by David Harmon

About the author: David Harmon is executive director of the George Wright Society, a professional association of people who work with cultural and natural parks and reserves. He is a co-founder of Terralingua.

Life’s variety—its scope, depth and meaning—is one of the great story lines throughout history. Much of the world’s visual and performing arts, its folklore and literature, can be interpreted as a coming-to-grips with difference. For many people, diversity is engaged through their experience of fellow human beings. “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan / The proper study of mankind is man,” advised Alexander Pope in a famous couplet. For others, though, the wondrous profusion of nature is itself a kind of...