nature is speaking essay

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One-And-Done Guide To A-Grade Worthy Essays On Nature

Table of Contents

At least once in your life from elementary school you will find yourself having to talk or having to write about the inspiring relationship between man and nature that has been there since us humans started walking this planet.

You better be inspired and get a feel for it before you start gnawing at your pen. You’ll see that this topic, apart from being so ubiquitous and beloved by teachers of all kinds and calibers, is rather fun to explore and write about.

Essays on nature: how to structure?

The topic of essays on nature is blissfully broad unless narrowed down by your teacher’s specifications. Not that we will break any major news saying that you should start your essay with a catchy introduction.

Do not underestimate the importance of that short introductory piece : written well, it will set the right tone to your essay, make your own voice heard and make that first impression on your readers.

The contextual diversity stems from the very definition of nature. Quoting Merriam Webster , nature can be defined as

• The inherent character or basic constitution … of a person or thing.
• A creative and controlling force in the universe.
• Natural scenery.

We have picked here only the most distinct definitions that would send your essay in three different directions, but you certainly get the drift.

As often as not, tasking students with an essay on nature, an educator expects a charming piece on scenic beauty with lots of descriptive passages.

But before you knock yourself out waxing lyrical on that breathtaking view from the mountain top that opened itself to your eyes as you were hitchhiking with your family during your Colorado trip, let not a premature sigh of relief escape your lips: there is more depth to it than may initially seem.

Depending on what the actual topic at hand is, you should:

• Make a concise presentation of the topic.
• Outline the problems you are going to solve in your essay.
• Introduce a clear thesis statement.

Normally, you are not expected to come up with any laboriously picked and analyzed sources of information other than your own experiences with nature that inspired you into deep contemplations, profound emotions and filled other spiritual gaps in your perception of the world.

However, a good quote here and there is a must – just to show that you are familiar with the background and the efforts your fellow-writers have made in the field.

Proceed to the core of your writing, speaking about the moments when the presence of nature in your life overpowered you, the thoughts and ideas this feeling sparkled in you, and the impact it has had on your way of thinking and living.

Remember that drawing unexpected parallels is a mark of genius. How about you compare natural phenomena to the way you express your own emotions? What in the way you express your feelings through beaming, smiling – or tears and yelling – can be paralleled to weather changes?

…Go full-on allegorical!

Writing about nature, we suggest that you pick such tried-and-true fellow-writers as Henry David Thoreau , who is commonly referred to as “the godfather of American nature writing,” as an environmental educator and a travel/naturalist writer Heidi Zillie put it, and a harbinger of all go-green enthusiasts.

Speaking of environmentalists: as far as the cornerstone idea of your essay is concerned, it would score you a lot of points to jump on the naturalist bandwagon and make a strong call to protect natural resources.

The use of nature essay examples

Depending on what your primary focus in the essay is, you should pick a specific set of arguments to back up the viewpoints you express in your writing.

While describing and processing the imprint that nature sceneries have had on you is not about debating, since it is a purely subjective description of your own emotions, you still can present your feelings as contradictory and conflicting.

For instance, speak about the impact a sunny spell has on you when you are happy as opposed to when you are depressed. By contrasting your own emotions, sunshine from a clear blue sky can make you feel worse – although it can do the opposite and pick you up.

Um… or not?

Provide arguments to support both stances and illustrate with an example from your life.

Don’t be afraid to channel your inner Hemingway; we mean, the topic is pretty corny in its nature – bad pun intended!

What to write in essays on human nature?

Essays on human nature open up new horizons still.

Here once again it would be great to make a reference to Thoreau who advocated for

“the importance of leaving nature undisturbed, the need for all humans to have contact with nature, and the relationship between humans and other living things”

Speak about the contradictory nature of humans: we are part of nature, but we constantly seek to outsmart it.

What do we get as benefits, and are they compared to the damage we do the environment in the process?

One thing is for sure, and it is that it is human nature to defy mother nature, and our own nature whilst at it.

For centuries, from the earliest forms of human life on Earth, man has been trying to interpret, explain and even control nature and its phenomena, it is not by chance that the first explanations of meteorological phenomena that is rain can already be found in the first primitive men.

The wind, the sun, the snow, which, however, lacking any logical or scientific connection , gave an answer through the omnipotent presence of gods who controlled these temporal impacts.

But not only that, being peoples who based their entire survival on agriculture, they introduced the first songs and dances of the rain, of the sun, and in doing so they were convinced that the gods could hear them and that they could control and “send” what could be used to harvest to be prosperous.

Essays on nature vs. nurture

Merriam-Webster defines nurture as

– as opposed to those predetermined by genes, or nature.

The debates about to what extension we are influenced by our genetics that is nature, and to what – by environmental factors.

The supporters of the “nature” camp study the behavioral development in twins to prove their point, and we suggest you get the most out of citing some of them.

On the other side of the equation, scientists prove that there is a link between the events in our lives and our bodily functions; some events or actions can actually make us pass on genes to our offspring, like for instance substance abusing or smoking.

A study like this one under the supervision of Dr. Linda J. Luecken proves some meaningful connections between our biography facts and health condition.

Nature vs. nurture essay topics

Here are some of the most fruitful and inspiring topics for an essay on nature versus nurture you can dig into because every essay topic needs to be narrowed down for you to be able to make a clear and logical presentation of your standpoint:

• Nature vs. Nurture In Personal Development.
• Nature Vs. Nurture In Children.
• The Nurture Assumption.
• Nature vs. Nurture: From Elizabethan Times Till Now.
• Frankenstein: Nature vs. Nurture.
• Nature vs. Nurture Debate.
• Nature vs. Nurture In Medicine.
• Intelligence Quotient.
• Nature vs. Nurture From A Psychological Standpoint.
• Human Nature.
• Obligate vs. Facultative Adaptations.
• Social Pre-Wiring.
• Heritability Of Intelligence.
• Nature vs. Nurture in Genomics.
• Personality Traits: Nature Or Nurture?
• The Fallacy Of Nature vs. Nurture.
• Darwinian Ethics In Nature Vs. Nurture Debate.
• Biological Determinism.
• Stability And Change In Nature Vs. Nurture Discourse.
• The Nature And Nurture Of Genius.

Bottom line

Science is progressing with increasingly surprising innovations and technologies day by day, but people in some way continue to not fully grasp the benefits nature offers.

Exemplary is the case of houses built at the foot of Vesuvius, an area considered to be at risk of eruptions.

There are laws that prevent building in those areas, but at the same time in those areas, you always see more architectures, houses, and buildings that endanger human life.

Then the question arises of who is to blame in the end, and the necessary answer is that man, as in many things, is the main cause of own flaws!

…You get the drift?

Got questions or feel a bit lost? You don’t have to do this on your own; there is expertly help to get you all set for a maximal educational outcome!

Speaking of that… How about trying an expert help right now? Any topic, tightest deadline, complete safety! Click the button below to save your evening!

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Orion Magazine

America's Finest Environmental Magazine

Speaking of Nature

Finding language that affirms our kinship with the natural world.

A CEMETERY SEEMED AN ODD PLACE to contemplate the boundaries of being. Sandwiched between the campus and the interstate, this old burial ground is our cherished slice of nearby nature where the long dead are silent companions to college students wandering the hilly paths beneath rewilding oaks. The engraved names on overgrown headstones are upholstered in moss and crows congregate in the bare branches of an old beech, which is also carved with names. Reading the messages of a graveyard you understand the deep human longing for the enduring respect that comes with personhood. Names, names, names: the stones seem to say, “I am. You are. He was.” Grammar, especially our use of pronouns, is the way we chart relationships in language and, as it happens, how we relate to each other and to the natural world.

Tiptoeing in her mud boots, Caroline skirts around a crumbling family plot to veer into the barberry hedge where a plastic bag is caught in the thorns. “Isn’t it funny,” she says, “that we think it’s disrespectful to walk over the dead, but it’s perfectly okay to disrespect the other species who actually live here?”

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We have a special grammar for personhood. We would never say of our late neighbor, “It is buried in Oakwood Cemetery.” Such language would be deeply disrespectful and would rob him of his humanity. We use instead a special grammar for humans: we distinguish them with the use of he or she, a grammar of personhood for both living and dead Homo sapiens. Yet we say of the oriole warbling comfort to mourners from the treetops or the oak tree herself beneath whom we stand, “It lives in Oakwood Cemetery.” In the English language, a human alone has distinction while all other living beings are lumped with the nonliving “its.”

As a botany professor, I am as interested in the pale-green lichens slowly dissolving the words on the gravestones as in the almost-forgotten names, and the students, too, look past the stones for inky cap mushrooms in the grass or a glimpse of an urban fox. The students out for a walk on this late fall day are freshmen in Janine DeBaise’s environmental writing class at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry where we both teach. I’ve invited them on a mission to experiment with the nature of language and the language of personhood. Janine would correct me: she would not refer to her students as “freshmen” since they are neither fresh nor all men. We call them “first-year students.” Words matter. She has collected their assignment, a written reflection on a cemetery walk last week, as baseline data. Now we revisit the same place, but with new ideas about grammar bouncing around in the students’ heads. New to them, perhaps, but in fact ancient—the grammar of animacy.

For me, this story began in another classroom, in another century, at the Carlisle Indian School where my Potawatomi grandfather was taken as a small boy. My chance of knowing my native language and your chance of ever hearing it were stolen in the Indian boarding schools where native children were forbidden to speak their own language. Within the walls of that school, the clipped syllables of English replaced the lush Potawatomi sounds of water splashing on rocks and wind in the trees, a language that emerged from the lands of the Great Lakes. Our language hovers at the edge of extinction, an endangered species of knowledge and wisdom dwindling away with the loss of every elder.

So, bit by bit, I have been trying to learn my lost language. My house is spangled with Post-it notes labeling wiisgaak, gokpenagen, and ishkodenhs. It’s a very difficult language to learn, but what keeps me going is the pulse of animacy in every sentence. There are words for states of being that have no equivalent in English. The language that my grandfather was forbidden to speak is composed primarily of verbs, ways to describe the vital beingness of the world. Both nouns and verbs come in two forms, the animate and the inanimate. You hear a blue jay with a different verb than you hear an airplane, distinguishing that which possesses the quality of life from that which is merely an object. Birds, bugs, and berries are spoken of with the same respectful grammar as humans are, as if we were all members of the same family. Because we are. There is no it for nature. Living beings are referred to as subjects, never as objects, and personhood is extended to all who breathe and some who don’t. I greet the silent boulder people with the same respect as I do the talkative chickadees.

It’s no wonder that our language was forbidden. The language we speak is an affront to the ears of the colonist in every way, because it is a language that challenges the fundamental tenets of Western thinking—that humans alone are possessed of rights and all the rest of the living world exists for human use. Those whom my ancestors called relatives were renamed natural resources. In contrast to verb-based Potawatomi, the English language is made up primarily of nouns, somehow appropriate for a culture so obsessed with things.

At the same time that the language of the land was being suppressed, the land itself was being converted from the communal responsibility of native people to the private property of settlers, in a one-two punch of colonization. Replacing the aboriginal idea of land as a revered living being with the colonial understanding of land as a warehouse of natural resources was essential to Manifest Destiny, so languages that told a different story were an enemy. Indigenous languages and thought were as much an impediment to land-taking as were the vast herds of buffalo, and so were likewise targeted for extermination.

Linguistic imperialism has always been a tool of colonization, meant to obliterate history and the visibility of the people who were displaced along with their languages. But five hundred years later, in a renamed landscape, it has become a nearly invisible tool. We forget the original names, that the Hudson River was “the river that runs both ways,” that Devils Tower was the sacred Bear Butte of the Lakota. Beyond the renaming of places, I think the most profound act of linguistic imperialism was the replacement of a language of animacy with one of objectification of nature, which renders the beloved land as lifeless object, the forest as board feet of timber. Because we speak and live with this language every day, our minds have also been colonized by this notion that the nonhuman living world and the world of inanimate objects have equal status. Bulldozers, buttons, berries, and butterflies are all referred to as it, as things, whether they are inanimate industrial products or living beings.

English has come to be the dominant language of commerce, in which contracts to convert a forest to a copper mine are written. It’s just the right language for the purpose, because the forest and the copper ore are equivalent “its.” English encodes human exceptionalism, which privileges the needs and wants of humans above all others and understands us as detached from the commonwealth of life. But I wonder if it was always that way. I can’t help but think that the land spoke clearly to early Anglo-Saxons, just as it did to the Potawatomi. Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful book Landmarks, about land and language, documents myriad place names of great particularity that illuminate an ancient Anglo-Saxon intimacy with the land and her beings. It is said that we are known by the company we keep, and I wonder if English sharpened its verbal ax and lost the companionship of oaks and primroses when it began to keep company with capitalism. I want to suggest that we can begin to mend that rift—with pronouns. As a reluctant student of the formalities of writing, I never would have imagined that I would one day be advocating for grammar as a tool of the revolution.

SOME OF THE STUDENTS in the cemetery have read the chapter in my book Braiding Sweetgrass that invokes the grammar of animacy. They are taken aback by the implicit assumption of the hierarchy of being on which English grammar is built, something they had not considered before. They dive headfirst into the philosophical implications of English-language pronouns.

One student, Carson, writes in his essay that it is a numbing word: “It numbs us to the consequences of what we do and allows us to take advantage of nature, to harm it even, free of guilt, because we declare other beings to be less than ourselves, just things.” He echoes the words of Wendell Berry who writes, “People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.”

While it’s true that words are simply vessels for meaning, without meaning of their own, many cultures imbue the utterance of words with spirit because they originate with the breath, with the mystery of life itself. In her book Becoming Wise, Krista Tippett writes, “The words we use shape how we understand ourselves, how we interpret the world, how we treat others. Words make worlds.”

