Why We Need New Words for Nature
[We must also recognize that climate change is only one symptom of a larger problem. Human beings have fallen out of alignment with life.] Their
Joy Harjo • All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis
Any real move towards sustainability will require us to cease limiting our understanding with simplistic language around group and individual identities, villain and victim branding, so that we can see what our actual diversity looks like and what it can do for us.
Tyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
There’s a reason Naomi Klein begins her climate masterwork, This Changes Everything, with a search for “the stories that got us into this mess.”36 Australian science writer Gillian King collects climate metaphors on her blog, craftily wielding them to reframe key climate debates and combat misinformation. To bring out the futility of trying to outs
... See moreAndrew Boyd • I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor
A world in which the environment itself was dominant, an ecological world, is of much longer duration and, despite the thoughtless exercise of our power, has never gone away. Indeed, the tumult in which we find ourselves today might be considered its violent reassertion. The task that lies ahead of us involves less a novel change in ourselves than
... See moreJames Bridle • Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence
We call nature ‘the wilderness’ and animals within it ‘wild animals’ while we are ‘civil’ humans. This type of language alone shows our un-symbiotic relationship with nature. We see us, humans, ourselves, as being separate or even superior to nature (the ‘wild’ vs the tame, conscious, civil), a mental model that is at the root of so many powerful a... See more