [Polis’s] goals, but to start with saying that the state gets to set a model code and the state gets to regulate and the state will be in charge of land use going forward is a nonstarter,” he said.

Bommer pointed me to an old amicus brief filed in defense of a local moratorium on fracking by then-Representative Polis. It defended local government’s authority over land-use decisions as both a state-constitution matter and a policy matter. Polis wrote that local democracy allows for “widespread citizen input and broad stakeholder involvement,” as well as “more opportunities for public participation.”

The fact that Representative Polis disagrees with Governor Polis is exactly the point. A congressman represents his district; he has little reason to care that local control can harm the rest of the state. A governor has a wider remit. If Polis the representative was right, and localities really are the best transmitters of their residents’ housing preferences, then what explains clear, widespread discontent with the outcomes of those decisions? Colorado’s housing crisis is undeniable, and its land-use authority has rested with local government virtually unquestioned for decades.

Colorado’s legislative session ended on May 8. The bill died in the Senate without a final vote.

Afterward, the governor told me he intends to keep fighting. States that have passed land-use reforms, such as California and Washington, suffered multiple defeats before seeing a first victory. Polis told me he’s frustrated by communities that said, No, we should do it. “The thing is, they’re not doing it!” he said with a laugh. Polis returned again to his central argument: “It’s beyond the capabilities of [local government] even if there’s a city council or mayor with the best of intentions … We have to figure this out together.”

[Annie Lowrey: Everything is about the housing market]

Two citywide votes, multiple lawsuits, and accusations of racism, classism, and harassment that divided Denver. What was the point? The property owner is now promising that the former golf course will become … an active golf course. (This despite the fact that the company has never developed a golf course; its founder told me they’re “doing research on it now.”) Well-meaning objectors judge proposals against a hypothetical better option, but in reality, the alternative to a decent project is often no project at all.

Kelly Brough, who supported the development project and was in the runoff to become Denver’s next mayor, is nevertheless hesitant to embrace state interference. “I can’t say Denver should not control its destiny … I’m just not ready to give it up yet.”

This power struggle is playing out across the country. It’s ostensibly a struggle over housing affordability, but it is also a fight over how we see voters. In polls and interviews, voters express deep empathy for people experiencing homelessness and deep frustration with widespread housing unaffordability. But that’s not the part of us that local government can hear. Instead local politics magnifies our selfish concerns: How will this affect my parking availability? What will this do to my view?

Everyone has a little NIMBY in them. It doesn’t have to be the part that wins.

This article appears in the July/August 2023 print edition with the headline “Local Government Has Too Much Power.”

Stephen Hampton has been watching birds for more than 50 years, and for almost all of that time, he thought nothing of names like Townsend’s warbler or Anna’s hummingbird: “They were just the names in the bird book that you grow up with,” he told me. Then, a few years ago, Hampton realized how Scott’s oriole—a beautiful black-and-yellow bird—got its name.

Darius Couch, a U.S. Army officer and amateur naturalist, named the oriole in 1854 after his commander, General Winfield Scott. Sixteen years earlier, Scott dutifully began a government campaign of ethnic cleansing to remove the Cherokee people from their homelands in the Southeastern United States. His soldiers rounded up Cherokee, separated their families, looted their homes, and crammed them into stockades and barges, where many of them died. Thousands of Cherokee, including Hampton’s great-great-grandfather and dozens more of his ancestors, were forced to move west along the Trail of Tears. Scott’s oriole is a monument to a man who oversaw the dispossession of Hampton’s family, and saying its name now “hits me in the gut, takes my breath away,” Hampton, who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, wrote in 2021.

The common names of almost 150 North American birds are eponyms—that is, they derive from people. A disproportionate number of these names were assigned in the early 19th century by the soldier-scientists who traveled westward across the U.S. Bestowing eponyms to honor commanders, benefactors, family members, and one another, they turned the continent’s avifauna into tributes to “conquest and colonization,” as Hampton wrote. Many birders are now pushing to remove these eponyms, arguing that too many of them tie nature’s beauty and the pure joy of seeing a new species to humanity’s worst grotesqueries. “I didn’t ask for any of this information; I was just trying to bird,” Tykee James, the president of D.C. Audubon Society, told me. But now “we should do better because we know better—that’s the scientific process.”

Similar sentiments have spread in other countries and animal groups. Many animals whose names had included ethnic and racial slurs now have new names, including a moth in North America and several birds in Sweden and South Africa. In the U.S., at least one bird with an eponym has been renamed, and the American Ornithological Society is developing a process for renaming more.