I don’t mean to say that we are constrained to act in a certain way because of our grammar. I’ve been saying it for most of my life and so far I have not clearcut a forest. (I can’t even bring myself to litter, although I tried once, just to see what it would feel like.) Nor does a language of animacy dictate that its speakers will behave with respect toward nonhumans. After all, there are leaders of indigenous nations, raised speaking a grammar of animacy, who willingly surrender their homelands to the use of mining or timber companies. And the Russian language, while embracing animacy in its structure, has not exactly led to a flowering of sustainability there. The relationship between the structure of a language and the behavior characteristic of a culture, is not a causal one, but many linguists and psychologists agree that language reveals unconscious cultural assumptions and exerts some influence over patterns of thought.

As we talk beneath the oaks, one of the students emphatically disagrees: “Just because I say it doesn’t mean I disrespect nature. I grew up on a farm and we called all of our animals it, but we took great care of them. We just said it because everyone knows that you don’t give a name to the thing that you’re going to eat.” Exactly! We use it to distance ourselves, to set others outside our circle of moral consideration, creating hierarchies of difference that justify our actions—so we don’t feel.

In contrast, indigenous philosophy recognizes other beings as our relatives, including the ones we intend to eat. Sadly, since we cannot photosynthesize, we humans must take other lives in order to live. We have no choice but to consume, but we can choose to consume a plant or animal in a way that honors the life that is given and the life that flourishes as a consequence. Instead of avoiding ethical jeopardy by creating distance, we can embrace and reconcile that tension. We can acknowledge food plants and animals as fellow beings and through sophisticated practices of reciprocity demonstrate respect for the sacred exchange of life among relatives.

The students we walk with in the cemetery are primarily environmental scientists in training. The practice of it -ing everything in nature is not only prevalent, but is required in scientific writing. Rachel points out that in her biology class, there are “strict taboos governing personification of nature, and even a whisper of anthropomorphism will lose you a grade on a paper.”

I have had the privilege of spending my life kneeling before plants. As a plant scientist, sometimes I am collecting data. As an indigenous plant woman, sometimes I am gathering medicine. These two roles offer a sharp contrast in ways of thinking, but I am always in awe, and always in relationship. In both cases the plants provide for me, teach me, and inspire me. When I write as a scientist, I must say, “An 8 cm root was extracted from the soil,” as if the leafy beings were objects, and, for that matter, as if I were too. Scientific writing prefers passive voice to subject pronouns of any kind. And yet its technical language, which is designed to be highly accurate, obscures the greater truth.

Writing as an indigenous plant woman I might say, “My plant relatives have shared healing knowledge with me and given me a root medicine.” Instead of ignoring our mutual relationship, I celebrate it. Yet English grammar demands that I refer to my esteemed healer as it, not as a respected teacher, as all plants are understood to be in Potawatomi. That has always made me uncomfortable. I want a word for beingness. Can we unlearn the language of objectification and throw off colonized thought? Can we make a new world with new words?

Inspired by the grammar of animacy in Potawatomi that feels so right and true, I’ve been searching for a new expression that could be slipped into the English language in place of it when we are speaking of living beings. Mumbling to myself through the woods and fields, I’ve tried many different words, hoping that one would sound right to my leafy or feathered companions. There was one that kept rising through my musings. So I sought the counsel of my elder and language guide, Stewart King, and explained my purpose in seeking a word to instill animacy in English grammar, to heal disrespect. He rightly cautioned that “our language holds no responsibility to heal the society that sought to exterminate it.” With deep respect for his response, I thought also of how the teachings of our traditional wisdom might one day be needed as medicine for a broken world. So I asked him if there was a word in our language that captured the simple but miraculous state of just being. And of course there is. “Aakibmaadiziiwin,” he said, “means ‘a being of the earth.’” I sighed with relief and gratitude for the existence of that word. However, those beautiful syllables would not slide easily into English to take the place of the pronoun it. But I wondered about that first sound, the one that came to me as I walked over the land. With full recognition and celebration of its Potawatomi roots, might we hear a new pronoun at the beginning of the word, from the “aaki” part that means land? Ki to signify a being of the living earth. Not he or she, but ki. So that when the robin warbles on a summer morning, we can say, “Ki is singing up the sun.” Ki runs through the branches on squirrel feet, ki howls at the moon, ki’s branches sway in the pine-scented breeze, all alive in our language as in our world.

We’ll need a plural form of course, to speak of these many beings with whom we share the planet. We don’t need to borrow from Potawatomi since—lo and behold—we already have the perfect English word for them: kin. Kin are ripening in the fields; kin are nesting under the eaves; kin are flying south for the winter, come back soon. Our words can be an antidote to human exceptionalism, to unthinking exploitation, an antidote to loneliness, an opening to kinship. If words can make the world, can these two little sounds call back the grammar of animacy that was scrubbed from the mouths of children at Carlisle?

I have no illusions that we can suddenly change language and, with it, our worldview, but in fact English evolves all the time. We drop words we don’t need anymore and invent words that we do. The Oxford Children’s Dictionary notoriously dropped the words acorn and buttercup in favor of bandwidth and chatroom, but restored them after public pressure. I don’t think that we need words that distance us from nature; we need words that heal that relationship, that invite us into an inclusive worldview of personhood for all beings.

As I’ve sent these two little words out into the world like seeds on the wind, they have fallen here and there on fertile ground. Several writers have incorporated them into children’s books and into music. Readers have reported that the very sound, the phoneme pronounced “kee,” has resonance with other words of similar meaning. Ki is a parallel spelling of chi —the word for the inherent life energy that flows through all things. It finds harmony with qui or “who” in Latinate languages. I’ve been told it is the name of a Sumerian Earth goddess and the root of Turkic words for tree. Could ki be a key to unlocking a new way of thinking, or remembering an ancient one?

But these responses are from nature writers, artists, teachers, and philosophers; I want to know how young people, the language makers among us, react. Our little environmental college is dominated by tree huggers, so if there were ever an audience open to ki, they would be it.

WITH ki and kin rattling around in their heads, the students walk together in the cemetery again, playing with using the words and seeing how they feel on their tongues and in their heads.

Steeped in the formalities of syntax, a fair number of student questions revolve around wanting “rules” for the use of the new words, rules that we don’t have. Is there a possessive case? Where are the boundaries? “I could say ‘ki’ about this shrub,” Renee says, “but what about the wind?”

“Yes,” I tell her, “in my language, the wind is understood as animate.”

As we stand beneath the stoutly branched oak, the students debate how to use the words. If the tree is ki, what about the acorns? They agree that the acorns are kin, a whole family of little beings. The ground is also littered, in this unkempt portion of the cemetery, with fallen branches. “Are these dead limbs considered kin too? Even though they’re dead?” Evelyn asks. “Looking at the dead branches on the ground, I found myself thinking a lot about firewood,” she says. “I’ve always spoken—and thought—as if I was the one who made firewood. But when I thought of that tree as ki, as a being, I suddenly saw how preposterous that was. I didn’t make the firewood. The tree did. I only picked it up from the ground.” In just one sentence Evelyn experiences a transfer of agency or capacity for action from humankind to the tree itself. The grammar of animacy is an antidote to arrogance; it reminds us that we are not alone. Evelyn later writes, “Using ki made me see everything differently, like all these persons were giving gifts—and I couldn’t help but feel grateful. We call that kind of firewood kindling, and for me it has kindled a new understanding. And look—that word kin is right there in kindling.”

Another student, Amanda, adds, “Having this word makes me regard the trees more as individuals. Before, I would just call them all ‘oak’ as if they were a species and not individuals. That’s how we learn it in dendrology, but using ki makes me think of them each, as not just ‘oak,’ but as that particular oak, the one with the broken branch and the brown leaves.”

Despite their very brief introduction to ki and kin, the students get right to the heart of the words’ implications: “I imagine that this would be a challenge for most religious people,” Paul says. “It kind of knocks humans off the pedestal of being the only ones with souls.” Indeed, Christian missionaries were the spearhead of language suppression in indigenous cultures and were among the prime architects of the Indian-boarding-school movement. War on a language of animacy and relationship to the natural world was essential to the dual mission of religious and economic conversion. Certainly the biblical mandate for human subjugation of the creation was incompatible with indigenous languages.

Another student, Kieran, observes, “Using these words as I walk around opened my eyes to how we are all connected. When you start using ki and kin, you will feel remorseful that all of your life you took them for granted.”

Ecopsychologists have suggested that our conceptions of self as inherently separate from the natural world have negative outcomes on the well-being of humans and ecosystems. Perhaps these words can be medicine for them both, so that every time we speak of the living world we breathe out respect and inhale kinship, turning the very atmosphere into a medium of relatedness. If pronouns can kindle empathy, I want to shower the world with their sound.

The most outspoken students voice some enthusiasm for the new pronouns, but the quiet skeptics save their reservations for the writing assignment when we are back in class. One student puts it this way: “This is a warm-hearted and generous idea, but it will never work. People don’t like change and they will be pissed off if you try and tell them how to talk. Most people don’t want to think of nature as being as good as them.” One student writes in a scrawl that carries his impatience in every half-formed letter: “If changing the world is what you’re after, do something real. Volunteer at the food bank, plant a tree. Dreaming up pronouns is a major waste of time.”

This is why I love teaching, the way we are forced to be accountable.

The abstraction of “dreaming up pronouns” does seem fruitless during a time in our nation’s history when the language of disrespect is the currency of political discourse. American nationalism, to say nothing of human exceptionalism, is being elevated as a lofty goal, which leaves little room for humility and ecological compassion. It seems quixotic to argue for respect for nonhuman beings when we refuse to extend it to human refugees. But I think this student is wrong. Words do matter, and they can ripple out to make waves in the “real” world.

The ecological compassion that resides in our indigenous languages is dangerous once again to the enterprise of domination, as political and economic forces are arrayed against the natural world and extractive colonialism is reborn under the gospel of prosperity. The contrast in worldview is as stark today as it was in my grandfather’s time, and once again it is land and native peoples who are made to pay the price.

If you think this is only an arcane linguistic matter, just look to the North Dakota prairie where, as I write this, there are hundreds of people camping out in a blizzard enduring bitter cold to continue the protective vigil for their river, which is threatened by the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and the pipeline’s inevitable oil spills. The river is not an it for them—the river lies within their circle of moral responsibility and compassion and so they protect ki fiercely, as if the river were their relative, because ki is. But the ones they are protecting ki from speak of the river and the oil and the pipe all with the same term, as if “it” were their property, as if “it” were nothing more than resources for them to use. As if it were dead.

At Standing Rock, between the ones armed with water cannons and the ones armed with prayer, exist two different languages for the world, and that is where the battle lines are being drawn. Do we treat the earth as if ki is our relative—as if the earth were animated by being—with reciprocity and reverence, or as stuff that we may treat with or without respect, as we choose? The language and worldview of the colonizer are once again in a showdown with the indigenous worldview. Knowing this, the water protectors at Standing Rock were joined by thousands of non-native allies, who also speak with the voice of resistance, who speak for the living world, for the grammar of animacy.

Thankfully, human history is marked by an ever-expanding recognition of personhood, from the time when aboriginals were not seen as human, when slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person, and when a woman was worth less than a man. Language, personhood, and politics have always been linked to human rights. Will we have the wisdom to expand the circle yet again? Naming is the beginning of justice.

Around the world, ideas of justice for nature are emerging in political and legal arenas. In New Zealand, when the Whanganui River was threatened, indigenous Maori leadership earned protection for the sacred waters by getting the river declared a legal “person” with rights to its own well-being. The constitutions of indigenous-led Ecuador and Bolivia enshrine the rights of Mother Nature. The Swiss amended their constitution to define animals as beings instead of objects. Just last year, the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin amended its tribal constitution, recognizing that “ecosystems and natural communities within the Ho-Chunk territory possess an inherent, fundamental, and inalienable right to exist and thrive.” This legal structure will allow the tribe to protect its homelands from mining for fracking sand and fossil fuel extraction because the land will have legal standing as a person. Supported by the revolutionary initiatives of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, the burgeoning Rights of Nature movement is flowering from the roots of animacy, from the personhood of all beings. We’ll need a new pronoun for that.

THE STUDENTS COMMENT that they’d like to use ki and kin, but stumble over the changes in phrasing. “This would be much easier if I’d learned it as a child,” they say. They’re right of course. Not only because language patterns are established early in development, but because children quite naturally speak of other beings as persons. I delight in listening to my grandson, who like most toddlers watching a butterfly flit across the yard says, “He is flying,” or “She sits on a flower.” Children speak at first with a universal grammar of animacy, until we teach them not to. My grandson is also completely smitten with bulldozers and will watch them endlessly, but despite their motion and their roar he is not confused as to their nature: he calls them “it.”

I am also introducing him to Potawatomi words. In honor of the language that was taken from his great-grandfather, I want to give that language back to my grandson, so he will never be alone in the world and live surrounded by kin. He already has the basics of animacy; he hugs trees and kisses moss. My heart cracked with happiness when he looked up from the blueberries in his oatmeal and said, “Nokomis, are these minan?”

He’s growing up in a time when respect among peoples has grown threadbare and there are gaping holes in the fabric of life. The mending we need will require reweaving the relationship between humans and our more-than-human kin. Maybe now, in this time when the myth of human exceptionalism has proven illusory, we will listen to intelligences other than our own, to kin. To get there, we may all need a new language to help us honor and be open to the beings who will teach us. I hope my grandson will always know the other beings as a source of counsel and inspiration, and listen more to butterflies than to bulldozers. O

This article was made possible through the support of the Kalliopeia Foundation. Listen to an interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer here .

This is a brilliant, elegantly written piece, which I will share widely — and have already posted to the Rethinking Schools Facebook page. Thanks to Robin Wall Kimmerer for writing it and to Orion for publishing it.

Re: As we talk beneath the oaks, one of the students emphatically disagrees: “Just because I say it doesn’t mean I disrespect nature. I grew up on a farm and we called all of our animals it, but we took great care of them. We just said it because everyone knows that you don’t give a name to the thing that you’re going to eat.” We are raising a beautiful Dexter steer; HIS name is Albertus. When we eat HIM, we will remember HIM and be grateful for HIM.

Thank you for the essay. Pronouns are, as you note, revelatory. We can learn from other languages. For example, there are no gender indications for pronouns in Magyar. So the English (and other language) debate on whether GOD is He or She is impossible to arise.

