The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape
theguardian.com
The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape

We are depleting, with an ever-growing tenacity, the complex, multilayered song of the world and replacing it with a single-pitched monotone, depositing empty calories, sterile seeds, and meaningless objects in every developing country while silencing forever the voices of hundreds of cultures. Every few weeks a language is lost and, along with it,
... See more"The Eyak word for rain means 'something is happening.'"
This quote comes a book by Eva Saulitis called "Into Great Silence." It's near the end of the book, where she talks about the Eyak people of the coastal rainforest of Alaska.
The Eyak are a distinct cultural group, separate from the Tlingit, that migrated thousands of years ago from the
... See morewithout introducing children to the interconnectedness of life, the gushy, gross wonder of the roiling, seething, slimy, dirty aliveness of nature, how will they love it, and how will they protect it?
I don’t think that human creations on the whole supply us with figures of speech. It is the natural world which does.… Our imagination itself takes its root in the natural world, and increasingly the natural world is being distanced from us, and that can only impoverish our own imaginations.13