How Upgrading Our Language Can Save the World

Choosing more giving language is an important step in saving the world and you can start doing it today...

Last week, I had the privilege of hearing Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss, speak in Bend as part of Deschutes Library Author! Author! Series. She shared thoughts on language and our responsibility as participants with the land. She dove into words like “property” and how believing we own land and setting up economic systems around this concept abuses it, parcels it, others it.

She spoke about the devaluing nature of the word “it,” suggesting we find another way to talk about animals, plants, and landscapes that better animates and honors them with agency. She suggests one word rooted in her own language: “ki.” As in, “Ki grew these berries.” Or if made plural “kin.” When she said this, the audience filling Bend Senior High’s auditorium gasped in understanding. Nature as kin, of course.

While writing my novel, I have experienced the limitations of the English language as well. This was disappointing because I have always loved the strict rules of English grammar. They make sense to me, have clear boundaries, make me feel something of an expert.

But writing the Wa·šiw sections of my novel quickly revealed how inadequate the English language is for telling stories about nature. English is decidedly not the correct language to talk about the Wa·šiw People’s relationship with Lake Tahoe. Perhaps this means I should have avoided writing a close third-person Wa·šiw character, but if you’ve been following my journey, you’ll know that I ultimately decided to educate myself so that I could tell the region’s story more accurately. I do not want to ignore, and thus further erase, the damaging truth that deforestation in the 1800s has crippled the health of Lake Tahoe and her caretakers, the Wa·šiw People.

When I say that English is not the right language to write about nature it is because English does not speak to the land or about the land as if she is kin. The structure of English is too rigid, too objectifying. Because of this, I have struggled immensely to write the Wa·šiw scenes. My sentence structure is all wrong, ill-equipped to animate subject and verb. My education points me toward extractive words like “take” and “resources,” which need to be replaced with more reciprocal words like “giving” and “harvest.”

Look at all the beings in this photograph…

Someday, when you read my book, you may see this evolution. The logging sections of my novel are extremely extractive. The language depicts Euro-American men coming into a foreign land, damming the river and cutting the trees. Their focus is on the taking, the resource extraction of timber, silver, and gold. They see the trees as wealth but only when cut as lumber.

When I began writing a parallel storyline from the point of view of a Wa·šiw woman, I did so because I wanted to understand what Tahoe’s forests were like before logging. I also wanted to represent a more full history of the region. Who has been managing the fish populations since the beginning of time? Who has been taking care of the trees? You can see by today’s forest health that the answer lately has been nobody. Not since the Wa·šiw People were forcibly removed from their homelands by privatization and property “ownership,” followed by decades of fire suppression, which allowed traditional understory species like fir to overtake the long-gone dominant upperstory species of pine, cedar, and redwood. I know people today are working hard to recover what has been lost. What I’m saying is that part of that recover also needs to come from language.

I am likely not alone in the need to unlearn how I speak about nature. As Robin Wall Kimmerer said in her talk the other night, it would be like having your grandmother hand you a cookie and your saying, “It handed me a cookie.” That’s unthinkable to call your grandmother an “it",” and yet we speak about nature this way all the time.

Should you dip your toes in Lake Tahoe, or whatever body of water you are near, think of her as kin. Shift your pronouns from “it” to “him/her/kin,” which will make it harder to dump cans in the Truckee River or leak speedboat diesel into the lake. It would be like spilling kerosine all over your grandmother then laughing it off and high fiving your buds. This is unimaginable. And yet we do it to nature every day.

Language Matters More Than Your Nostalgia

I’m amazed that I still hear people using the word sq***. Please, I invite you to read why resorts like Palisades changed their name and why we should show respect by altering our language choices. What value does that word hold for you? Is your commitment to personal nostalgia more important than respecting the humanity of those whom that word deeply offends? Have you considered what damage your continued use, your carelessness with language, does to others?

Language matters. It was true in elementary school, and it is true today: Words hurt. Words hold tremendous power.

What if we shift our language, evolve our skills, and practice calling trees, animals, plants, weather, and landscapes our kin. Will it be harder to extract from them? Harder to abuse them? Harder to consider elements of nature as mere resources rather than giving members of our community?

People wonder what they can do on Earth Day or Nature Month or whatever holiday we invent to try to do better. Here are my two suggestions for how to change the world:

1. VOTE for elected officials who actually believe in climate advocacy; who consult with scientists, doctors, and other experts before creating policies; who believe women’s right are human rights and act accordingly.

2. Upgrade your language. Practice recognizing when you are othering non-human beings through words like “it.” How does it feel to use “her/him/kin” instead? Notice when your verbs are extractive, taking rather than giving.

Try this:

• Instead of “I’m going fishing,” say, “I’m going to check on the fish populations.”

• Instead of “I’m going on a hike,” try, “I’ll going to introduce myself to the mountains.”

These may feel small, but changing our language is how we upgrade our mentality. Giving nature agency through language is how we build better relationships instead of just abusive ones.

What else?

What other examples can you think of? What moments and spaces do you feel yourself engaging differently with language and thus with nature? I don’t think any shift in our langauge practice is too small or too silly. Try it. See how it feels.

Agent Rejection Update:

So far I’ve sent novel queries out to 8 agents and gotten 4 rejections. For some reason sharing this here makes me feel better. Like many new authors, I’m aiming for 100 rejections… As always, thank you so much for reading.