Thank you for this thoughtful, beautiful, and spacious essay. There is a lot to think about here for me, and for many of us.

I’d add another observation of using languages with genderless pronouns–to understand the meaning of the language and the subject of conversation, you have to take in the context. You cannot know what ki is referring to without the company of description and relation.

My experience as a learner of Ndjoeka (in Suriname) is that the structure of the grammar is simple, but the language is not. Learning to hear and speak within a richness of context and relation is beautiful complex and subtle, and makes meaning poetic.

Perhaps this is another support of how language can help us consider repositioning our speakers within a more equal world.

Thank you again.

As an activist working on the Willamette River superfund site, participating in a cleanup narrative that treats the river as an it to be fixed rather than healing with, in collaboration with the river has always been painful for me. What a huge relief and inspiration to hear someone decry the use of “it” and begin to create a language of animacy!

I am thankful for Robin’s clear writing and vital advocacy on behalf of language. This is an important topic that seems to be gaining momentum thanks to writers like Robin and Robert Macfarlane. However, gender of animacy is simply one of many tools that we can use to open up language and our relationship with the natural world, and this is the topic of my recent book “Language Making Nature.”

This was so beautiful- Thank you for this.

There is alienating language, and there is wanton destruction of animate beings. Both matter. And they shape each other. May we learn how to re-join the wholeness that has been broken, in how we think and in what we do.

In Malay language, there is no distinction of he and she. They use ‘dia’ meaning person for both. Try discussing gender issues with them. 🙂 And in Hindi, the verb takes different forms depending on whether the act is done by a female or a male. Now, try discussing gender issues with them. 🙁

Language matters and we (all living beings, kin) are connected genetically and spiritually. Thank you for this lovely article. I think many young people will embrace the change of language! There are many of us, young and older, who love and appreciate all of life.

Thank You, Thank you, Thank you,

I have been at a loss for words in my English language vocabulary. It misses so much of what I feel in nature, in love, in true living.

As an old man who escaped to the forest as a young man and spent most of my life here, thanks for the good work. May you alway teach in the shade of a tree as the ancient Greeks did.

Thank you to Orion for publishing this piece. Thank you to Robin for raising our consciousness about these important ideas

Thank you so much for this brilliant perspective and writing. And thank you, Orion, for featuring this piece.

As someone who works with people to (re-)connect with their Spirit Helpers and spirits of Nature, to hear their wisdom and guidance in order to live more authentic, joyful, transformative and effective lives of service, I feel limited by English on a daily basis. I often find myself saying, “it’s hard to translate what your Helper is saying into English” – and then I muddle along, doing the best I can, often having to try a few times before the Spirit Helper is satisfied. And then – by what pronouns do I call Spirit Helpers such as Wolf, Bear, Eagle, Deer, Magpie, Tree Spirit? I often revert to “he” but it doesn’t feel right.

I agree with you that the English language holds a great deal of power, and that it has shaped the mindset of people responsible for colonialism, racism, environmental destruction, and in general the culture of domination. My hope is that all of us – including white people – can come home and reconnect with Nature as mother, father, teacher and friend. Your work is so helpful in this.

Lastly, as we spread the seeds of “ki” and “kin,” I wonder if the gender queer and trans rights movement might provide fertile ground. Many of us who have never identified strongly with the male or female gender have been deeply hurt by the definitive and limiting binary pronouns of she/her/hers and he/him/his. Many people now request to be referred to as they/them/theirs, or even “ze” (pronounced “zee”). Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could add the pronouns ki and kin to our lexicon for gender queer folks as well? And wouldn’t it be wonderful if the LGBTQ and rights of nature movements could join in common cause?

Thank you so much for your work!

Thank you for your insights and your courage in articulating them so beautifully. English is my native tongue, and it often fails me. Our culture shuns wildness and intimacy, both essential to our evolution. Words do build worlds. They can also tear them down as we are seeing everyday. Let’s continue to rediscover the rich, root words and bring them into daily use to remind us all of our place of responsibility alongside all of our kin in this magnificent world.

This article was very interesting. It led me back to other questions that have been recently discussed in political discourse regarding the use of gender-neutral pronouns. The use of the singular ‘they’ as a way of designating a person without designating a gender. I wonder if another possible solution would be to expand the singular use of ‘they’ from being a way of designating a gender-neutral singular person to being a species-neutral animate singular and plural.

What a beautiful, compassionate essay. As a high school English teacher, there is so much here to reflect on. As someone who writes regularly about the relationship between humans and creatures (mainly through the lens of bird hunting), I’m fascinated by the potential impact on prose as well as concept. For example, one question that comes to mind regarding the pronoun “its” has to do with human ignorance (mine included) about the sex of animals. Most of us can’t tell at a glance if the tree swallow fledgling is a male or female, and we want to be accurate, right? So it seems “it” is a catch-all in that sense. I wonder if “ki” can accommodate a regard for the biological sex of a bird or if that’s not a concern, if it’s a catch-all like “it” but more of a de-hierarchical linguistic move.

This is a beautiful piece of writing on language and nature. I never refer to an animal as an “it.” Words matter indeed, in our customs, our culture, our language, our thoughts, our values.

Yes, beautiful thoughts beautifully expressed. I wonder about domesticity? Most pet owners refer to their cats and dogs as he or she. I was scolded once for speaking of a friend’s dog as “he,” and was informed that SHE had produced two litters of pups and SHE had more than earned her rightful gender. I think it must be, as Robin writes, a case of relationship. We feel our pets are family. Why not the trees all around us and the garden plants I spend my summer days with and the water I swim in? So much to think on here. Thank you!

I make no claims at being a trained environmentalist, yet I happily claim to be an amateur environmentalist in the context of being an agrarian working to make my homestead regenerative. As Wendell Berry has reminded us, being an amateur means you are a lover, in the entomological sense. As an agrarian, one of the most important ecosystems I “love” is the rhizosphere – something Occidental industrial agriculture has abandoned since the “Green Revolution” and reinforced by the misguided policies of Earl Butz.

Once I became aware of the extensive universe of life in and near the rhizosphere I immediately adopted an approach to agriculture and gardening that abandoned tillage. The kin of the soil are as mandatory for healthy life and salubrious food as is the oxygen we breathe. Using tillage and pulverizing the soil to create a specific germination or growing condition can be a sign of one of two things: simple ignorance of (or about) the life beneath our feet, or, arrogance of high order motivated by avarice.

Whether ignorance or arrogance the result is the same: billions of destroyed kin that are the mechanism of botanical flourishing. If yield is our objective as growers of food, we have selected the wrong goal. Yield is a biproduct of fertile soil. Fertile soil is the biproduct of abundant and integrated life within the soil. Instead of yield, our goal as growers of food should be to create an environment, to create conditions, whereby the residents of the rhizosphere prosper and thrive. When we do this, our photosynthesizing neighbors will blossom, both figuratively and literally. This isn’t just sustainability, this is regenerative because the natural process is perpetual or at least cyclical.

The biota (the kin) of the soil should command the same level of respect as any other species on the Earth. Some people, such as myself, claim this group of neighbors needs even more attention. Without humans raising their respect for the kin of the soil, we are not likely to survive as a species in this amazing geosphere.

Excellent piece, on a subject I have thought a lot about over the years. While in London last month I happened across an old cemetery a couple blocks from the hotel. There were many moss encrusted, nearly illegible grave markers tilting at precarious angles under large old oaks. At the center of the cemetery was the larger grave of John Bunyon, author of “Pilgrims Progress”, one of the earliest examples of an invading alien language to the Americas. Nearby was also a marker for William Blake, someone who would probably sympathize greatly with Ms. Kimmerer’s essay and thoughts. I’ll see if I can post photographs.

Wonderful paradigm shifting work. I really loved the realization that our language shapes the way we approach the world. Migwetch

Our industrialized and environmentally unsound system of animal-for-food production treats animals as objects and commodities for profit. Big Ag raises and kills animals in cruel and inhumane ways and their short lives inevitably end in slaughter as they are transformed into an entree for one’s dinner plate. Their deaths serve as another example of how our language debases and controls the animate world. If we can see animals as Ki and Kin, as individuals with their own lives to live, perhaps we can also see that eating them is an affront to their rights too. As Alice Walker states, ““The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites, or women created for men.”

Wonderful article. I’ve always hated using the pronoun “it” for non-human animals, but never thought to extend the “personhood” further–toward rivers, forests, etc. This reminds me, too, of the film by Akira Kurosawa–Dersu Uzala. Dersu, the main character, a Nanai hunter who lives in the Russian Far East. He refers to the sun, the forest, everything–as “persons”, which makes the Russian explorers laugh (but they get it after a while–Kurosawa is good at showing empathetic moments.) Again, this is beautiful, and beautifully written. Thank you!

Yes! I love the idea and etymological family of “ki” and “kin,” despite the worrisome lack of a syntax that clarifies subject/object, etc. I use “he” and “she” for animals, as more and more “animal people” seem to be doing. Of course, that usage has the same problems as it does in English for the unknown or nonspecified sex and the other complications. But “it”? No way! My “Ask Me, Says the Turtle” (Turtles All the Way: Poems. Finishing Line Press, 2016), expresses that lack of respect in a persona poem written in box turtle Diode’s voice. (Diode has been involved in communication and cognition exploration since 1979.)

“You meet me steering down the woodland trail, secure in the hand of my tutor. You look in her eyes and ask her what I always hear, Does it know you? And what does it eat?

I say, ask ME. I am not an it. . . .”

I would love to see these concepts published as a children’s book, with lovely illustrations. This is a perspective that ideally should be learned at a young age and the material lends itself to illustration. Hoping to see this happen before my little grandchild gets too much older.

author says, “Sadly, since we cannot photosynthesize, we humans must take other lives in order to live. We have no choice but to consume, but we can choose to consume a plant or animal in a way that honors the life that is given and the life that flourishes as a consequence. Instead of avoiding ethical jeopardy by creating distance, we can embrace and reconcile that tension. We can acknowledge food plants and animals as fellow beings and through sophisticated practices of reciprocity demonstrate respect for the sacred exchange of life among relatives.”

This is a crap excuse for killing and eating non-human beings. Really? You would eat your cousin? your mother? If you really saw non-human beings as your relatives, you wouldn’t eat them.

There is a qualitative difference between eating plants and eating non-human animals which the author conveniently drifts over. Eat animals, if you wish, but with honesty, not with hypocrisy.

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This is a powerful article that illustrates how western thought and language centers objectification and thus separates human species from all other corporeal, material, and spiritual phenomena. But language is alive and fluid. Robin Kimmerer gracefully leads us along a spiritual path of reconnection. As a psychoanalyst, I seek ways to breach the barriers of our language so that we can more fully experience the miracle of the cycles of life.

I was fortunate enough to hear Robin Kimmerer speak at the University of Oregon on this very topic. This is just what a nature essay should do – make us think differently. Force us to sit down and say, “ahh, I never thought of it that way before.” I hope this idea sprouts wings and that we can go to court and speak for the unnamed, the “it” of nature. That we can defend rivers and trees, not for their usefulness to humans but for what they are. #earthtoo

I found refuge in the oasis of that cemetery while a law student at Syracuse, and well remember the acorns, squirrels and peace it offered. Ms. Kimmerer’s essay calls to mind the dissent of Justice William O. Douglas in Sierra Club v. Morton, in which Douglas opined that any natural being — e.g., a river, a grove of trees, or an animal — should have “standing” to be heard, and its (ki?) voice considered. “So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes — fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.”

This essay made me thinking of all the times I have tried to explain to people surrounding me about the differences that different language provoke your ways of thinking. Or how it limitates it.

Born in Argentina and living more than 30 years in Israel, came as a child when my parents decided this will be the best place for us, every single day in my life goes by with thoughts about this issues. Different thinking options that evoke the ways we think.

As a nurse giving service it a community care clinic, I have lately started working with ultra religious people. Every interaction became an act of learning. Even though we speak the same language, Hebrew , we use the same language in such different ways. While interacting I discover many ways of speech used by them which I do not no at all. So the context, of course, produces the meaning.

I enjoyed reading! Thank you

I identify with so many elements in this reading. I grew up in a marvelous old cemetery and I loved to read tombstones to try to learn about the people who rested there. I have also always loved Native American cultures and history and often work with and write about Pawnee and other Native people whom I know and love. I have learned much from them and feel very akin to them. In this piece, Robin Kimmer writes about the very “person”-al kinship that Native Americcns feel for each other, the earth, the animals, their environment, and more. That is so true and so worth remembering. When Native American hunters kill an animal, they do so in ritualistic ways and with great respect. They address the animal as brother or sister and thank him or her for giving up his/her own life so that the hunter might live. When their women harvest Mother Corn, squash, pumpkins, beans, or even wild foods, those women always offer thanks and prayers directly to those plants and spirits as if they were people. In so doing, they also honor the gods and spirits of their ancestors. When I talk to or about my animals (horses, dogs, cats) or other animals I usually use he or she pronouns and seldom use it, unless the gender is unknown, but I am less personal with plants and places. Perhaps I need to revisit my own way of looking at places. Thinking that way, I can easily see that my land is a she, for she brings forth grass and shelters my animals with her tree limbs. It is amazing to see how just ascribing a he/she pronoun to a subject can make it far more personal, but it certainly does make a positive difference.

