I remember a conversation that I had with my father when I was about ten.
I asked, “Why doesn’t anyone remember what it was like to be a baby inside the womb? It’s not like it was that long ago, and we were all in there once…” His reply was something I have thought about ever since because, in the beginning — with my ten-year-old brain — I wasn’t sure it made sense.
He said, “Well, in order to have memories, you need words. And babies in the womb do not yet have any language because they have not learned any words yet.”
I remember wondering: “Do I really need words to describe what I think and feel? Why can’t we just remember the feeling or the sound or the look or the smell of something?”
Which of course we do: remember non-verbally, that is. Memory is stored throughout our bodies. But to truly file “something” away so it can be retrieved randomly or intentionally — thinking of our memory as some great filing system filled with little drawers, some that open easily, and others that, for a multitude of reasons, sometimes stick — a language is needed.
What kind of language?
The conversation resonated particularly this year as a conglomerate of seemingly disconnected experiences took shape for me: the legacy of Toni Morrison — who gave voice so strongly and poignantly to the idea that “word work is sublime because it makes meaning”; the publication of United Nations Governmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC), a sobering report on the Climate Emergency; the crass simplicity and disregard for nuance in language from our president; and my discovery of one of the most beautiful, depressing, haunting, yet hopeful authors I have ever read: Robert MacFarlane.
MacFarlane, like Morrison, understands deeply the importance of language.
He collects words. He collects stories. In his book “Landmarks” he writes about the British landscape and meditates on the words people have created to describe the places in which they live and work: onomatopoetic words, words so site-specific one doesn’t need a map, living words. One critic hailed “Landmarks” as a “field guide to the ways we can speak and write about the land.”
But it’s more than a field guide: he writes about the ways we not only speak and write, but celebrate, experience and, consequently, make meaning, remember, and honor.
When it was discovered several years ago that 40 words had been removed from the most recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary  (used in schools and by children all over the world), MacFarlane partnered with an illustrator to write a “Spell Book,” reclaiming the missing words, which included acorn, bluebell, fern, adder, dandelion, newt, otter, wren, willow, weasel, heron, starling, raven — all words that describe members of the natural world. In their place readers found new words: voice-mail, attachment, blog, broadband, cut-and-paste — all words that describe aspects of the digital world, our brave new world.
When words go missing, meaning disappears. Perhaps experience disappears: a childhood without an acorn, a fern, or a raven?
As we lose connection with the natural world, the natural world becomes unimportant; it disappears.
What does that bode for the future?
In his book “Underland: A Deep Time Journey” MacFarlane digs deeper to explore what is beneath us; not only what is there, but our relationship with it, from how we represent it in our language (where there is an inherent, or buried, bias against what is under, as we automatically elevate what is above), to what we extract from it, to what we hide in it, to the vast communication systems that pulse slowly through the roots of trees (a wood-wide web), to what we bury and why.
From burying radioactive waste in Finland to reading core samples of melting glaciers in Greenland (what he calls the “blue of time”), to 30,000-year-old hand print cave paintings in Norway, to navigating underground rivers in the Carst region of northeast Italy, to walking the tunnel streets of the invisible city beneath Paris (sewers and mines), to searching for dark matter in a limestone cave beneath the North Sea off Yorkshire, England, where it is quiet enough to actually hear dark matter’s infinitesimal particles, the reader journeys deep into lands and stories that were, for me, new territory.
When MacFarlane writes, “Time is profoundly out of joint — and so is place. Things that should have stayed buried are rising up unbidden,” I think of the U.N. Climate report describing more particularly the dangers to our food system while we continue to heat the planet at an unprecedented rate. Soil is being lost at rates 10 to 100 times faster than it is forming. Our farmers know well how changeable and extreme weather patterns are already disrupting the food supply, even as some of the industrial agricultural methods are themselves exacerbating the climate changes.
Indigenous people and their knowledge of land stewardship and production methods are for the first time included in the IPCC report, cited as resources to be tapped:  sustainable practices of agriculture, small scale, attuned to the local substrate.
Knowledge of land stewardship in cultures where the land and its inhabitants are closely in sync and attuned to each other — where language is deeply wrought from and connected to place itself…
Could this be a sign of hope?
MacFarlane describes the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Potawatomi Nation who speaks, she says, “fluent botany,” which is NOT the technical language of botany as lexis of study and classification, but rather the language that plants “speak.” Which is to say, her language acknowledges that plants are alive and we are connected to/with them. Her language declares animacy: humans, animals and trees are alive — as are mountains, rocks, fire, water and wind. Seventy percent of Potawatomi words are verbs. In contrast, only 30 percent of English words are verbs.
Puhpowee is the Potawatomi word for “The force that causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.” The word for “bay” is the verb “wiikwegamaa,” “to be a bay.” Kimmerer writes that a bay would only be a noun if  “water is dead, trapped between its shores and contained by the word … The verb … releases the water from its bondage and lets it live … sheltering itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers.”
In our race to burn the planet, smash through ecosystems, extracting, uprooting, we disconnect ourselves from place and language, degrading the biosphere and the ethnosphere. We throw away words as we reframe and rewrite history and collective memory.
Which words are our leaders erasing? Climate Change for starters.
Words matter. And language is alive, constantly developing and changing, as it must. What words would you delete from the dictionary? What words would you sanctify?