Nature Speaks: How Environmental Linguistics may help save the planet.
Walking through the Siberian forest with Marta, a lifelong huntress and forager, I could sense her reverence. Marta Kongarayeva, born 1930, was among the very last speakers of a language called Tofa. Having dwelled in the forest her entire life, Marta also inhabited a linguistic world that rendered it legible. She named subtle, yet meaningful, signs: tiny flowers blooming on the forest floor, insect chirps, lunar phases, swirly patterns in lake ice, the creak of cedar cones disgorging their nuts.
Nature spoke to Marta, telling her the lunar calendar days, when to gather nuts, where to hunt, and how to survive. And Marta spoke back to nature in her Tofa language, invoking the bear to fatten itself for the kill, offering tea to the campfire god for success in hunting, whistling the wood grouse to the hunter’s snare, or serenading a reindeer to nurse her calf. Marta’s lyrical dialogue with nature — which she knew to be capable of both benevolence and severity — was a spiritual practice that kept the world in balance and allowed her Tofa people to thrive in one of the harshest climes on earth. Marta’s Tofa language uniquely expresses “I’ll catch a quail” as a single verb (üšpülläär) and “my two-year-old male castrated domes- ticated rideable reindeer” as a single noun (charym). She could recite twenty Tofa words exclusively denoting body parts of a bear (irezang). Marta knew the name of each bend in the river, directional words that applied only to rivers, and the names of water spirits. These language tools allowed her to wayfind in the forest, harvesting its bounty while respecting its power.
Without walking with Marta and listening to her wisdom, it would be hard to grasp her linguistically encoded environmental knowledge (or LEEK, as I call it). Contemplating the forest with an elder, you witness how knowledge springs up from the land, trickles into the observant mind, and is absorbed by cultural practice. It can then be applied to sway nature to human will and to augur its patterns. This seems like magic to someone like me who comes from a culture thoroughly detached from nature and lacks the lexicon of the forest. In fact, it is science, millennia of keen observation and cultural sense-making by astute, nature-attuned minds.
Language infuses every environment. Through language, people generate and transmit astounding bodies of nature knowledge, mostly unwritten and stored only in memory. The application of this knowledge creates feedback loops that link human perception and behavior with plants, animals, and non-living elements. How then can one practice environmental studies, ecology, or biological sciences without including and respecting the knowledge base found in the world’s 7,000+ languages, and especially in smaller Indigenous tongues?
Linguistic science has much to offer us in understanding climate change, biodiversity, conservation, and sustainability. But this is a different ilk of linguistics than what has dominated the academy for the past half century. I’ll call it Environmental Linguistics, a re-attachment of language to nature. For Indigenous peoples, these two were never parted.
I went to Siberia to do field linguistics, intending to create a grammar, dictionary, and story collection of Tofa. Grammar, so we are taught in contemporary linguistics, may be extracted from speakers’ minds, captured in recordings, and analyzed for science. As a newly-minted PhD from Yale, I’d had superb theoretical training. But on my walks with Marta, I realized her language did not exist apart from its forest habitat. My training and tools were unfit for the task. Tofa makes little sense in a library or a digital archive— or in Stalinist labor camps where Marta’s friend Varvara Adamova had been exiled just for speaking it. The intimate environmental knowledge Tofa encodes is nonportable, untranslatable, and exists nowhere else on the planet, nor in the minds of any other people. Although I had some nifty analytical tools from linguistics and anthropology, these had not prepared me to grasp the complexity, connectedness, and value Tofa holds for its speakers.
Language Hotspots
Recently, I’ve been exploring the language-environment interface in the South Pacific, a place remarkably different from Siberia. Vanuatu’s lush tropical islands are home to a self-confident people enjoying the bounty of the sea while managing tourism that showcases their pristine coral reefs and daring land-divers. Vanuatu boasts astonishing bio-diversity, and it’s the world’s #1 “Language Hotspot” (a term I coined in 2007 for the National Geographic Society to help visualize global patterns of language diversity). The Ni-Vanuatu people — a population of just 250,000 — boast a higher ratio of languages to people than anywhere on earth. They can express themselves in one or more of 113 local tongues, as well as Bislama, French, and English.