I work as a substitute teacher at a native village nearby my home. It saddens me that capitalistic culture has made its way into the school curriculum. The forest is taught as a renewable resource to be used for the benefit of the economy. We live in a forested area and I am sad to see the pine disappearing and being replaced by a mostly disiduas forest. The DNR says with rising temperatures the forest will soon change permanently, but no responsibility is being taken for the way we manage our forests and how this relates to climate change. In college I was taking botany, and many of my friends were studying forestry. It was interesting to see that we were learning completely different things from our intructors. Botany would teach of the importance of root systems and how the leaves of old growth trees would pull in moisture, while the forestry students were being taught that clear cuts were good because that way the deer would have plenty to eat. In saddens me to see that native children are being taught that clear cuts are necessary and and easily renewable, and that trees only took a short time to grow. I wonder how soon the native children will lose the old way of thinking and forget that the ancient white pine are indeed there “kin”. Teddy Roosevelt is a good example of someone who was able to keep a balance between the economy and preserving the natural world in which we live, so I know it is possible. One thing I did disagree with regarding the essay is the idea of being heartless when you do not take in refugees. I think one has to be careful of taking in mass immigrants from places that have already experienced environmental collapse due to high birth rates and cultural separation from nature. The Native Americans learned a hard lesson when they let Europeans immigrate in in mass. To invite many people into your nation that do not respect your way of life or the natural world will forever be a thorn in your side. Just as the white settlers did not respect the native cosmology, so is it with many refugees and immigrants that come to our country for economic benefit. I do think we as nation should help them, but it is dangerous to make them citizens and allow them to vote. We can help in other ways that do not include sacrificing our own way of life and making America unlivable for our grandchildren to come.

Re: Janine would correct me: she would not refer to her students as “freshmen” since they are neither fresh nor all men. We call them “first-year students.” Words matter. She has collected their assignment, a written reflection on a cemetery walk last week, as baseline data. Now we revisit the same place, but with new ideas about grammar bouncing around in the students’ heads. New to them, perhaps, but in fact ancient—the grammar of animacy.

The “first year students” here are called “freshers” and are taken as “fresh ass” as I have come to understand. “Words matter”.

I love this whole idea, especially with the opening lines. Truly, words matter coherent with the grammar of animacy, I wondered why kids would gladly repeat the same “mistake” of calling the “its” “kis”, but now I realized. Nature cannot lie. In my language, Igbo, of Nigerian origin, it is general also to refer to “nonhuman beings” by their true names, not minding pronoun. Trees are called trees, oaks, oaks, and so it is with animals and humans. There’s no such word as it, only that verbs justifies “ki” and “kin” from human beings. I love this, the world needs this not because it is against English as a language, it is the fact. Nature cannot lie.

I love this whole idea, especially with the opening lines. Truly, words matter coherent with the grammar of animacy, I wondered why kids would gladly repeat the same “mistake” of calling the “its” “kis”, but now I realized. Nature cannot lie. In my language, Igbo, of Nigerian origin, it is general also to refer to “nonhuman beings” by their true names, not minding pronoun. Trees are called trees, oaks, oaks, and so it is with animals and humans. There’s no such word as it, only that verbs justifies “ki” and “kin” from human beings. Now, plants in biology are grouped as sexual and asexual. My native language also recognises this and coalesce also the haemaphrodites. Nature is beautiful, no language is superior to the other, and THANK you so much for this Ma. I love this, the world needs this not because it is against English as a language, it is the fact. Nature cannot lie. Thanks to Orion Magazine for publishing this essay. Peace.

Fascinating account of how language differences change our perceptions–of us and other entities in our world, and beyond. As a text linguist, I have always been interested in how language shapes and to an extent explains a culture, by providing quite detailed terms for some areas of life, and hardly anything in others. One example of language and thinking differences in two cultures is found in the 1992 novel, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, by Danish author Peter Høeg.

Fascinating. I wonder if there is something about boundaries, related to colonising cultures. A while back I went to the Koorie (Australian Indigenous People) Heritage Trust to enquire about their stories of the afterlife. Two of the elders tried to explain to me. Let me be clear that I may have only poorly understood. This is their story, not mine to tell, and I’m only trying to comprehend from my side of the cultural border. The gist was, I think, that their stories were all about country, the place of all things, animate, inanimate, human, in country – ”Beings of the earth’? All things were always part of country. So the moment of one human being moving from life to death, was not crossing a border of any consequence. The two Koorie women were very kind to me, gave me a lot of their time, but finally looked at one another and sighed, as if they felt I was just never really going to be able to get it.

“The language speaks us” according to de Saussure. Hence, the reason why Robin Kimmerer invites us to change the way we speak about other beings so as to acknowledge them as our kin. Just like the Native Americans, the indigenous peoples of the Malay Peninsula and Borneo used to be close to Nature. They treated living and non-living beings in their cosmos as if they were their ancestors or relatives. When I was a child living in a village, my mother taught me to seek permission from the guardians of the trees, and even anthills, when we passed through groves, shrubs and bushes in the dark. With urbanization, and electricity, we began to dismiss such practices as superstitions and illogical.

I think we are a world waiting for ki. In this post- Bruce Jenner world gender has been redefined. Labels Men and Women do not begin to cover the diversity lived and experienced by some. We trip over he and she pronouns. I often lament that the America’s would be so different if settled and conquered by Asians and not Europeans. We would have welcomed ki a long time ago. And then I wake to the thought- but we were. The tribal peoples who were present at the conquest could have taught all those who came a language and philosophy of your people. Humans are not separate from nature. We are part of that web of life and must develop a vision of how we protect that web that provides for the continuance of ki. Not as objects to objectify and commercialize. It does all start with language and in middle school we used to invent words and attribute meaning to kin. I share your vision.

A beautifully written eye opener. The change in pronouns did work a kind of magic though it remains to be seen whether I will succeed in my intention to use ki instead of it. But then in languages that assigns male and female gender (french, hindi)even to inanimate things like table there is no particular intimacy. Or is there? The world is a better place due such passionate lovers of nature who can love the lichen on a tomb and the birds on a bough

A beautifully written eye opener. The change in pronouns did work a kind of magic though it remains to be seen whether I will succeed in my intention to use ki instead of it. But then in languages that assigns male and female gender (french, hindi)even to inanimate things like table there is no particular intimacy. Or is there? The world is a better place due to such passionate lovers of nature who can love the lichen on a tomb and the birds on a bough

The change in pronouns did work a kind of magic though it remains to be seen whether I will succeed in my intention to use ki instead of it. But then in languages that assigns male and female gender (french, hindi)even to inanimate things like table there is no particular intimacy. Or is there? The world is a better place due to such passionate lovers of nature who can love the lichen on a tomb and the birds on a bough. poignant

I liked that you started out with human interest. It helped bring me into the subject. I also love how you compare human death rites with animals. Beautifully written.

I have read your book, Braiding Sweetgrass and portions of Gathering Moss. It was only while reading this essay though that I was reminded of St. Francis and his lovely poem, “The Canticle of Brother Sun.” In this work, he refers not only to Brother Sun, but also to Brother Fire and Brother Wind. He refers to Sister Moon, Sister Water, and our sister, Mother Earth. Perhaps this is another pat to wholeness. After reading your book, i began to experiment with forms by referring to trees, birds, rivers, etc as someone. Someone flows between to banks and carries boats along. It felt a bit stilted when I read the poems aloud, and I got strange looks from the audience. My heritage is European and not Indian, so I may try using the vocabulary of St. Francis. Sister Water, Brother River, etc. It will be another attempt.

Delightful. Moving. Needed in our times. For a linguist (German, Spanish, English French; international conference interpreter) deeply troubling and enlightening. In German, I remember a horrible book: “The Dictionary of the Inhuman.” Made up almost entirely of nouns. Composite nouns. Very long, complicated, composte nouns. I am a poet. Poems, to be poetic, flutter on words. It’ their key, their life force, their sparkle Thank you for a timely, beautifully argued appeal!

Fascinating article about changing out mindset through deliberate use of language.

Thoughtful essay about how different languages provide us with different world-views and values.

Yes I do think the words we use affect the way we think. When we refer to an animal as “it” instead of “he” or “she” we are more inclined to treat it as an object instead of a sentient being. like ourselves. A new pronoun would be useful, but have I the courage to be a pioneer in this regard?

An intriguing argument for the power of language – even a harmless pronoun – to shape our world view and our morality. And the proposed new pronouns – ‘ki’ and ‘kin’ – even evoke linguistic associations with existing words, like ‘kindred’ and perhaps even ‘kind’. I found the argument compelling, although in some places it verges on religious fervour. Here are some quotes I found particularly significant: ‘I wonder if English sharpened its verbal ax and lost the companionship of oaks and primroses when it began to keep company with capitalism.’ ‘Wendell Berry writes, “People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.”’ ‘I am always in awe, and always in relationship. In both cases the plants provide for me, teach me, and inspire me.’ ‘An indigenous plant woman might say, “My plant relatives have shared healing knowledge with me and given me a root medicine.”’ ‘I want a word for beingness. Can we unlearn the language of objectification and throw off colonized thought?’ ‘War on a language of animacy and relationship to the natural world was essential to the dual mission of religious and economic conversion. Certainly the biblical mandate for human subjugation of the creation was incompatible with indigenous languages.’ ‘If pronouns can kindle empathy, I want to shower the world with their sound.’ We should not forget, however, that English is not the only language! Latin languages and German, for example, genderize, and thus in some sense personalize, all nouns; we anglophiles struggle with the articles and declensions. Finnish, on the other hand, abolishes the gender of nouns but distinguishes between person of any gender and things.

I found this story educational as well as startling. I agree with all of the students mention ed in this story. I am concerned about how we as humans treat each other and how we treat each other. I also struggled with changing the way we refer to nature and animals. I me have a problem with changing the way it is used.

Greetings; It’s a fact that it is a fact that it is a matter of great interest to the disappearance of the sub-languages in developing countries and the lack of importance of the local dialects. Thank you

It is interesting that this is the second of the given essays to look at language and the natural world. I wondered if the author had thought about how sometimes we label a bird or an animal with it if we don’t know the sex but anyone with a male dog calls him, him or a female her, etc Ki coming from kin is the perfect pronoun for other living things as they truly are our kin and this can apply to trees and lichens as well as elephants and birds, yet I feel it will work better with lifeforms that don’t have gender that is obvious to us. I thought it a little sad that the kid who came from the farm protested to animals being called he or she. I grew up on a farm where every cow had a name and not all but many of the sheep too and they were always referred to as he or she or they. Maybe we are waking up a little to how we have had to not dehumanise animals to make them commodoties in our factory farms and on our freezer shelves. maybe ki and kin wont get into world wide use but the more people we have who write thoughtfully about and worry about these things the better place our world will be. This author feels the loss of the connection her ancestors had with the natural world and making that connection with how her people’s language was erased is very moving. This happened us in Ireland too where we are still trying to erase the shame that was heaped on our beautiful culture by colonisation. In rural Ireland every ditch, fence, hillock had a name and every creature was as just a part of the world as the humans, in a funny aside rural Irish people will often use a female pronoun for perhaps their car her tractor as he she is such an important part of their life but maybe that’s taking it too far!

Fascinating account re linguistic agency and being.

This is a well articulated piece of article. I love it! It reminds me of how the imperial settlers marginalized, and systematically tried to exterminate my culture and traditions- the Oromo. The Oromo have lived with nature for years and years. They have big respect for nature- trees, animals , in general for all living things. They love to live with them They don’t treat, for example water as an object, they treat as a subject. They call “bishaan”, as bi-sha—n, meaning water. They have rules for every creatures – if you kill a snake, you will be punished, even a termite can’t be unreasonably be killed in their tradition.

The writer doesn’t only has scientific knowledge but she also has an indigenous knowledge. And, she skillfully blended them together to present us this wonderful article.

Thank you again!

Astounding article. Thank you, thank you. I am extremely curious to know which children’s books have incorporated these pronouns into their text, as mentioned in the article. Does anyone happen to know of any? I am having difficulty finding them. Thank you.

Thank you for this beautifully written, thought provoking essay. I am a better person for having read this. I only wish these thoughts had been presented to me as a child, rather than in my old age.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this loving tribute to all beings on this earth. As a person who feels most peaceful and happy when outdoors – especially among trees and by water – I have a strong connection with nature. I like the idea of using ki and kin more often. I will also be more aware of when I use the word ‘it’.

Many thanks for this fascinating article which has resonated with me so strongly. May I use ki and kin at the end of a novella I have written in draft? I was a university lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan Uni., UK, Cheshire campus, teaching creative writing. I now facilitate Wild Writing workshops in the community. As a keen naturalist, I have written for the Guardian’s Country Diary and am a member of Wildlife Trust and RSPB. During the pandemic I have written pieces on my FB page about the power of the natural world and the links between ecology, sighting Robert Macfarlane( I have recently listened to Robin’s podcast with Robert 🙂 ) tenets of yoga philosophy and the Romantic poets: Everything is connected. Nature is us and we are nature. A title of a piece of writing I wrote in terms of how we relate to the natural world: It is time for a new beginning, a new way of living, time for change-I was delighted at the positive response I received. Thank you for enhancing my thinking. I have been wondering for sometime how we might move forward with our relationship with the land and family and how this may impact on my writing too. I experiment with language: ‘words make worlds’ of course, I have ‘borrowed’ language from this article and Robin’s podcast and the piece in today’s Guardian, which of course I will reference and acknowledge in my creative work: ‘reciprocity’ of gifts. Like Robin, and Richard Powers: ‘art and storytelling move consciousness’ and in a humble way I wish to contribute to this debate and seek to do this in my work. Thank you for gifting me a way forward. Namaste Julie

This beautiful and inspiring article brought me to tears. Thank you!

really inspiring article about how do we look towards nature

In one of the above comments the writer referred to the Greeks (may you teach in the shade of a tree as the Greeks did). However, we must remember that to a large extent the objectification that Western thinking and language encourage is due to the dualistic thinking of the ancient Greeks.

Totally inspiring article. I will try to use ki and kin. Pleae not the correct spelling of Māori.

I’m reminded of a story I read by Frank O’Connor, the Irish short-story writer. I cannot remember the title. An old woman goes to her priest to commission a mass for a deceased family member. The priest is shocked to learn that the family member was a dog. He tells her that dogs don’t have souls. In the mid-20th century Irishmen, let alone Irishwomen, didn’t contradict a priest – but this one does. “Anything that can love has a soul,” she says, and tells him how much love the dog gave her and her late husband. The priest tries again, saying that the dog wouldn’t be in Purgatory. Neither is her husband, she says – he was a good man and she’s sure he went straight to heaven. Then why did she have a mass said for his soul? “Just to let him know I’m thinking of him.” I think the story ends with the priest asking the woman to pray for him.

