Language is a double-edged sword that both empowers and disempowers humans, with regard to human-environment interactions. Where it empowers, it gives humans identity, sense of belonging, and means to free ourselves from our inner world that cannot be said. Where it disempowers, humans use certain identities, narratives and concepts to separate humans from humans and the animated living world.
Perhaps the most liberating and anthropocentric tool, language enables humans to “make claims” about ourselves and our surroundings. Narrative is the primary use of language to construct social norms that holds together a community. These narrations people carry on generations after generations are also fundamentally shaped by our relationship with our land. And by naming the physical locations and subjects, we make stamps and declare the evidence of material reality. Our reality. Leslie Marmon Silko tells the story-telling format from a Native American Pueblo eye, “one that embraces the whole of creation and the whole of history of time (p.49)” In communities where stories of the Creation survive, stories are also told to give directions and ground members of the community for both internal purposes and social conduct. Just like the West Apaches, as anthropologist Keith Basso unveiled, who “negotiate images of understandings of the land” – into stories that “stalk” people. These claims of reality, through naming of places on which stories “naturally” occur, constitute the moral world of the West Apaches. That moral system prescribes checks-and-balances not only to the social world, but also to the society-nature interactions.
Humans’ particular way of claiming of who we are reminds me of human’s use of language from a Chinese perspective. Chinese idioms, mostly famously the ones composed of only four Chinese characters, do not conform to modern Chinese grammatical structure and syntax. They are highly compact and synthetic in that the meaning the whole idiom goes beyond those of the four characters combined – “the whole is larger than the sum of the parts.” Each idiom has a story, mostly a historical event or a myth, that derives from ancient literature. It usually entails a moral lesson. We treat them as our cultural treasury and learn them throughout the 10-year mandatory primary education. For example the idiom“蜀犬吠日(shu quan fei ri),” it tells the story originated from the Tang Dynasty more than a
thousand years of ago of a dog from the Sichuan region, where I come from, who would bark at the Sun whenever it comes out. Seldom do people living in the Sichuan basin see the Sun because of the topography and climate. The Sichuan people thus carry the stereotype of living in their isolated but fertile heaven. It is also used to describe people, often disapprovingly, who are too easily panicked at something normal due to their isolation.(Picture left:Credit LISA MINOT)
Humans use language to not only make claims to ourselves or even ridicule ourselves so our offspring will no follow suit. We also use sometimes very powerful narratives to claim biophysical spaces and resources we are made to believe we belong to. Apt to be the master of our language, humans also use it to disempower our fellow species, living and nonliving on planet Earth. In her essay “In History,” Jamaica Kincaid told the less narrated side of the Christopher Columbus’s heroic and groundbreaking “discoveries.” It serves as an example of great scale in which one man, replete with self-placed superiority and “sense of wonder,” placed names onto thousands of physical and living objects in the “New World” as if they never have names or any history before him. They were “new” only to him and his shipmates. Negotiations over “property rights” – a western invention – have often sparked fierce, if not violent, conflicts among different groups of actors carrying different identities and discourses to justify who truly owns and belongs. And too often, we find out in the end the long-existing primary caretakers of the land are ousted and replaced by “efficient,” entrepreneurial and technocratic entities, in the name of progress, modernity and development. Those who are disempowered are forced to conform to a constructed new norm or standard. In the end we hear very polarized narratives of who owns what and who can best use the land, which denotes completely different policies, if necessary at all. The Amazonian forest region is one thus example where government, corporations, big industrial rangers and the indigenous have heavily contested the ownership and usage of the land, resulting in the exploitation of both the forests and already marginalized populations. Living organisims have the tendency to overdo themselves with the same means they make the world around do for them. “The result is a spiritual fragmentation that has accompanied our ecological destruction,” says Hogan, and social destruction of segments of the global society, as I would add. The conversion of forest land into cattle range was driven partly by the government incentives, encouraged by global financial institutions who champions liberalizing the markets, to make “productive” use of the land, which in the end resulted in speculation of land at the expense of small-holder farmers.
All the same, we can reclaim the same human intellect that has crafted the sensorial expression of ourselves as language to reconnect with the Creation. Language is a tool of knowing the world and ourselves. As David Abram points out, we learn language by basic mimicking – it is physical, intuitive and “bodily.” We need to bring forth our animal nature, echoes Frances Moore Lappé, to heal ourselves and our broken relationship with the land. “What we are searching for is a language that heals this relationship, one that takes the side of the amazing and fragile life on our life-giving earth,” says Linda Hogan in her account of “A Different Yields: A Spiritual History of the Living World.”
There could be in every human being’s inner self a desire to heal the wound. And today’s worlds are in urgent need of true healers. Nevertheless, by solely mimicking the shamans in Southeast Asia, says Abram, is only to treat the symptoms without awareness to the broader physical and ecological environment. “For the source of stress lies in the relation between the human community and the living land that sustains it.” To be a healer, or a true magician, one first needs to understand the intricate relationship we have with nature and call on fellow species to respond to their respective inner calling. However, what arouses human sensual experiences, emotions and expressions are what we treat as “external” stimuli. To understand that the “external” is only part of the big Creation and the whole history, we will be able to internalize and reclaim respect for ourselves. Because only when we begin truly listening to and loving ourselves, can we appreciate and protect other parts that constitute the whole.
In reflecting on the thoughtful analyses and writing this paper, my understanding of the path I have chosen also renewed. I have always understood that I do not mainly express my passion for the environment through writing. After all, written words have many limitations despite their higher position in Western culture. What I have learned out of these readings and the study of political ecology is the ability to discern the power-laden messages, directives, confrontations imbedded in stories people tell that have largely shaped human landscapes and have been driven by evolving ideologies and ethics. At the end of my undergraduate study as an environmental studies major, I have finally found a set of tools that will allow me to see the world through languages and other representations, and re-create narratives that speak the language of our Creation and an honest self.
Here, let me end by returning to my version of the barking dog story. The visiting poet who coined the phase in a way used a euphemism to belittle the local people’s animal behavior. Yet in the locals’ accounts, when the sun is out everybody is enlightened. Everybody is as happy as a Sichuan dog when it baths in the sun. From waiting for the light of life to come out to being shone by it, my people have fully enjoyed, with due respect, the cycle of life in universe.
Works Cited
Abram, D. 1997. The spell of the sensuous. New York: Vintage.
Basso, K. 1984. Stalking with stories: Names, places, and moral narratives among the western apache. Text, Play, and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society: 19-55.
Hetch, S. B. 1985. Environment, development and politics: Capital accumulation and the livestock sector in Eastern Amazonia. World Development: 13 (6): 663-684
Hogan, L. 1994. A different yield. Religion & Literature 26 (1): 71-80.
Kincaid, J. 1997. In history. Callaloo 20 (1): 1-7
Silko, L. M. 1981. Language and literature from a pueblo Indian perspective. Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today: 48-59.
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