Nature's metaphors (or the monkey's devil fingers)

The monkey has the fingers of the devil

When I started learning a little Tajik in preparation for a volunteering trip a few years ago, my bizarre phrase book contained this gem in the section under 'animals'. I'm starting on a bit of a tangent, but it's relevant, I promise.

My question this time is - how much of our language takes its inspiration from the natural world? Where have our animals, plants, trees and skies slipped into our ordinary parlance without us noticing? We have some beautiful idioms - maybe none as strange as the monkey with the devil fingers*, but still...

In the wake of new word hoarders like Robert McFarlane, I'm setting out to make my own list (to be continued):

to weasel
to ferret
have a gander
larking around
beetling away
dog-tired
crow about s.th 
pussyfoot
to leapfrog
to be a pig
parrot-fashion
budding talent
a blossoming young woman
put down roots
.....


*I do have some doubts about this phrase, but I'll never know for sure. My phrase book was written by two people whose only common language was Esperanto, living hemispheres apart from each other.

"The limits of my language"

After some very preliminary research into language and 'sustainability' I found something that I wasn't expecting to discover: a correlation between indigenous language and positive responsibility towards the environment. Wittgenstein once wrote, "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world". To me this suggests that the global spread of English, whilst enabling for communication like never before, is making us as a planet lose some understanding of our world. What does it mean if we see everything through an English lens? Through the lens of a language that developed thousands of miles away? For somebody living in Thailand, does speaking more English change their perception of their environment?

A report in the Australian Geographer in 2012 found a positive relationship between 'the sustainability of indigenous land, language and culture and an indigenous person's subjective emotional well-being'. Likewise, a conference at Bangor University, Wales, discovered that 'forces that work against the environment are very similar to those that lead towards apathy to the Welsh language'.

That is to say, there's something that inherently connects our language with our understanding of the world and consequently our understanding of our relationship with and impact on the environment.

The questions for me are manifold. How in an English speaking context in England can we better use the language we already have to prevent further climate change? What can we learn from non-English languages?