What a fascinating essay, yes indeed, we have a great deal of relationship with nature, but only those with a sense of how the environment around them came into being, understand the summary of this piece. Growing up in my native home, the forest was our place of refuge when trouble came. We consulted the rivers when bearing child has become an issue for a family. Our ancestors spoke through the trees to messengers when calamities were above to befall the land. Not to mention the leafs that were used as herbs to heal the sick. Yet, they used “it”pronoun coined to favor them to describe nature. Nature is part of us, we’re made from it and we will return to it. Be wise and begin to treat it as part of you, so that when you return to it, generations after you would offer same.

As someone who knows so little about the environment, this article was a very endearing read. I am so happy I came across this as part of one o fmy readings for a university course. Thank you for writing this.

I don’t know how I came across this article but I am glad I did. I am working on a play about the digitization of East Indian languages and the loss of aesthetics. I found reading this very wholesome. I wish I could take your class. Thank you for sharing.

I just loved this article. I referred to it in the thesis I am writing and all the its referring to kin, are being corrected to “ki”, with a full explanation. Thank you

I think some poeple use “it” when gender is unknown, but I have always found myself identifying an animal or plant as he or she based on how it felt to me during an encounter. Attitude is important in our interactions, as is moving past the shallow measure of “What can I use this for? Of what benefit is it to me?” Better to wonder how we can coexist, or simply coexist without treating everything as expendable. If a new pronoun, even teh discussion of a new pronoun, moves us in that direction, we are making good progress. Excellent article – thank you for sharing it again!

Deeply observed and thought through, Prof. Kimmerer’s essay is very stimulating. I’m a little surprised that in 5 years of comments, only one person (Ray Zimmerman on November 21, 2018) points out that in late Medieval Europe, Francis of Assisi developed and bequeathed to his followers a language of identifying nonhuman creatures as brothers and sisters. Whatever fresh start this might have given Western Christian thinking about nature was overwhelmed in the following centuries by internal turmoil and encounters with capitalism, colonialism, rationalism, science, and technology. St. Francis was covered with cement and chained to a birdbath. Some of his followers today are trying to cut him loose, though, and his linguistic innovation can mesh nicely with Kimmerer’s. I do have to object that the “biblical mandate for human subjugation of the creation” that Kimmerer mentions is a pure fiction, got up by capitalism from two or three sentences wrenched out of their context in a large collection of literature. The Bible itself originated in an “indigenous” pastoral and agricultural community. One Psalm (8) may be misinterpreted to bless human exploitation of the nonhuman; but another (Psalm 104) envisions forest creatures “seeking their food from God” just as humans do, and an animating divine spirit giving rise to all creatures. Yet another (Psalm 148) pictures sun, moon, and stars, winds and weathers, mountains, trees, animals, birds, and “creeping things” worshiping the Creator on an equal footing with men and women. All which is to say that the ecological crisis must be met with every human resource. Not only is changing language a way to change the world, it may be the only way to change the world. The record of new pronouns succeeding is not encouraging, but it must be tried. Traditional beliefs and cultures must be given their voices back. And that includes ones lingering in the background of some very unpromising reaches of Western culture.

It appears I have been few years off in discovering this ligh bearer. Nevertheless, these words have tugged my heart’s strings as does a song that speaks our soul. The least I can do is share this “conversation” with my kin near and far.

You just perfectly put into words what I’ve needed and wanted to hear since I was little. The world around is just as real as us and we are not above ki. Ki is part of us and us part of ki. Thank you, so much for this, I can now speak of nature in a way that reveres ki. I also found a pronoun that says I’m living and part of this earth. Thank you so much.

They did something similar in Swedish a few years ago, it’s already widely accepted. They introduced a new pronoun “hen” (instead of han(=he) or hon(=she)) that’s to be used when the gender of a person isn’t know. It’s not animacy but it could be used the same way, and probably is.

Thank you for a very well written and thoughtful article. I have recently come across animal communication, which I and many others have experienced as very very real. Far more real than most things in our lives, like money, aha. The animal communicator I have worked was telling me about how she learned the medicinal properties of the plants by talking and listening to them in a field. There is lost wisdom in the old languages, cultures, perspectives of the indigenous. However, the Truth is never lost. It always exists within us and all things all the time. There is always room to embrace new language; I say that if you find it rings true for you, it likely will for many others (I know it does for me). There will 100% be resistance, even from within ourselves. I found myself wondering why the whole world doesn’t know about animal communication. It is the same concept you are talking about here, respecting and knowing these other beings as full equal beings with shared soul. I realized it is because it requires us to abandon everything we are holding onto. Our world could not possibly stay the same if we let ourselves know what was possible and True. The pronouns will be embraced as the world and our perception of it changes.

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Speaking of Nature

A cemetery seemed an odd place to contemplate the boundaries of being. Sandwiched between the campus and the interstate, this old burial ground is our cherished slice of nearby nature where the long dead are silent companions to college students wandering the hilly paths beneath rewilding oaks. The engraved names on overgrown headstones are upholstered in moss and crows congregate in the bare branches of an old beech, which is also carved with names. Reading the messages of a graveyard you understand the deep human longing for the enduring respect that comes with personhood. Names, names, names: the stones seem to say, “I am. You are. He was.” Grammar, especially our use of pronouns, is the way we chart relationships in language and, as it happens, how we relate to each other and to the natural world.

Tiptoeing in her mud boots, Caroline skirts around a crumbling family plot to veer into the barberry hedge where a plastic bag is caught in the thorns. “Isn’t it funny,” she says, “that we think it’s disrespectful to walk over the dead, but it’s perfectly okay to disrespect the other species who actually live here?”

We have a special grammar for personhood. We would never say of our late neighbor, “It is buried in Oakwood Cemetery.” Such language would be deeply disrespectful and would rob him of his humanity. We use instead a special grammar for humans: we distinguish them with the use of he or she, a grammar of personhood for both living and dead Homo sapiens. Yet we say of the oriole warbling comfort to mourners from the treetops or the oak tree herself beneath whom we stand, “It lives in Oakwood Cemetery.” In the English language, a human alone has distinction while all other living beings are lumped with the nonliving “its.”

As a botany professor, I am as interested in the pale-green lichens slowly dissolving the words on the gravestones as in the almost-forgotten names, and the students, too, look past the stones for inky cap mushrooms in the grass or a glimpse of an urban fox. The students out for a walk on this late fall day are freshmen in Janine DeBaise’s environmental writing class at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry where we both teach. I’ve invited them on a mission to experiment with the nature of language and the language of personhood. Janine would correct me: she would not refer to her students as “freshmen” since they are neither fresh nor all men. We call them “first-year students.” Words matter. She has collected their assignment, a written reflection on a cemetery walk last week, as baseline data. Now we revisit the same place, but with new ideas about grammar bouncing around in the students’ heads. New to them, perhaps, but in fact ancient—the grammar of animacy.

For me, this story began in another classroom, in another century, at the Carlisle Indian School where my Potawatomi grandfather was taken as a small boy. My chance of knowing my native language and your chance of ever hearing it were stolen in the Indian boarding schools where native children were forbidden to speak their own language. Within the walls of that school, the clipped syllables of English replaced the lush Potawatomi sounds of water splashing on rocks and wind in the trees, a language that emerged from the lands of the Great Lakes. Our language hovers at the edge of extinction, an endangered species of knowledge and wisdom dwindling away with the loss of every elder.

So, bit by bit, I have been trying to learn my lost language. My house is spangled with Post-it notes labeling wiisgaak, gokpenagen, and ishkodenhs. It’s a very difficult language to learn, but what keeps me going is the pulse of animacy in every sentence. There are words for states of being that have no equivalent in English. The language that my grandfather was forbidden to speak is composed primarily of verbs, ways to describe the vital beingness of the world. Both nouns and verbs come in two forms, the animate and the inanimate. You hear a blue jay with a different verb than you hear an airplane, distinguishing that which possesses the quality of life from that which is merely an object. Birds, bugs, and berries are spoken of with the same respectful grammar as humans are, as if we were all members of the same family. Because we are. There is no it for nature. Living beings are referred to as subjects, never as objects, and personhood is extended to all who breathe and some who don’t. I greet the silent boulder people with the same respect as I do the talkative chickadees.

It’s no wonder that our language was forbidden. The language we speak is an affront to the ears of the colonist in every way, because it is a language that challenges the fundamental tenets of Western thinking—that humans alone are possessed of rights and all the rest of the living world exists for human use. Those whom my ancestors called relatives were renamed natural resources. In contrast to verb-based Potawatomi, the English language is made up primarily of nouns, somehow appropriate for a culture so obsessed with things.

At the same time that the language of the land was being suppressed, the land itself was being converted from the communal responsibility of native people to the private property of settlers, in a one-two punch of colonization. Replacing the aboriginal idea of land as a revered living being with the colonial understanding of land as a warehouse of natural resources was essential to Manifest Destiny, so languages that told a different story were an enemy. Indigenous languages and thought were as much an impediment to land-taking as were the vast herds of buffalo, and so were likewise targeted for extermination.

Linguistic imperialism has always been a tool of colonization, meant to obliterate history and the visibility of the people who were displaced along with their languages. But five hundred years later, in a renamed landscape, it has become a nearly invisible tool. We forget the original names, that the Hudson River was “the river that runs both ways,” that Devils Tower was the sacred Bear Butte of the Lakota. Beyond the renaming of places, I think the most profound act of linguistic imperialism was the replacement of a language of animacy with one of objectification of nature, which renders the beloved land as lifeless object, the forest as board feet of timber. Because we speak and live with this language every day, our minds have also been colonized by this notion that the nonhuman living world and the world of inanimate objects have equal status. Bulldozers, buttons, berries, and butterflies are all referred to as it, as things, whether they are inanimate industrial products or living beings.

English has come to be the dominant language of commerce, in which contracts to convert a forest to a copper mine are written. It’s just the right language for the purpose, because the forest and the copper ore are equivalent “its.” English encodes human exceptionalism, which privileges the needs and wants of humans above all others and understands us as detached from the commonwealth of life. But I wonder if it was always that way. I can’t help but think that the land spoke clearly to early Anglo-Saxons, just as it did to the Potawatomi. Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful book Landmarks, about land and language, documents myriad place names of great particularity that illuminate an ancient Anglo-Saxon intimacy with the land and her beings. It is said that we are known by the company we keep, and I wonder if English sharpened its verbal ax and lost the companionship of oaks and primroses when it began to keep company with capitalism. I want to suggest that we can begin to mend that rift—with pronouns. As a reluctant student of the formalities of writing, I never would have imagined that I would one day be advocating for grammar as a tool of the revolution.

Some of the students in the cemetery have read the chapter in my book Braiding Sweetgrass that invokes the grammar of animacy. They are taken aback by the implicit assumption of the hierarchy of being on which English grammar is built, something they had not considered before. They dive headfirst into the philosophical implications of English-language pronouns.

One student, Carson, writes in his essay that it is a numbing word: “It numbs us to the consequences of what we do and allows us to take advantage of nature, to harm it even, free of guilt, because we declare other beings to be less than ourselves, just things.” He echoes the words of Wendell Berry who writes, “People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.”

While it’s true that words are simply vessels for meaning, without meaning of their own, many cultures imbue the utterance of words with spirit because they originate with the breath, with the mystery of life itself. In her book Becoming Wise, Krista Tippett writes, “The words we use shape how we understand ourselves, how we interpret the world, how we treat others. Words make worlds.”

I don’t mean to say that we are constrained to act in a certain way because of our grammar. I’ve been saying it for most of my life and so far I have not clearcut a forest. (I can’t even bring myself to litter, although I tried once, just to see what it would feel like.) Nor does a language of animacy dictate that its speakers will behave with respect toward nonhumans. After all, there are leaders of indigenous nations, raised speaking a grammar of animacy, who willingly surrender their homelands to the use of mining or timber companies. And the Russian language, while embracing animacy in its structure, has not exactly led to a flowering of sustainability there. The relationship between the structure of a language and the behavior characteristic of a culture, is not a causal one, but many linguists and psychologists agree that language reveals unconscious cultural assumptions and exerts some influence over patterns of thought.

As we talk beneath the oaks, one of the students emphatically disagrees: “Just because I say it doesn’t mean I disrespect nature. I grew up on a farm and we called all of our animals it, but we took great care of them. We just said it because everyone knows that you don’t give a name to the thing that you’re going to eat.” Exactly! We use it to distance ourselves, to set others outside our circle of moral consideration, creating hierarchies of difference that justify our actions—so we don’t feel.

In contrast, indigenous philosophy recognizes other beings as our relatives, including the ones we intend to eat. Sadly, since we cannot photosynthesize, we humans must take other lives in order to live. We have no choice but to consume, but we can choose to consume a plant or animal in a way that honors the life that is given and the life that flourishes as a consequence. Instead of avoiding ethical jeopardy by creating distance, we can embrace and reconcile that tension. We can acknowledge food plants and animals as fellow beings and through sophisticated practices of reciprocity demonstrate respect for the sacred exchange of life among relatives.

The students we walk with in the cemetery are primarily environmental scientists in training. The practice of it -ing everything in nature is not only prevalent, but is required in scientific writing. Rachel points out that in her biology class, there are “strict taboos governing personification of nature, and even a whisper of anthropomorphism will lose you a grade on a paper.”

I have had the privilege of spending my life kneeling before plants. As a plant scientist, sometimes I am collecting data. As an indigenous plant woman, sometimes I am gathering medicine. These two roles offer a sharp contrast in ways of thinking, but I am always in awe, and always in relationship. In both cases the plants provide for me, teach me, and inspire me. When I write as a scientist, I must say, “An 8 cm root was extracted from the soil,” as if the leafy beings were objects, and, for that matter, as if I were too. Scientific writing prefers passive voice to subject pronouns of any kind. And yet its technical language, which is designed to be highly accurate, obscures the greater truth.