These discussions have pushed many biologists and wildlife enthusiasts to reconsider the very act of naming—the people who get to do it, and the responsibilities they ought to shoulder. Whether common ones such as giraffe or scientific ones such as Giraffa camelopardalis, names act first as labels, allowing people to identify and classify living things. But names are also value-laden, reflecting the worldviews of the people who choose them. And some have come to believe that honoring any person, no matter their sins or virtues, reflects the wrong values. In this view, the practice of affixing an entire life-form with the name of a single individual must end entirely.

When the ornithologist Robert Driver petitioned the American Ornithological Society in 2018 to rebrand McCown’s longspur, his proposal was rejected. This species was named after an Army officer who accidentally shot one of the birds, and who also waged campaigns against Indigenous tribes before joining the Confederacy; members of an AOS committee, which maintains an official list of common names for North American birds, variously said that “judging historical figures by current moral standards is problematic,” and that they were “concerned about where we would draw the line.”

But the tide of opinion turned in May 2020. On the same day that a police officer murdered George Floyd, a white woman in New York City’s Central Park falsely told the cops that she was being threatened by Christian Cooper, a Black birder who had asked that she leash her dog. A video of that incident went viral, drawing the birding world into the debates over race and justice that were sweeping America. As Confederate statues and monuments fell nationwide, many birders argued that problematic eponyms also needed to be toppled. In June that year, Jordan Rutter and Gabriel Foley founded Bird Names for Birds, a campaign to rename all American birds that have eponyms. In July, the AOS reconsidered Driver’s proposal because of “heightened awareness of racial issues,” and the following month announced that the newly christened thick-billed longspur would be McCown’s no longer.

Many other eponyms present similar cases for change, although none have been altered yet. John Kirk Townsend, whose name still graces two birds and almost a dozen mammals, dug up the graves of Native Americans and sent their skulls to the physician Samuel George Morton, who wanted to prove that Caucasians had bigger brains than other people; those remains are still undergoing a lengthy process toward burial or repatriation. John Bachman was a practitioner and defender of slavery, reasoning that Black people, whom he compared to domesticated animals, were so intellectually inferior to Caucasians as to be “incapable of self-government”; Bachman’s sparrow was named by his friend, John James Audubon. And Audubon, the most renowned—and, more recently, notorious—figure in American ornithology and the namesake of an oriole, a warbler, and a shearwater, also robbed Native American graves for Morton’s skull studies, while casually buying and selling slaves. “People have been singing his praises for 150 years, but in the last 15 years, he has turned out to be quite a monster,” says Matthew Halley, an ornithologist and historian, who has also found evidence that Audubon committed scientific fraud by fabricating a fake species of eagle that helped launch his career. In light of Audubon’s actions, several local chapters of the National Audubon Society have renamed themselves, as has the society’s union. In March, though, the national society’s board of directors voted to keep the name, on the grounds that it would allow the organization to “direct key resources and focus towards enacting the organization’s mission.”

The drive to change these eponyms has faced the same now-familiar criticisms as the push to remove Confederate monuments. Proponents have been charged with erasing history but counter that they are clarifying it: People tend to assume that an eponym represents the individual who actually described the species, when it’s usually an honorific, sometimes exalting people with no connection to birds at all. (Anna’s hummingbird, for instance, was named after Anna Masséna, a French courtier and naturalist’s wife.) Halley also rejects the AOS’s original argument that modern birders are inappropriately judging the past using today’s standards. Townsend, for example, who came from a Quaker family and had an abolitionist for a sister, “was going against the moral teachings of his own community,” Halley told me. Meanwhile, Black people have always rejected slavery, just as Natives have always opposed ethnic cleansing, Hampton said. What’s changed is their presence in communities that typically decide what animals are called.

Critics have also argued that names are meant to be stable, and changing them sows confusion. But there’s precedent in the bird world for updating them: In 1957, the AOS revised 188 common bird names to achieve better trans-Atlantic consistency, and it has changed dozens more since 1998. Names change all the time, for scientific and cultural reasons, and given a choice between stability and respect for people whose ancestors were harmed by early ornithologists, “I come down on the side of respect,” David Allen Sibley, a renowned author and illustrator of bird field guides, said in 2021.

For some scientists, the eponym problem is about more than the egregious misdeeds of a few individuals. As Europeans spread to other continents, they brought not only invasive species that displaced native ones but also invasive nomenclature that ousted long-standing native terms for plants and animals. In Africa, the scientific names of a quarter of local birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals are eponyms, mostly from Europe. On the biodiverse Pacific island of New Caledonia, more than 60 percent of plant eponyms honor French citizens. Countless species around the world have been named after European scientists whose travels were made possible by imperial ventures aimed at expanding territories or extracting natural resources. “We have romantic ideas of these explorers going around the world, seeing beautiful things, and naming them, and we forgot how they got there to begin with,” Natalia Piland, an ecologist at Florida International University, told me.

