Rewilding Language
from EIDOS: The Shape and Form Ideas Take Hosted by Ira Gardner
What happens to human consciousness when the words used to describe the living world quietly disappear from our everyday speech? In this episode of Eidos, we hit the pause button on our high-speed, screen-mediated world to examine a quiet cultural crisis: the steep decline of ecological vocabulary and the resulting phenomenon of environmental generational amnesia. Beginning with the controversial decision by the Oxford Junior Dictionary to excise words like acorn, bluebell, and kingfisher in favor of broadband and voicemail, we trace how losing nature words changes what our visual cortex physically registers when we step outside. Drawing on cognitive psychology, corpus linguistics, and environmental sociology, we explore how human perception filters out unnamed biodiversity into a generic, static blur—a failure known as plant blindness. We contrast the objectifying, property-focused history of the English language (from the Norman Conquest and the Enclosure Acts to the modern "real estate spreadsheet" grammar) with the high-definition, relational maps embedded in Indigenous languages such as Salish, Scottish Gaelic, Anishinaabemowin, and Māori. Finally, we outline practical protocols for linguistic rewilding, bridging citizen science and ancient place-based wisdom through the framework of Two-Eyed Seeing.
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