Writing as an indigenous plant woman I might say, “My plant relatives have shared healing knowledge with me and given me a root medicine.” Instead of ignoring our mutual relationship, I celebrate it. Yet English grammar demands that I refer to my esteemed healer as it, not as a respected teacher, as all plants are understood to be in Potawatomi. That has always made me uncomfortable. I want a word for beingness. Can we unlearn the language of objectification and throw off colonized thought? Can we make a new world with new words?

Inspired by the grammar of animacy in Potawatomi that feels so right and true, I’ve been searching for a new expression that could be slipped into the English language in place of it when we are speaking of living beings. Mumbling to myself through the woods and fields, I’ve tried many different words, hoping that one would sound right to my leafy or feathered companions. There was one that kept rising through my musings. So I sought the counsel of my elder and language guide, Stewart King, and explained my purpose in seeking a word to instill animacy in English grammar, to heal disrespect. He rightly cautioned that “our language holds no responsibility to heal the society that sought to exterminate it.” With deep respect for his response, I thought also of how the teachings of our traditional wisdom might one day be needed as medicine for a broken world. So I asked him if there was a word in our language that captured the simple but miraculous state of just being. And of course there is. “Aakibmaadiziiwin,” he said, “means ‘a being of the earth.’” I sighed with relief and gratitude for the existence of that word. However, those beautiful syllables would not slide easily into English to take the place of the pronoun it. But I wondered about that first sound, the one that came to me as I walked over the land. With full recognition and celebration of its Potawatomi roots, might we hear a new pronoun at the beginning of the word, from the “aaki” part that means land? Ki to signify a being of the living earth. Not he or she, but ki. So that when the robin warbles on a summer morning, we can say, “Ki is singing up the sun.” Ki runs through the branches on squirrel feet, ki howls at the moon, ki’s branches sway in the pine-scented breeze, all alive in our language as in our world.

We’ll need a plural form of course, to speak of these many beings with whom we share the planet. We don’t need to borrow from Potawatomi since—lo and behold—we already have the perfect English word for them: kin. Kin are ripening in the fields; kin are nesting under the eaves; kin are flying south for the winter, come back soon. Our words can be an antidote to human exceptionalism, to unthinking exploitation, an antidote to loneliness, an opening to kinship. If words can make the world, can these two little sounds call back the grammar of animacy that was scrubbed from the mouths of children at Carlisle?

I have no illusions that we can suddenly change language and, with it, our worldview, but in fact English evolves all the time. We drop words we don’t need anymore and invent words that we do. The Oxford Children’s Dictionary notoriously dropped the words acorn and buttercup in favor of bandwidth and chatroom, but restored them after public pressure. I don’t think that we need words that distance us from nature; we need words that heal that relationship, that invite us into an inclusive worldview of personhood for all beings.

As I’ve sent these two little words out into the world like seeds on the wind, they have fallen here and there on fertile ground. Several writers have incorporated them into children’s books and into music. Readers have reported that the very sound, the phoneme pronounced “kee,” has resonance with other words of similar meaning. Ki is a parallel spelling of chi —the word for the inherent life energy that flows through all things. It finds harmony with qui or “who” in Latinate languages. I’ve been told it is the name of a Sumerian Earth goddess and the root of Turkic words for tree. Could ki be a key to unlocking a new way of thinking, or remembering an ancient one?

But these responses are from nature writers, artists, teachers, and philosophers; I want to know how young people, the language makers among us, react. Our little environmental college is dominated by tree huggers, so if there were ever an audience open to ki, they would be it.

With  ki and kin rattling around in their heads, the students walk together in the cemetery again, playing with using the words and seeing how they feel on their tongues and in their heads.

Steeped in the formalities of syntax, a fair number of student questions revolve around wanting “rules” for the use of the new words, rules that we don’t have. Is there a possessive case? Where are the boundaries? “I could say ‘ki’ about this shrub,” Renee says, “but what about the wind?”

“Yes,” I tell her, “in my language, the wind is understood as animate.”

As we stand beneath the stoutly branched oak, the students debate how to use the words. If the tree is ki, what about the acorns? They agree that the acorns are kin, a whole family of little beings. The ground is also littered, in this unkempt portion of the cemetery, with fallen branches. “Are these dead limbs considered kin too? Even though they’re dead?” Evelyn asks. “Looking at the dead branches on the ground, I found myself thinking a lot about firewood,” she says. “I’ve always spoken—and thought—as if I was the one who made firewood. But when I thought of that tree as ki, as a being, I suddenly saw how preposterous that was. I didn’t make the firewood. The tree did. I only picked it up from the ground.” In just one sentence Evelyn experiences a transfer of agency or capacity for action from humankind to the tree itself. The grammar of animacy is an antidote to arrogance; it reminds us that we are not alone. Evelyn later writes, “Using ki made me see everything differently, like all these persons were giving gifts—and I couldn’t help but feel grateful. We call that kind of firewood kindling, and for me it has kindled a new understanding. And look—that word kin is right there in  kindling.”

Another student, Amanda, adds, “Having this word makes me regard the trees more as individuals. Before, I would just call them all ‘oak’ as if they were a species and not individuals. That’s how we learn it in dendrology, but using ki makes me think of them each, as not just ‘oak,’ but as that particular oak, the one with the broken branch and the brown leaves.”

Despite their very brief introduction to ki and kin, the students get right to the heart of the words’ implications: “I imagine that this would be a challenge for most religious people,” Paul says. “It kind of knocks humans off the pedestal of being the only ones with souls.” Indeed, Christian missionaries were the spearhead of language suppression in indigenous cultures and were among the prime architects of the Indian-boarding-school movement. War on a language of animacy and relationship to the natural world was essential to the dual mission of religious and economic conversion. Certainly the biblical mandate for human subjugation of the creation was incompatible with indigenous languages.

Another student, Kieran, observes, “Using these words as I walk around opened my eyes to how we are all connected. When you start using ki and kin, you will feel remorseful that all of your life you took them for granted.”

Ecopsychologists have suggested that our conceptions of self as inherently separate from the natural world have negative outcomes on the well-being of humans and ecosystems. Perhaps these words can be medicine for them both, so that every time we speak of the living world we breathe out respect and inhale kinship, turning the very atmosphere into a medium of relatedness. If pronouns can kindle empathy, I want to shower the world with their sound.

The most outspoken students voice some enthusiasm for the new pronouns, but the quiet skeptics save their reservations for the writing assignment when we are back in class. One student puts it this way: “This is a warm-hearted and generous idea, but it will never work. People don’t like change and they will be pissed off if you try and tell them how to talk. Most people don’t want to think of nature as being as good as them.” One student writes in a scrawl that carries his impatience in every half-formed letter: “If changing the world is what you’re after, do something real. Volunteer at the food bank, plant a tree. Dreaming up pronouns is a major waste of time.”

This is why I love teaching, the way we are forced to be accountable.

The abstraction of “dreaming up pronouns” does seem fruitless during a time in our nation’s history when the language of disrespect is the currency of political discourse. American nationalism, to say nothing of human exceptionalism, is being elevated as a lofty goal, which leaves little room for humility and ecological compassion. It seems quixotic to argue for respect for nonhuman beings when we refuse to extend it to human refugees. But I think this student is wrong. Words do matter, and they can ripple out to make waves in the “real” world.

The ecological compassion that resides in our indigenous languages is dangerous once again to the enterprise of domination, as political and economic forces are arrayed against the natural world and extractive colonialism is reborn under the gospel of prosperity. The contrast in worldview is as stark today as it was in my grandfather’s time, and once again it is land and native peoples who are made to pay the price.

If you think this is only an arcane linguistic matter, just look to the North Dakota prairie where, as I write this, there are hundreds of people camping out in a blizzard enduring bitter cold to continue the protective vigil for their river, which is threatened by the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and the pipeline’s inevitable oil spills. The river is not an it for them—the river lies within their circle of moral responsibility and compassion and so they protect ki fiercely, as if the river were their relative, because ki is. But the ones they are protecting ki from speak of the river and the oil and the pipe all with the same term, as if “it” were their property, as if “it” were nothing more than resources for them to use. As if it were dead.

At Standing Rock, between the ones armed with water cannons and the ones armed with prayer, exist two different languages for the world, and that is where the battle lines are being drawn. Do we treat the earth as if ki is our relative—as if the earth were animated by being—with reciprocity and reverence, or as stuff that we may treat with or without respect, as we choose? The language and worldview of the colonizer are once again in a showdown with the indigenous worldview. Knowing this, the water protectors at Standing Rock were joined by thousands of non-native allies, who also speak with the voice of resistance, who speak for the living world, for the grammar of animacy.

Thankfully, human history is marked by an ever-expanding recognition of personhood, from the time when aboriginals were not seen as human, when slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person, and when a woman was worth less than a man. Language, personhood, and politics have always been linked to human rights. Will we have the wisdom to expand the circle yet again? Naming is the beginning of justice.

Around the world, ideas of justice for nature are emerging in political and legal arenas. In New Zealand, when the Whanganui River was threatened, indigenous Maori leadership earned protection for the sacred waters by getting the river declared a legal “person” with rights to its own well-being. The constitutions of indigenous-led Ecuador and Bolivia enshrine the rights of Mother Nature. The Swiss amended their constitution to define animals as beings instead of objects. Just last year, the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin amended its tribal constitution, recognizing that “ecosystems and natural communities within the Ho-Chunk territory possess an inherent, fundamental, and inalienable right to exist and thrive.” This legal structure will allow the tribe to protect its homelands from mining for fracking sand and fossil fuel extraction because the land will have legal standing as a person. Supported by the revolutionary initiatives of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, the burgeoning Rights of Nature movement is flowering from the roots of animacy, from the personhood of all beings. We’ll need a new pronoun for that.

The students comment that they’d like to use ki and kin, but stumble over the changes in phrasing. “This would be much easier if I’d learned it as a child,” they say. They’re right of course. Not only because language patterns are established early in development, but because children quite naturally speak of other beings as persons. I delight in listening to my grandson, who like most toddlers watching a butterfly flit across the yard says, “He is flying,” or “She sits on a flower.” Children speak at first with a universal grammar of animacy, until we teach them not to. My grandson is also completely smitten with bulldozers and will watch them endlessly, but despite their motion and their roar he is not confused as to their nature: he calls them “it.”

I am also introducing him to Potawatomi words. In honor of the language that was taken from his great-grandfather, I want to give that language back to my grandson, so he will never be alone in the world and live surrounded by kin. He already has the basics of animacy; he hugs trees and kisses moss. My heart cracked with happiness when he looked up from the blueberries in his oatmeal and said, “Nokomis, are these  minan?”

He’s growing up in a time when respect among peoples has grown threadbare and there are gaping holes in the fabric of life. The mending we need will require reweaving the relationship between humans and our more-than-human kin. Maybe now, in this time when the myth of human exceptionalism has proven illusory, we will listen to intelligences other than our own, to kin. To get there, we may all need a new language to help us honor and be open to the beings who will teach us. I hope my grandson will always know the other beings as a source of counsel and inspiration, and listen more to butterflies than to bulldozers.

This article was made possible through the support of the Kalliopeia Foundation. Originally published in Orion Magazine.

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• Speech About Nature

What is Nature?

Nature includes our natural surroundings including both the biotic and abiotic components. It is essential for our survival and provides us with air, water, and trees. It plays an important role in maintaining the ecological balance of Earth. Here we have provided three dedication speech examples about nature. There is a Long speech about nature and a short 1 minute speech about nature for students and we have also provided 10 lines on Nature Topics for Speech for kids. Students can refer to them to get some idea on the topic.

Long and Short Dedication Speech Example about Nature

Long speech about nature.

Good afternoon all! Today, I am here to deliver a Speech About Nature. For all our needs, such as food, oxygen, air, natural resources, we are all dependent on nature and, most importantly, it gives us a place where we live. Our human life started on this planet, and our "Mother Earth" has faced the dangers of devastation and abuse ever since. Beautiful forests have been ruined because of the innate selfish nature of humans, rivers have been polluted and wide-open areas have been used for factories or other architectural growth.

We don't know that we are invoking Mother Earth's wrath, which can pose a serious threat to our lives. Our land is currently facing the results of all the harmful practices, caused by the drying up of the river, the dying of plants, and the disappearance of mammal species. Another serious issue which we are dealing with is 'global warming', which has a tremendous effect on our atmospheres, such as thawing glaciers, rising sea level and rapidly evolving climate change. This is why we should all track our operations and assist in controlling such circumstances.

The question now arises: how do we control our activities?  Water is an essential natural resource. Therefore, if not in use, we can save every drop of water, by fixing any leakage in taps and closing them properly when not in use. We can practise rainwater harvesting as there is unnecessary water pollution and it is a good means to make use of rainwater. Additionally, wet or dry waste should not be thrown into the drainage pipes as they ultimately harm our water bodies. 

As for the protection of our plants, toxic pesticides shouldn’t be used and the use of home remedies or other environmentally friendly tools should be encouraged. Also, people can avoid throwing rotting fruits, vegetables, leftover food, and eggshells in the waste bin and instead use those to make organic manure for their home garden. Different activities, such as helping to generate fertilizer, aid a ton in recycling waste products from useful items.

Similarly, we should start conserving the electricity used by us. We must switch the power button off before leaving our room/house. When public transport can be used, we shouldn’t use private cars. In reality, we can also use bicycles for a short distance, and protect our environment from the unnecessary release of harmful gasses from our vehicles. In this way, we can make our precious contribution to protecting Mother Earth from permanent/irreversible damage. 

I would like to conclude this speech by requesting each of you to spread awareness regarding our environment and the practices which we can follow to save it.

Short 1 Minute Speech on Nature

Today, I am here to deliver a 1 minute speech on nature. One of the amazing gifts with which the planet earth is endowed is nature. It's the incomparable beauty of planet earth. Nature comprises the sweet birds singing, the change of season, the blessed morning and evening, the light of the rivers, the thunderstorms, the floods, the glaciers, the mountains, etc. In reality, the variety and blessing of nature can never be counted by humanity. Nature, in human life, has tremendous meaning and significance. To protect our lives, we need water, fresh air, and the earth. Mankind's survival is entirely dependent on nature.