Such naming patterns still continue. Piland and her colleagues found that since 1950, 183 newly identified birds have been given eponyms, and although 96 percent of these species live in the global South, 68 percent of their names honor people from the global North. In 2018, the Rainforest Trust, an American conservation nonprofit, auctioned off the rights to name 12 newly discovered South American species, leading to a frog named after Greta Thunberg and a caecilian named after Donald Trump. (A similar auction in 2005 landed a Bolivian monkey with the name of the internet casino GoldenPalace.com.) The beloved British naturalist David Attenborough has more than 50 species named after him, most of which live in Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. That is not to begrudge Attenborough, Thunberg, or Trump; having a species named after you is widely considered a great honor, but globally, such honorees are still disproportionately people of European descent—a perpetuation of colonialism through taxonomy.

Some scientists have proposed reinstating Indigenous names for animals wherever possible. But many species live across the territories of different Indigenous groups, or migrate across national or continental divides, making it hard to know whose names to prioritize. And if native names are applied without native consultation, the result can smack of cultural appropriation. Emma Carroll from the University of Auckland took on both challenges in naming a recently identified species of beaked whale. Carroll spent a year consulting Indigenous groups in countries where the new whale’s specimens had been found. In South Africa, the Khoisan Council suggested using the word //eu//’eu, which means “big fish” and is now immortalized in the scientific name Mesoplodon eueu. For the common name, Carroll asked a Māori cultural expert in New Zealand to draw up a shortlist, which she then ran past a local council. She eventually named the creature “Ramari’s beaked whale” after Ramari Stewart—a Māori whale expert whose work was pivotal in identifying the new species, and who has been “working to bridge Western science and mātauranga [Maori knowledge] for decades,” Carroll told me. Fittingly, ramari also means “a rare event” in the Māori language, and beaked whales are famously elusive.  

Inspired by Carroll’s example, Eric Archer of the NOAA used a similar approach when describing a new species of bottlenose dolphin. He initially wanted to name it after Jim Mead—a respected scientist to whom Archer owes his career. But after feeling that this pattern of honoring close colleagues was too insular, he consulted the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation, whose ancestors lived in the lands where the first specimen of the dolphin was found. Eventually, he named it Tamanend’s bottlenose dolphin after an iconic 17th-century chief.

But these names, too, sit uneasily with Steve Hampton, the birder and Cherokee Nation citizen, who told me that many Indigenous communities would see them as recapitulating “colonizer practices.” If the intent is to symbolize a connection between the animals and the people who share its land, “then take the apostrophe-s off,” Hampton said. Those two characters invoke ownership, as if an individual could lay claim to an entire species—a fundamentally colonial way of thinking, no matter whether the honoree is an Indigenous woman or a European man. By that logic, the issue with eponyms isn’t that some of them honor people who did vile things. It’s that animals shouldn’t be named after people at all.

Doing away with all eponyms avoids, if nothing else, the problem of judging who, exactly, is objectionable enough to have their name stripped away from a species. Kevin Thiele, a botanist and director of Taxonomy Australia, argues, for instance, that the scientific community can easily expunge eponyms that honor “history’s monsters” without jettisoning the practice altogether; he told me that “a good cutoff might be if a person had influence, and thus has an eponym, as a result of egregious acts.” For example, the Australian flowers that he studies—Hibbertia—are named after George Hibbert, an 18th-century Englishman and amateur botanist whose fortunes and status derived almost entirely from the transatlantic slave trade. By contrast, hundreds of species are named after Charles Darwin, who certainly had racist views and benefited from colonialism, but who is honored because he profoundly shaped our understanding of nature. (Darwin also staunchly opposed slavery.) Hibbertia should go, but Darwin’s eponyms can stay, Thiele says.

But Halley, the historian, suspects that people “who want to go in with a scalpel don’t know the full extent of the improprieties in the historical records,” he told me, and a clean slate would be preferable. Carlos Daniel Cadena, a Colombian ornithologist, agrees. “There’s a lot of potential to make these discussions ugly if we start going name by name and trying to decide which person was good or bad,” he told me. “And in 200 years, will we all be despicable because we trashed the planet or ate meat?”

