The mind's intercourse with the landscape

In his book Arctic Dreams, the American author Barry Lopez writes:

"...language is not something man imposes on the land. It evolves in his conversation with the land - in testing the sea ice with the toe of a kamik, in the eating of a wild berry...A long-lived inquiry produces a discriminating language. The very order of the language, the ecology of its sounds and thoughts, derives from the mind's intercourse with the landscape."

As I walked to work today, I wondered about the intercourse of minds with the landscape in my own community, and the effect this may have on our language and therefore on our perception of our own environment. (Incidentally, the German word Umwelt, meaning 'environment' but which I translate literally as 'world around oneself' helps me understand better what we mean by 'environment').


If we're not letting our minds interact, study, perceive the landscape, what happens?

It makes me wonder whether it's a vicious cycle. The less time we spend outside, the less we understand; the more language we lose with which to describe our landscape and so more estranged we become from the natural world around us.

Perhaps today, then, I'd advocate spending just a little more time outside, looking, listening and letting our minds explore.

Gypsy storytelling

Should sustainability be an abstract concept? I went to a talk by Damian le Bas last weekend at Greenbelt on Romany language, storytelling and culture and I asked him how he would express the concept of 'sustainability' in Romany.

The answer he gave all of us was surprising at first. For all the precious lessons that Romany people have learned from the past about travelling light, for their low carbon footprint, there's no word for sustainability. Granted, Romany is an evolving language, but there's no English Romany word for 'sustainability'. According to Damian, English Romany is not often used for abstract ideas; more for saying "I'm going up the hill to catch a rabbit".

However, the Professor chipped in, there is an international Romany constructed word, dur-shayipe; sort of 'long term ability to carry on, etc', which can be used in the context of sustainability. They both agreed, though that it's a word with little currency.

This got me thinking. Should something so vital to our existence be relegated to the realm of the abstract? Where's the concrete language to talk about what we mean?

These are a few of my favourite...

...words. I did a quick straw-poll on Facebook this week, asking a simple question:

What's your favourite word?

I'm not sure that any of the answers are words that get used very often, but they're an interesting mix of foreign, emotive, philosophical, onomatapoeic expressions. A lot were chosen for the way they feel to say; some for the meanings and a couple for their flexibility.

I wonder whether a piece of writing containing one of these favourite expressions would make the reader more likely to take notice?

Presumably someone, somewhere has mapped the nation's favourite words.

Here's the list I got:

- Bizarre
- Shenanigan
- Autumnal
- Lassitude
- Plinth
- Gloopy
- Lentosaema (airport in Finnish)
- Unheimlichkeit
- Crepuscular
- Quail
- Rationalise
- Delectable
- Defenestration
- Shagala bagala ('mess' in kiSwahili)
- Hobb
- Abominate
- Idyllic
- Slake

I should point out that one of my friends takes umbrage with this question of ' favourite words', as it subscribes, in his opinion, to false economic reason. We ought not, he tells me, reduce the massive complexity of language to mere words. Thanks, JB.

In a land of ice

In the fantastic After the Ice: Life, Death and Politics in the New Arctic, author Alun Anderson talks about the extreme northerly communities of Inuit peoples in Canada. Living on the edge of the ice, their language points to a people who have a profound understanding of their relationship with their natural surroundings. Perhaps 'understanding' is too trifling a word: the connection runs deeper than consciousness. The communities here in places like Grise Fiord depend almost entirely on their surroundings for their survival in a way that is hard to understand for a soft, suburban dweller like myself.

And so in Inuit you find the following words:

qanuqtuurniq- resourcefulness
piliriqatigiiniq - capacity to work together for a common cause
tuunganarniq - fostering good spirit by being open, welcoming and inclusive
avatittinnik / kamatsiarniq - respect for the land, animals and environment

When we speak about 'sustainability' in English, I think we mean all of these things and more. Maybe it's time to expand our vocabulary a little bit.

"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?