numenon
NOO-meh-non
Aldo Leopold's term for the imponderable essence a species contributes to its landscape — the quality that cannot be measured but whose absence is unmistakable. The grouse is the numenon of the north woods; the blue jay of the hickory groves; the whisky-jack of the muskegs. The word stands opposite phenomenon, which is ponderable and predictable.
Etymology
Leopold borrowed and adapted from Kant's noumenon — the thing-in-itself beyond sensory experience. Leopold planted the word in ecology, where it names what a species means to a place beyond what it does.
Notes
From A Sand County Almanac (1949).
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