Others argue that, more importantly, the act of honoring a person through an organism’s name dishonors the organism itself. It treats animals and plants as inanimate objects like buildings or streets, constructed and owned by humans, instead of beings with their own lives and histories. “It doesn’t sit well with me to think of an individual human becoming the signifier of an entire species,” Piland said. A more descriptive name, meanwhile, is a chance to tell a creature’s story. Joseph Pitawanakwat, an Anishinaabe educator, notes that many of his people’s bird names are layered with meaning—onomatopoeias that mimic calls, and descriptions of habitat and behavior, all embedded in a single word that could have been coined only through a deep understanding of the animals. English names could be similarly descriptive: Thick-billed longspur tells you something about the bird that might help you recognize it in a way that McCown’s longspur does not.

These arguments are gaining traction. This March, Patrícia Guedes from the University of Porto and an international group of 10 colleagues published a commentary saying that “naming a biological species after a human was and is never right—regardless of good intentions.” But even if the scientific community as a whole agreed with this principle, the logistics of changing or banning eponyms are not simple. Many people who have animals named after them are still alive; changing those names would effectively strip them of an honor. And Cadena said that many Latin American researchers bristle when they’re told that they shouldn’t name animals after their colleagues. “North Americans and Europeans have named things after themselves for centuries, and now we cannot do it?” Cadena told me.

Changing the scientific names of animals is especially tricky because such names are formally governed by the International Commission for Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN)—a group of 26 scientists who volunteer time outside their main jobs. They simply lack the person-power to oversee changes to even a fraction of the tens of thousands of scientific eponyms, Thomas Pape, the ICZN president, told me—and it’s not in their remit to change even one. Consider Anophthalmus hitleri, a rare Slovenian beetle that was named after Adolf Hitler in 1933 and is now threatened by enthusiastic Nazi-memorabilia hunters. The ICZN still won’t change its name, because “we stand absolutely firm on not regulating based on ethics,” Pape told me. “It’s not our mandate.”

But, though he argues that set names are important for allowing scientists to unambiguously communicate about the organisms they study, Pape also admits that “it’s strange that we keep talking about stability when we keep changing names.” Scientific names change frequently, when a species is reclassified or split into several new ones. They can also change because scientists uncover an alternative name that was assigned first and then forgotten, or because they violate Latin grammar. There are also routes for changing scientific names through societal force of will. Pape cites the case of Raymond Hoser, an Australian amateur herpetologist who has assigned hundreds of new names to questionably defined species and genera of reptiles—often on shaky scientific grounds, usually in his own self-published journal, and in many cases honoring his family members and pets. Other taxonomists are simply refusing to use his names; if that continues, “it might be possible for the ICZN to rule that those names should not be used,” Pape told me.

Common names are even easier to shift, because there’s typically no formal process for doing so. In 1993, a zoologist decided to name a predatory marine worm with scissorlike jaws the “Bobbit worm,” referencing the incident in which Lorena Gallo (then Bobbitt) cut off her husband’s penis. Other biologists, who noted that the name mocks a woman who survived repeated domestic and sexual abuse, have just started calling the worm “sand striker” instead. In this vein, common names that are deemed offensive enough could change organically as people stop using them, Eric Archer, the NOAA biologist, told me. “I don’t think it’s necessarily something that should be done by fiat,” he said.

For North American birds, there is a standardized list of common names, maintained by the AOS. It has no legal standing but is widely followed by birders, conservationists, and, notably, the federal government. Name changes would carry far more clout if the AOS ratified them. It has traditionally been unwilling to, but after the events of 2020, it formed a committee to develop a process for identifying and changing “harmful or exclusionary English bird names.” Hampton and James are part of that 11-person committee, which Cadena co-chairs. They wouldn’t reveal specifics of their recommendations, which they’re set to present on June 15, but at least some of them have come around to the idea that all eponyms should go. And they stressed that they wanted to unite the birding world rather than divide it.

Any changes, they imagine, would mean that rookie and veteran birders alike would have something new to learn, while the entire community could be involved in concocting new monikers—a practice that could generate more excitement about birds at a time when many species desperately need to be protected. Hampton acknowledged that community involvement can be risky—“we have talked about ‘Birdy McBirdface’ many times,” he said, referencing the crowdsourced boat-naming campaign from 2016 that yielded Boaty McBoatface—but he and other committee members think it’d be worth it to open up the right to name nature to a much broader swath of society than the one that has long held it. Wildlife doesn’t belong to it, or to anyone, and shouldn’t be named as if it does.

That’s the view of every birder under 40 whom Hampton talks to, and every person of color—demographics that will have a growing say over our custodianship of the natural world. “Everyone in our committee knows that 20 or 30 years from now, the next generation will be changing all of these names if we don’t,” Hampton said. To him, it feels inevitable. Perhaps future generations will also look upon this moment and see our own historical foibles embedded in the names we now choose. Or perhaps they’ll see a turning point when people stopped seeing animals as vessels for human legacies but as entities with their own worth and stories, reflected in their very names.