I live in a development where all the streets are named after birds. To get home I pull in at Ivocet, pass Whinbrel and Kestral, and take a right on my road, Petral Court. There’s only one problem. Skim through your bird guide and you will find no ivocet, no whinbrel, no kestral, no petral. The real names are avocet, whimbrel, kestrel, and petrel.

How did this happen? No one in the neighborhood seems to know. I imagine the developers sitting around and brainstorming: “Wouldn’t it be classy if we made our roads sound kind of nature-y . . . What about bird names?” But why they didn’t then actually look in a field guide, or at least a dictionary, is a mystery. Maybe they were just go-for-it kind of guys who said, “Screw those fancy word people.” The strange thing is that they got pretty close and knew enough to almost get the names right.

Why does it matter? you might ask. Half the people in the neighborhood likely aren’t even aware of the mistake, and certainly the birds don’t care, having never thought of themselves as avocets or whimbrels in the first place. Personally I think it’s kind of funny, and I can see how it’s no big deal: it is certainly more important to know that a kestrel is a raptor, a lovely little killer able to hover over the grass like a hummingbird’s big brother, than to know that the name humans have assigned it has more than one e.

But still. One of the central tasks of my tribe, those who write about place, is Adam’s task, that of naming the things we find in this world. It is an important task, as well as a somewhat strange two-way task, since the flow of words moves back and forth. What do I mean? I mean that if you happen to walk a lot, and think as you walk, you will have had the experience of the place you are walking through putting words in your mind, both in a simple sense—the word hummock pops into your head when you see a low mound of earth rising out of a swamp, though hummock is a word you never use—and in a much more complicated way. The woods at the university where I teach provide an example of the second, more complex relationship. Over the last year I have gotten to know these woods well, falling for them just as they have begun to fall to deeper development, and one day, upon seeing a new road making its incursion into this small patch of wild, I immediately stopped and wrote an essay in defense of the woods, an essay that, at the risk of sounding like a mystic, the woods themselves aided me with. How did they help? They provided me with the details—the sharp-shinned hawk I had seen the day before, the cool gulley where I always stopped during my walks, the blueberry bushes that the trail weaves through—that made the essay. They provided me with the inspiration, as well as with the things and the names.

This reciprocal relationship with landscapes occurs on a much grander scale in aboriginal cultures. In The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin celebrated the way that the Australian aborigines sang the landscape into existence. On the most basic level this meant that the songs, passed down through the generations, were also maps, celebrating a particular rock or tree, or winding path between the hills, to the extent that, if sung correctly, they could be used in a very practical sense to guide one through a landscape which, while unfamiliar to an individual, is known to the larger family and tribe. There are those, including Scott Russell Sanders, who believe that a similar, if less primal, naming and mapping form the roots for the profusion of the sort of writing that magazines like the one you are holding celebrate. In Staying Put, Sanders writes: “Right now, here and there throughout America, tough-minded people are trying to reconstruct a survival lore for their own territory, their own watersheds, their own neighborhoods . . . Whatever their training, they are all cartographers of sorts, drawing maps of particular places, giving us narratives that reveal the lay of the land, that show how the power moves, that guide us to sustenance and beauty.”

While his words are already almost twenty years old, the same effort continues today, though perhaps with more of an edge of desperation as the world grows ever more crowded and cluttered, and the places we love and celebrate continue to be despoiled and destroyed at an alarming rate. Still, there is something stubbornly hopeful in these efforts at naming and mapping. The book Home Ground, edited by Barry Lopez, stands as a veritable monument to this continuing effort. Skim through this encyclopedia of terms for particular places, and if you are like me, your synapses will snap like popcorn. Just take the B’s for instance: berm and biscuit board and borderland and boreal forest and borrow pit and bosque and box canyon and braided stream. These are physical words describing physical places, and they have heft to them, and distinctness, and we can say of them what Emerson said of Montaigne’s sentences: “Cut them, and they will bleed.”

Words, of course, are by their nature abstract, and are not the things themselves, but representatives of those things. But wielded by the best writers these abstract things make us feel our physical world in ways we rarely do, even when we are out in it. I remember eating a particular radish after reading about a Hemingway character eating a radish that tasted like no radish before. “A little too abstract, a little too wise,” Robinson Jeffers wrote. “It is time to kiss the earth again.” And time to write the earth, I will add. I have to imagine that Jeffers often wrote his lines outdoors, just as Thoreau did, scribbled down with a pencil from his family’s factory, and just as Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy must have walked the ground that appears in the books they have written, and Charles Frazier, who learned well from McCarthy, must have walked the same journey as his protagonist in Cold Mountain. To make another feel a place, you had better know it intimately, preferably by foot.

Emerson, not surprisingly, had much to say on the subject. “Each word was at first a stroke of genius,” he writes. “Language is fossil poetry.” In First We Read, Then We Write, Robert Richardson tells us that, for Emerson, “the poet is ‘the sayer, the namer,’ and pointedly not the maker.” Richardson argues that Emerson saw in nature a place to reclaim language, and found in the physical world a way to reinvest words with their original meaning: “Right means straight. Wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind, transgression the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of an eyebrow.” The goal, for Emerson, was to “pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things.” Of course Emerson doesn’t stop there: “The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.”

The modern writer, at least this modern writer, may be unwilling to take that next step. Sure, anyone who spends a lot of time in nature sees behavior, in birds and plants and wind and water, that reflects how one feels about one’s own life and one’s own species. But a less anthropocentric take would be that we see these things in nature not because they reflect human moods and feelings, but because the things we see came from the same root and nut that we did, and we are all part of a larger whole. Is it odd, then, to see ourselves reflected in our brothers, whether tree, toad, or terrapin?

This quibble aside, I am down with Ralph when it comes to reclaiming words. Like him, I believe that nature has always provided writers with a direct recourse, a return to the original source, a way to throw aside the current style and get at the thing. It is true that when we get back to our study we often tame our words into fashion and genre, but the world at least provides us with the chance to see those words where they belong, in the wild. What we do with them is our problem.

If the modern writer may not be ready to find spiritual symbols in words, he can still believe that the process of seeing the world, and naming the world well, is electrifying. To call something a hummock, not a hill, an avocet, not an ivocet, matters, and it matters beyond the pure workmanlike pride of getting something right. It matters because it directly connects us to the world in ways that words may not quite be able to explain. Every time we talk or write we have a chance to bring words back to life. To resuscitate. We can each, in our small way, attach the right word to a thing, reinvest it with its original spirit, and set free its meaning. We can become namers as well as makers.

Just a guess here, but I doubt that the founding developers of my neighborhood felt this fervor when they set to naming our streets.