Sadly, at the hands of humans, nature has suffered a great deal. Humanity has damaged and ruined nature in different ways over a hundred years or more. Mankind's industrial and technological advancement has hit the flow and rhythm of nature badly. Without understanding the fact that its destruction would end human existence, we have been unnecessarily misusing nature and its wealth for our material benefit. 

The ecology of our lives has been seriously disrupted by the cutting of trees, burning of fossil fuels, pollution of soil, water and climate, etc. Nature is at immense risk. The atmosphere is contaminated by the introduction of dangerous and contaminating elements into it. We are experiencing shifts in the patterns of the atmosphere. The living testimony to this reality is the torrential rains, floods, droughts, earthquakes, landslides and glacier loss, etc.

It is time for us to understand the significance and value of our mother nature. We need to prepare and behave accordingly to tackle it effectively. To rescue our future generations, we need to save nature.

10 Lines on Nature Topics for Speech

Here we have provided pointers which will help you in writing a 1 minute Speech about Nature.

The surroundings where we live, the natural resources or food we consume are parts of nature.

Forests, hills, rivers, seas, deserts, weather etc. are part of nature.

Nature provides us with opportunities to satisfy our needs and wants, such as water, air, and food.

Earth is the only known world that supports life for good and has biodiversity survival. 

The environment, the climate and the weather are part of nature and are important to us.

Nature is also a major source of Ayurvedic medicines that have been used in the treatment of different common and fatal diseases for thousands of years.

Nature has an ecosystem consisting of biotic and abiotic components which are complementary and a part of nature.

As for the protection of our plants, toxic pesticides shouldn't be used and the use of home remedies or other environmentally friendly tools should be encouraged.

Human wellbeing is entirely connected to the health of the surrounding community. Nature is full of different resources responsible for our lives that are renewable and non-renewable.

In reality, we can also use bicycles for a short distance, and protect our environment from the unnecessary release of harmful gasses from our vehicles.

FAQs on Speech About Nature

1. Does Vedantu provide any article on the topic of "Nature" in English?

There is a speech on the topic of "Nature" in English available on the official website of Vedantu. In this article, a long speech, short speech and 10 lines of speech on the given topic are provided to the student. Through this content, students will get to know about the meaning of nature, the factors that are affecting nature and the conservative measures to prevent nature. The whole content is prepared by Vedantu experts in an easy to comprehend language. The students can download this speech in PDF format.  

2. Which factors are affecting the growth of plants in nature?

Ecological factors affect the growth of plants in nature. There are three types of ecological factors. These are mentioned below:

Climatic Factors - This type consists of factors like light, wind, temperature, atmospheric humidity, atmospheric gases and rainfall. 

Physiographic Factors - The factors included in this type are the direction of slopes, sunlight on vegetation, altitude and effect of steepness.

Biotic Factors - The biotic factors affecting the plants' growth are interrelationships between various plants of a particular region, the interrelationship between plants and animals living in the same area and interrelationship between plants and soil microorganisms. 

  3. In what ways can pollution be controlled to protect nature?

The following steps can prove to be helpful in controlling the pollution to protect nature:

To reduce air pollution, one should reduce the use of vehicles for short distances. Instead of vehicles, people can use bicycles. 

Turn off the fans and lights when not in use. By doing this, we can save electricity.

Plastic is very harmful to nature. One should not use and burn plastic bags and other plastic products. 

Plant more and more trees to increase the amount of oxygen in nature.

  4. What are the prime components of nature?

There are two prime components of nature. These are as follows:

Biological Components - Biological components which are also known as biotic components comprises all living things. Various ecosystems are formed due to the interaction between the animals, microorganisms and plants with the abiotic components. In these ecosystems, organisms are classified as decomposers, producers and consumers.

Physical Components - These components are also known as abiotic components which comprise all non-living things. These components are classified as lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere. 

5. What is the role of decomposers in nature?

Decomposers are the organisms that decompose the dead decaying organic matter in the environment. The decomposers consist of saprophytes like bacteria and fungi. The role of these decomposers are discussed below:

They recycle all the nutrients that are used by the plants.

Decomposers are regarded as cleansing agents as they decompose the dead and decaying animals and plants.

As they decompose the dead organic matter, a new place is created for other organisms in the biosphere. 

Decomposers help in putting different elements back in air, water and soil so that producers can use them. 

Learning the language of nature

Timothy seekings.

Nature has brought forth intelligences, minds, and languages. We need to come to our senses and begin to listen.

Art, spirituality and epidemiology do not often intersect. But when they do, it’s worth taking a closer look, especially when the emerging perspective can help us respond to epidemics such as Covid-19 in a more constructive manner.

The current global health crisis is an invitation to listen and reflect on the varying consequences of different kinds of collective human action and the impact of wider social and economic structures. 

The inspiration for this way of seeing originates in a recent documentary by artist James Bridle titled  Se ti sabir , the essay ' Spirituality as Common Sense ' by Brother David Steindl-Rast, and the idea of a “ language of epidemics ” suggested by epidemiologist David-Waltner Toews.

Communication 

Bridle recounts how between the eleventh and the nineteenth centuries, lingua franca served as the pidgin language around the Mediterranean, facilitating trade, travel, and communication between members of different nations.

In this language, the word “sabir” meant “to know”. It was commonly used as a question, in which case it meant: “do you know lingua franca, can we speak?” At first encounters, people would greet each other by asking “sabir?” This was a greeting and, at the same time, a means to determine whether they spoke the common language.

Today, as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly sophisticated, we are also revealing other intelligences in nature, in plants and animals and in ecological communities at all scales. In other words, we are gradually realizing that humans are one of multiple forms of knowledge on this living planet.

Bridle offers this example: The eye evolved independently, twice – once in the class of cephalopods, and a second time, in vertebrates. He suggests that the mind, too, has evolved more than once independently, in different species. Octopuses (cephalopods), for instance, are among the most intelligent and behaviourally diverse of all invertebrates.

The idea then is that mind is not an exclusively human feature. There are other minds around us in nature, emerging out of different forms of life. And this invites back the idea of a common language. Can we speak? Can we communicate with those minds?

Brother David Steindl-Rast provides a tentative answer in his essay  Spirituality as Common Sense .  In his view, common sense does not refer to rational thinking and problem solving in practical matters. Rather, it is comparable to the basic human senses such as sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, which allow us to connect to the world around us.

But senses are not exclusive to humans either. All life connects to the surrounding world, and Steindl-Rast suggests that it does so through the common sense.

As humans, we experience this common sense when we connect with animals, trees, or other living beings and experience moments of affinity and deep connectedness.  

What if life has a common language? We know that all life shares a common code: DNA and RNA. But what if life has a common language of the senses, not a language based on a system of semiotics, but one based on a common sense, a language that we can understand in principle, perhaps through feeling? 

Pandemics 

The current case of Covid-19 has to be understood in the context of other infectious diseases that have emerged in recent decades, including MERS, SARS, and H5N1. David Waltner-Toews elaborates on how these outbreaks are not random occurrences but the consequences of human actions and inactions as well as dominant social and economic structures. In this sense, these outbreaks have to be understood as “complex messages from the natural world”. 

A case in point is our proximity to livestock. In the same way as the invention of the ship inadvertently introduced the shipwreck, the domestication of animals in human history brought with it zoonosis, the leaping of pathogens from other animal species to the human.

Many of the most harmful diseases that humans have faced throughout history originate from livestock. Among the diseases to emerge in recent decades, 70 percent are of animal origin. 

After pathogens make the leap to humans, they encounter conducive breeding grounds: modern, dense yet atomised societies, in which the idea of healthcare has come to denote a system for treating diseases rather than one for nurturing healthy people and communities.

In 2008 the WHO determined that the main social determinant of health was social injustice, yet income gaps continue to expand, and unequal distribution of power, money, and resources persist. 

Extraction 

Dominant economic thinking is growth-oriented, exploitative, extractive, resource-hungry, short-sighted, and polluting. Urban centres live off the periphery, the periphery lives off the natural resources.

The relentless expansion of extractive industries feeding the global economy pushes already marginalised people further into the margins and increases contact with the last vestiges of wildlife.

Primary forests, protected areas, and wildlife are not just the linchpins of essential life support systems, but also repositories of unknown scale when it comes to pathogens such as ancient bacteria and viruses. Bringing humans, livestock, trade, and travel closer to them is like extending a welcoming invitation and creating zoonotic passageways for pathogens to the human species.

Newly emerging epidemics are therefore not freak occurrences that will simply go away again. They emerge as consequences of extractive action. They are the outcomes of systemic processes, pressures, relationships, and structures that are innate to the modern global (economic) system and modern lifestyles.

As such, they tell us something about our human behaviour and about our ideas. And therefore, they have to be understood as messages from the realm of nature. Decades ago, ethnobotanist Terrence Mckenna stated that “nature is alive and talking to us, and this is not a metaphor.” Waltner-Toews shows how this can be understood in relation to epidemics. 

If nature is alive and talking to us, it has been sending us a lot of messages. Therefore, it is high time to think about life’s lingua franca, this common sense shared by living beings.

Humans aren’t the only animals that have evolved intelligences, minds, and languages. The unfolding of life has been going on for millions of years. Planet Earth is the home of between 1.2 million known and 8.7 million unknown species of life. From the smallest, to the largest proponents, life has a common code and a common sense.

If these messages have been falling on deaf ears, it might be because we are generally blind to what we cannot see and deaf to what we cannot hear. The question is: Are there intelligent lifeforms that we don’t recognize as such? Are there minds and languages around us that we do not see because, as George Berkeley suggested, the only things we perceive are our  own  perceptions?

In other words, we preclude the possibility of intelligent life, other minds, and other languages of life through our systems of thought and semantic definitions. As modern proponents of science, we have for most part insisted that our interlocuters from the living world speak our language, the language of reason and intellect.

New literacy

As humans we encounter a host of life forms. We encounter hyperobjects as large as typhoons, global warming, and Gaia (12,742 km) and entities as small as Covid-19 (120 nm). The take-away message is that our encounters with these life forms are not freak events occurring in a random universe for no reason. 

These encounters are transmissions of messages. They are not messages in the way you receive a text message or an email. These encounters are messages more in the sense of Marshall McLuhan’s work, captured in his catch phrase “the medium is the message".

They are messages because they represent “a change of scale or pace or pattern“ that is introduced into human affairs, and because they reflect the consequences of our collective behaviour. They are feedback to our actions, like when you hold your finger over a flame. The pain is the feedback. The pain is also the message. The message is pull away your finger. 

In the same way, if you continue to expand the sacrifice zones of your extractive industries, displace the already marginalized and disadvantaged human populations and stir up wildlife populations by disturbing their habitats; if you maintain high-density population livestock, increase bacterial resistance by over-applying antibiotics in agriculture; if you create a ‘flexible’ work force, encourage mass consumer society and provide the global infrastructure for international trade, travel, and transport, etc.

Well, as they say, you don’t always get what you pay for, but you always pay for what you get. In other words, we reap what we sew and we get to experience the outcomes of our actions. Covid-19 is one such outcome, one such incoming message. 

Recent work and literature suggests that other intelligences exist around us. These represent other minds and other languages. In addition, as life has a common code in the form of DNA and RNA, it exhibits a common sense.

Emerging infectious diseases as well as other global and environmental phenomena are not just random occurrences, but rather complex messages from nature. However, we modern humans have largely failed to perceive those encounters as messages because we don’t understand the language.

Nature’s preamble to all our incoming messages is ‘sabir?’ Do you know? Do you speak the common language? And our answer has mostly been ‘No, speak ours!’ The latest epidemic really brings home the message: We should start to learn this common language. Most cultures in human history probably spoke this language to some extent, and it is still spoken today. And that’s good. It means we can find teachers.

In this sense, the task is clear. We have to become multilingual, and that means learning the lingua franca of the living planet. In the Anthropocene, our most pressing concern is to be able to hear and understand what she has to say, because we have been ignoring her messages for too long.

Therefore, in the future, when we encounter an incoming message, we will hopefully be able to respond as we should do: Sabir. We know. Talk. We are listening.  

This Author

Timothy Seekings is a PhD student in Natural Resources and Environmental Science at National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan. His research is about edible insects and his most recent publication is  The proof is in the cricket: engaging with edible insects through action research. 

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The Beauty About The Nature

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

The Stars Awaken a Certain Reverence, Because Though Always Present, They Are Inaccessible;

but all natural objects make a kindred impression when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood. When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet . The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet . This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this, their warranty deeds give no title. To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other;

who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, — he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight.

Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith.

There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,

— no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, — master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable.

I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

Chapter I from Nature , published as part of Nature; Addresses and Lectures

What Is The Meaning Behind Nature, The Poem?

Emerson often referred to nature as the "Universal Being" in his many lectures. It was Emerson who deeply believed there was a spiritual sense of the natural world which felt was all around him.

Going deeper still in this discussion of the "Universal Being", Emerson writes, "The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship."

It's common sense that "nature" is everything you see that is NOT man-made, or changed by man (trees, foliage, mountains, etc.), but Emerson reminds us that nature was set forth to serve man. This is the essence of human will, for man to harness nature. Every object in nature has its own beauty. Therefore, Emerson advocates to view nature as a reality by building your own world and surrounding yourself with natural beauty.

• The purpose of science is to find the theory of nature.
• Nature wears the colors of the Spirit.
• A man is fed, not to fill his belly, but so he may work.
• Each natural action is graceful.

"Material objects are necessarily kinds of scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation to their first origin; in other words, visible nature must have a spiritual and moral side."

This quote is cited in numerous works and it is attributed to a "French philosopher." However, no name can be found in association with this quote.

What is the main point of Nature, by Emerson?

The central theme of Emerson's famous essay "Nature" is the harmony that exists between the natural world and human beings. In "Nature," Ralph Waldo Emerson contends that man should rid himself of material cares and instead of being burdened by unneeded stress, he can enjoy an original relation with the universe and experience what Emerson calls "the sublime."

What is the central idea of the essay Nature, by Emerson?