On Futuna Island, I met Anselon Seru, in his mid-20s and renowned for his fishing expertise. Showing off a prized tuna (uorukago) he had netted from his wooden outrigger canoe (waka), Anselon paused to upload a photo of it to Instagram. When I turned on my recorder, Anselon easily named more than 250 species of fish and described their feeding habits, migration patterns, and schooling formations. Many Futuna fish names do not map one-to-one onto the Linnaean scientific taxonomy used by marine biologists. Rather, the Futuna apply a cultural logic of classification and naming that they find apt. For example, two fish that appear identical to a marine biologist and share just one scientific name are called by two distinct names in Futuna, because one sleeps in the daytime and the other at night. To fish, one must also sail, and so I listened as expert navigator Yaugane Misikofe taught the young men the names of 18 winds that make up the Futuna wind compass, a crucial tool for making landfall.
On nearby Keamu island, elder David Nasauman taught me the sugar cane calendar, each month named for a different cane variety. David’s son, Wopa Nasauman, named the dozen plant species he had turned into rope, thatch, and posts to build his cyclone house. Martial Wahe explained the eight life stages of the coconut, and Ruben Neriam named thousands of plants, many with curative properties. As part of a five-year project called “Plants mo pipol blong Vanuatu” (Plants and People of Vanuatu), I am working with the Vanuatu Forestry Department and with New York Botanical Garden scientists Michael Balick and Gregory Plunkett to document this valuable knowledge.
The foundation for our scientific work is the knowledge base of the Vanuatu people, which they retain as intellectual property while generously sharing. As the botanists collect specimens of nearly 2,000 plants entirely new to modern science, we find that almost every plant is known, named, and used by local people. As Takaronga Kuautonga of Futuna Island remarked: “We have names for all these plants in our language.”
Globalization pros and cons
These remote communities — in Siberia and Vanuatu — are now within range of cell towers and are active on social media. Eager technologizers, they are crossing the digital divide and creating an online presence for tongues never before heard outside a few isolated villages. They do this intentionally, viewing technology not as a threat but an opportunity. By leveraging the positive value of globalization, they visibilize their cultures, inviting the appreciation of a global audience. They also add to the sum of recorded environmental knowledge.
Languages are endangered because they have been conquered, colonized, and oppressed and are now dominated by major global tongues. Tofa is nearing a vanishing point, with a dozen elderly speakers left. As Marta Kongarayeva told me: “Old age is creeping up on me, and soon I’ll go berry-picking. When I go, I’ll take my lan- guage with me.” Futuna counts over 1,000 speakers but is potentially threatened as young people migrate off the island. Both scenarios are sources of concern met with active interventions by community leaders and by outsiders invited to assist.
Hope amidst crisis
The world is at a crucial juncture, as it stands to lose an immense portion of its plant, animal, and cultural diversity during this century. Threats to the natural environment are driven by climate change and unsustainable lifestyles. Small languages are falling into oblivion as major global languages expand to dominate human thought and discourse. Saving species from extinction, adapting to climate change, and assisting communities in revitalizing their languages are urgent, yet intertwined efforts.
As Neil McKenzie of the Yawuru people of Australia explained to me while demonstrating survival skills in the outback, “If I don’t show you the land, you won’t understand the language. It exists because of the land. It is in close harmony with it.”
A sign of hope that we may yet learn to create a sustainable civilization is that humans have done so before, many times over: the Yawuru in their deserts, the Tofa in their Siberian forests, and the Ni-Vanuatu on their bountiful islands. Their languages—and the unique knowledge these encode—enable their survival. These Environmental Linguists have much to teach us, if we will listen. What they know may help save the planet.
—K. David Harrison, PhD is an environmental linguist, author, and National Geographic explorer.