Language Lenses
You needn’t be a linguist to know that the language we use to talk about the natural world influences the way we think about it. Words and phrases sculpt even how we perceive nature in the first place. Language is a lens and, like all lenses, remains invisible (seen through vs. seen) until we examine it. So, let’s examine some current terms and concepts related to nature that might shape our way of seeing and thinking about it. If we can adopt accurate language lenses, we can serve the Island’s environment well.
One very popular term for time spent in the woods is forest bathing, an immersion that cleanses and renews the self. Sounds amazing. One downside to this language lens: It freights your quiet walk in the woods with the expectation it should be soul-transforming. Imagine the disappointment if all you feel on your daily jaunt in Vashon’s lovely woods is “mere” pleasure and relaxation!
There’s a bigger problem with this lens, though. It implies the purpose of the natural world (in this case, the forest) is primarily the servicing of human psychological and emotional needs. Is the Island’s landscape valuable only as background scenery in the great American theater of self-improvement?
Botanists complain about this orientation, at least when it comes to plants, calling it plant blindness, which renders the plant world merely a green curtain behind the supposedly mainstage actors, people. Good corrective lens.
Some environmental philosophers want to reverse all human lenses and imagine how the world appears to non-human species, who see us as their background world. This reversal in perspective can produce a humbling disorientation philosophers call experiencing the uncanny. Could we live better with Island coyotes and the occasional cougar if we saw them as working their territory rather than invading our fields—as uncanny as that might feel?
Biophilia—people’s innate love of the living world—seems real. So it makes sense that, at this point in history, people can also feel solastalgia, a longing for the natural world as they once knew it before rapid development and climate change. Islanders are famous for our biophilia. Many feel solastalgia, too. How do these two language lenses shape our plans to preserve and restore Island landscapes?
The over-consumption of natural resources is referred to by some environmentalists as future-eating—our taking so much now that there won’t be enough for coming generations of people and other species. The byproduct of this consumption, climate change, has led to abandonment zones in places where flooding, heat, and drought have chased out people. What if we’re “eating” the Island’s aquifer to a point past replenishment? Will climate-induced flooding force Islanders to “abandon” some parts of Vashon?
Maybe there’s consolation in a medieval European lens embodied in a term (Latin, natch) that’s been revived recently: viriditas. It focuses on the energy behind nature’s growth and complexity, its capacity to heal itself, and us.