For Emerson, nature is not literally God but the body of God’s soul. ”Nature,” he writes, is “mind precipitated.” Emerson feels that to realize one’s role in this respect fully is to be in paradise (similar to heaven itself).

What is Emerson's view of the Nature of humans?

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Ralph Waldo Emerson left the ministry to pursue a career in writing and public speaking. Emerson became one of America's best known and best-loved 19th-century figures. More About Emerson

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Mother Nature – Nature is Speaking – Julia Roberts

All beings, including humans, are born in nature and from nature. Nature provides for all our needs and fulfils our dreams. Nature provides the life supporting ecosystems that make the Earth habitable, hospitable and friendly for us humans. When we die we go back to nature. This is why we call it Mother Nature.

Mother Nature

“Some call me Nature, others call me mother nature I’ve been here for over four and a half billion years Twenty-two thousand five hundred times longer than you I don’t really need people but people need me Yes, your future depends on me When I thrive, you thrive When I falter, you falter or worse But I’ve been here for aeons I have fed species greater than you, and I have starved species greater than you My oceans, my soil, my flowing streams, my forests, They all can take you or leave you How you chose to live each day whether you regard or disregard me doesn’t really matter to me One way or the other your actions will determine your fate not mine I am nature I will go on I am prepared to evolve Are you?”

NATURE DOES NOT NEED PEOPLE PEOPLE NEED NATURE

Every year we celebrate Mother’s Day. It is an opportunity for us to reflect on relationships and the important role the mother plays in the family.  Very often this is a caring, guiding and nurturing role, becoming over time, a friendship and perhaps companionship. Your mum might be, or might have been, your inspiration, your confidante, perhaps the glue that bonds the family. Mothers are so many wonderful and meaningful things, often making many sacrifices to be so.

In nature it is exactly the same, a lioness will watch over, groom and feed her cubs, and when they are a little older, will teach them to hunt and catch their prey. An elephant will gently teach her little calf to use their tiny trunks, and a giraffe will watch over and encourage her new-born to quickly stand and then run on their long, thin wobbly legs – in all these cases, the mother remains ever vigilant, and will sacrifice all to protect their young. In nature this nurturing and caring often continues for years – well into adulthood.

There are many cases as well in nature where the mother is all of the above, and leads the group, the colony or the tribe: honey bees, killer whales, elephants, spotted hyaenas, lions, meerkats and ants – all are examples of these matriarchal societies where females are the leaders!

Nature itself is indeed wonderful – perhaps that is also why we call it ‘Mother Nature’ – recognising these life-giving qualities.

Source: Conservation International & AlexandrasAfrica

To read other articles on the catastrophic collapse of nature cause by people click here

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How does nature communicate with us?

9 min read Intuition Nature & Environment

Guest post by Sara Wiseman

We all know that the animal world communicates with us: we have either experienced this directly in our own lives, or seen it happening with others.

Sometimes, this level of communication is astounding: we have all heard the tale of a school of dolphins saving a person struggling in rough surf; the elephant that cries upon being rescued from chains; the dog who welcomes a family member home.

These are beautiful, heartwarming methods of communication with other mammals: our species, part of our extended family.

Sometimes, the way we communicate with animals is mystic: the wild deer or cougar or eagle who appears seemingly out of nowhere as totem, sent by the Universe to provide a clear and direct sign. Even the reptilian world shows up to give us Universal direction: the snake on the path in a region where there are no snakes.

But does the non-animal, non-reptilian world—by this I mean the sentient plant world—communicate directly with us?

And what about the non-sentient aspects of this earth environment: the natural forces of air, water, fire, earth? Do they communicate directly with us as well?

The answer of course, is yes.

In fact, I would add that all objects, all matter communicates with us, though for purposes of this discussion, I will limit to the natural world, and all the animals, beings, plants, environments and weathers that this includes.

Scientists would refute this.

I say: not everything that is true has been proven yet by scientific process.

Scientists seek to solve hypotheses: by this I mean they seek to solve questions that they have asked. But what happens when we are not even at a place where we can think of the question? When the question is so far outside of our thinking process, that we can’t even begin to think of it?

The questions we are most interest in are as yet unanswered as to “fact” or “fiction.” However, to the person who experiences this level of communication, this lack of proof is of no concern. In fact, it matters not at all.

The proof is in the experience.

Once you have had this experience, of communicating directly with the natural world, you will laugh at the idea that this is somehow a question.

It is so very clearly a reality.

Communicating with the natural world            Do plants communicate with us?

Do trees resonate with our energy?

Do crystals communicate with us?

What about the earth?

Does the wind respond to our emotions?

Does water understand our thoughts?

If the answer to all of these questions and others like it is “yes,” (and the answer is yes!), then how doe we make this happen in our own life?

Can we become as skilled as The Last Airbender , controlling the elements at will?

The answer is yes, and no.

Is it a process that is complicated to those at the beginning of their path of soul inquiry, and simple to those who’ve been doing their work for a while.

It is not about control; it is about communication, resonance and exquisite sensitivity. And it happens by simply becoming really, really conscious; really, really aware.

So of course this is both an astonishingly simple process, if you have been working on your consciousness and doing your spiritual practice and making direct connection to Universe often, if not as much as possible.

Full presence is all that is required, to experience this level of connection to the natural world. That is because this is simply how things are, when we become one of One: when we inhabit our full Divine reality, even for just a few minutes.

In this way, we become able to resonate with all the natural world: everything, anything: even the tree, even the deer, even the wind, ever the water.

We are not separate

It is common to think of nature or the natural world as something separate from us. That we are human, and nature is nature, and these are different, somehow.

But we are the same.

First, we are also animals, living in the natural world.

Second, we are not separate from nature, any more than we are separate from anything in the Universe.

Try this for yourself, by taking a walk out it in the woods. Sit under a tree for an hour and watch the leaves wave in the breeze; or lie your back on the ground and spend time gazing at the sky.

In that hour, you will become intimately involved with nature! You will stop your experience of being sanitized, clean and protected “human” and become “animal” instead. Your skin may become damp from where you are sitting. Your skin may become exposed to wind or sun. You may become the highway for various bugs: ants will crawl over you, gnats will pester you. Bees may buzz about.

Smaller life forms will also find you in your animal state: seeds, burrs, spores, lichens, mosses and molds will become intimately involved with your clothing, your hair, your skin.

Sit under that tree, or lie on your back in the grass for much longer than an hour: for a day, a week, a hundred years like some Rip Van Winkel, and nature will soon invade the organism that you consider “you”: first your clothing, your body, your being.

After some period of time, you become so filled with nature that it is hard to know which is which: is the burr in your hair yours or not yours? Is the powdery mold on your ankles yours or not yours? Is the dampness on your skin yours or not yours?

Nature communicates energetically

Yet it is not only our interaction with nature in the physical form that shows us our connection; it is also our interaction with nature in the energetic or vibrational plane.

If you have even sat outside quietly and meditated for a period of time, you will begin to notice that your own vibration changes the longer you are in that space. You become calmer. Your mind clears. You become spiritually aware.

You experience consciousness.

You may even move into a state of bliss.

These are all things that just happen, when you are simply “being” in the natural world.

By “being,” I mean doing nothing. Not hiking to a destination, not doing a sport, not having any other kind of goal. It is fine to do these things, but for reaching consciousness easily, it is best to simply relax and attend, open to whatever happens.

But something else very interesting can happen if you become accustomed enough to the vibration of the natural world around you:

Nature will begin to respond to your thought vibrations.

This is subtle, most of the time; but sometimes it can be very strong.

If you have had this experience once, you will probably desire to repeat this experience. It is all about opening up very fully, and simply connecting and allowing.

For example, if you are thinking of a particular charged or active memory, and you are very focused on this, you may suddenly notice that the wind picks up, or the light darkens, or the rustling in the leaves intensifies.

This will be enough to make you take notice: to think “what was that” or “that’s something.”

If you are working on some particularly important inner work, you may notice this at an even more noticeable level: you may notice a particular thing happening in the natural world that absolutely ties into what you are thinking about.

For example, say you were thinking about how to lighten your frantic, stressful, overscheduled life, and you might suddenly notice a snail crawling slowly across the path, moving in the exact time it needs, without concern for rush or haste.

Or perhaps you are thinking about a family relationship that has been conflicted, and you may suddenly find your attention drawn to how the branches in a stand of trees are entangled; they cross and curve over each other. You realize these trees have grown together as a family does; they have entwined and wrapped and cannot be separated. They grow on their own, but they also grow together. In noticing this, you may have a new understanding about your conflicted family relationship.

Or perhaps at that moment, there’s more: the wind picks up and the tree begins to rustle in a way that sends you into a light trance of full presence, in which you receive the message and the knowing to release this conflict; this knowing is communicated to you fully, not in words or symbols, but in the experiencing of the rustling leaves.

A two way communication with nature

What is the most surprising about the way we are One with nature, is not only in the messages of the natural world, but the way nature communicates to us physically and vibrationally: so there is actually a two-way communication happening.

This is especially apparent when the energy collective is stronger: such as when two or more people are outside together, holding a higher vibration state. This might happen at outdoor ceremonies or celebrations, in meditation, intimacy, deep connection, deep relaxation and play.

At times where several people are gathered and joined in high vibration, nature seems to be able to sense us better; to sense or vibration in a more clear way…and to communicate back to us.

I’ll often walk with my husband to the small creek on the edge of our property, simply be there by the trickling water and the trees. Often—too often to even keep track of—when we are very relaxed and our own vibration is very high, we will notice the leaves suddenly rustling in a new and fervent way, a shaking of the leaves in a way that seems like waving, or like laughter.

Other times, if we are in deep discussion, the wind will pick up out of nowhere, the wind will suddenly make itself known, showing that there is another vibrational presence with us.

Resonance takes time

I have been living in nature for 14 years now. When I first moved to the woods, I could not see the squirrel on a tree limb, it’s body still and camouflaged. I could not tell one bird’s call from another. I could not see the constant activity on the ground: a moving carpet of vibration and hum, scattering with every step forward, like an earth wave moving under my feet.

It has taken 14 years for me to get my nature eyes, my nature sense this clear. And this is after a lifetime of finding joy in the natural world.

But now, with those sense built in as a part of me, it is clear: nature is no dumb force, separate from us. Nature is communicating with us, in ways both subtle and direct, small and unmistakable.

We only must choose to see and to sense.

Our human awareness is just a small part of what is happening here in the Universe. When you begin to explore the ways in which nature is communication to you: animals, plants, elements, both subtle and profound, you begin to experience great comfort and peace in this life.

It takes some time to attain your own “nature sense”. It can be difficult to achieve it in this increasingly urban and disconnected life. The more time you can spend in the natural world… not doing, but being, with exquisite awareness to every little thing… the more you can open this particular window of connection.

Sara Wiseman is a visionary spiritual teacher and the award-winning author of Messages from the Divine: Wisdom for the Seeker’s Soul . Find out more about the book and FREE Seeker’s Guide at www.sarawiseman.com

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Home » News » Essay: The Healing Power of Nature

Essay: The Healing Power of Nature

October 15, 2019 October 30, 2019

While waiting for a hike to begin during Earth Week last spring at Kehl Lake, I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket. Glancing at the screen, I saw it was a close friend of mine, a college roommate, who dislikes talking on the phone, and almost never calls. I picked up.

My friend could hardly speak but managed to get the words out that her daughter, 28, had died that morning of a drug overdose. She had just heard the news. It was a call that I had somehow always expected I might get, and yet it nearly took me to my knees.

Her daughter had struggled with addiction mightily for 12 years. She was bright, beautiful, married and a mother to an adorable three-year-old. This was a girl who my own two sons thought of as a cousin. She loved Leelanau and came up every summer with her mom and younger brother, to stay with us for a week. I can still see her jumping off our raft, or surfing the waves at Van’s Beach, or toasting marshmallows by firelight, her long dark hair pulled back.

But tragically, as in so many cases across our nation, her drug addiction trumped everything. We went downstate to be with my friend and to attend the funeral.  In the days that followed, I felt alternately numb and perpetually on the verge of tears, sad for my friend and incredulous at her unimaginable loss.

I came back to work later that week and our staff carpooled out to tour the new Cedar River Preserve addition. Our Board had just taken the leap of faith to buy this incredible 80 acres that could have easily become a ridgetop development, with its sweeping views of Lake Leelanau.

It was a cool and overcast May afternoon as we trekked up and along the ridgeline. The trees were still stark and bare. But the bright green of spring ephemerals on the hillside took my breath away, contrasting beautifully against the darkness of a forest floor rich with leaf litter. Iridescent moss and patterned lichen fanned out on decaying logs. We heard a cacophony of birdsong and looked down on a kettle hole lake, formed by the glaciers.

For the first time in weeks, I felt something ease in me. Seeing all of the new life after such a long, brutal winter felt hopeful. The ancientness of the kettle hole, the girth of old-growth trees, even the skeleton of what appeared to be a deer gave me a kind of peace and perspective that only nature can provide.  Life and death are intertwined so beautifully and naturally in the out of doors. It gave me comfort to be reminded that each of us is just a small speck in time, whirling through a very big universe. Somehow, it felt easier to accept the death of my friend’s daughter.

I couldn’t be more grateful that the Leelanau Conservancy has protected places like the Cedar River Preserve to hike in, to heal in, and to offer peace and perspective. My friend plans to come up this fall. We won’t visit the new preserve as it is not yet open to the public. But we will go to Clay Cliffs, to the dunes, and to Lake Michigan, remembering the little girl who once played along those shores.—– Carolyn Faught, Senior Writer and Donor Loyalty Specialist for the Leelanau Conservanc y

email Carolyn: [email protected]

Cedar River Preserve, What’s Next?

Please Note: The new Cedar River Preserve 80-acre addition is not yet open to the public. As has been our practice with all natural areas, access is provided as soon as we can develop a management plan for the property that best preserves the land’s ecological resources and create safe, well-marked trails. Stay tuned for more information as plans unfold.

Become a steward of the land.

Help us preserve the wonders of Leelanau County by becoming a trail steward, volunteering at a workbee, or donating funds.