by Catherine Schmitt
This story was originally published by Maine Audubon in the Winter 2024 issue of Habitat.
The other day I struggled to explain to a colleague, who was writing about their forest research, why the word “primeval” was maybe not the best choice of adjective.
This is my job: to write and edit stories about land, the history of land, people studying land and water. It is my job to pay attention to language. I have to make decisions about which words to use or not use, and why.
Accuracy, of course, is important. Primeval means “of or relating to the earliest ages.” The forests in what is now called Maine are not that old, relatively speaking. They emerged only in the last ten thousand years after the last glaciers melted. But primeval, and its synonyms primitive and primordial, harken back to a time before humans.
The tendency to separate humans from nature, to romanticize and idealize nature without people, is pervasive in communication about land and conservation.
More and more, I am learning how so much of our vocabulary of conservation, of science, of place, reflects broken and harmful relations with land, and with each other. Changing these relations, repairing the damage, creating a healthier future, can’t happen without also changing language. Words are not arbitrary. Words, and how they are presented and arranged and emphasized, represent attitudes, ideas, philosophies, policies, culture, history. They also influence attitudes, ideas, philosophies, policies, culture, history.
•••
This is the forest primeval. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
In his epic 1847 poem Evangeline, Longfellow repeated a pattern of portraying the American continent as wild and empty, the dense and tall woodland growth presenting a contrast to the arrival of “civilization” and its associated forest clearing. When in the poem the British evicted the French from Nova Scotia, there was left only the murmuring hemlocks and pines “wailing into the dark void where only the ocean answers.”
Before Evangeline, the woodlands of northeastern North America were home to tens of thousands of Indigenous people comprising hundreds of different communities. Over thousands of years they had lived with, in, by, and for the forest, and had established sophisticated cultures and intricate relationships with the woods, rivers, and seas.
One reason the forest may have seemed primeval in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is that the newcomers, via their disease and their violence, killed so many of the people who had been tending to the trees. Without these relationships, the forest may have appeared, to Longfellow, untouched by humans.
To call a forest primeval, or similarly any place as pristine, untouched, conjures a time before humans, an ideal of nature without people, a world in which any human interaction with nature is believed to be inherently bad.
I don’t think this is what most people intend; they use words without thinking, out of habit. A first step, then, is to pause to consider our intentions and our choice of words, and what meaning we might be misinterpreting, or missing altogether.
•••
There’s always more we can’t see, that the trees are reaching for. – Carl Philips
There is value in thinking back to earlier ages. A long-term perspective offers a reminder that the forest has changed over time, as tree species shifted along with the climate. Remember, too, that the current dominant modes of interacting with the Earth, even supposedly bedrock principles such as land “ownership,” are relatively new and likely temporary. Is a forest America’s? Maine’s? Mine, yours, ours? Who decides? What happens when there is no possessive?
The past also holds agency. Too often, a passive voice narrates a history of land presumed to be certain and inevitable — territory lost, land granted, places founded, villages established, towns incorporated, property owned — all while concealing the specific people responsible for such actions. In the same way, agency hides in the language of land conservation. Who is saving and protecting land and wildlife from whom, for whom?
In many versions of the story, conservation has been a success, as evidenced by the old forests that continue to grow across the state. But the same story tells of accelerated loss of biodiversity, increasing pollution, and an ever-warming planet.
Language needs to change, because our words aren’t working.
•••
…the past is a country under the ground where the days practice their old habits… – Donald Hall
The late poet Donald Hall called phrases and comparisons that have lost their context and are no longer useful “dead metaphors.” Hall’s examples include metaphors from archaic sources such as shield, cradle, and plow, and words separated from their original meaning. “Our mind cancels the literalness of the word and takes in only the word’s abstracted sense.” Such words have outlived their effectiveness, yet I encounter them every day.
Since 1990, use of the phrase “combat climate change” has increased at about the same rate as carbon dioxide concentrations. Trends are similar for “biodiversity loss” and “invasive species”: the problems get worse, but our language doesn’t change. What is that old saying about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?
Like primeval, these terms too, can be technically dishonest. The atmosphere cannot engage in combat; nature knows no boundaries.
But worse than being ineffective and inaccurate, “combat climate change” is also, often, wildly inappropriate. Making everything a fight disregards the real, actual battles experienced every day by many people – people most directly affected by the climate crisis, and who are most needed in the pursuit of solutions. Labels like alien, exotic, non-native are uncomfortably similar to how some people describe and discriminate against their fellow humans.
Continuing to exclude others, through language and its meanings, puts the future of conservation at risk. The trees, the land, water, and sky, need more advocates, but they won’t come if they don’t feel welcome or connected. Too many people have been left out, and while language is only a small part of the problem, it is a part that is relatively easy to remedy.
All of this upheaval over words and phrases can be frustrating. People are afraid of making mistakes, of using the wrong words. While some are hungry for an explanation, most just want to know which words to use instead. But simply swapping out vocabulary is not an answer. Focusing instead on intention – what are you really trying to say? – will often lead to a better choice of words, and also account for the fact that, like the forest, language is ever-changing.
This takes work, yes, but it turns out that, with the help of poets and scientists, the pursuit of alternatives is inspiring and invigorating.
•••
And there are other words
in other languages, always
in movement.
– Joy Harjo
Dr. Bonnie Newsom is an archeologist and assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Maine and a member of the Penobscot Nation. Along with Wabanaki students Isaac St. John and Natalie Dana Lolar, she has been re-analyzing archeological collections from Wabanaki cultural sites in Acadia National Park. Many of these sites are coastal spaces which they refer to as shell mounds, intentionally created landforms. In interpreting and translating, the researchers describe not prehistoric occupants and artifacts, but Wabanaki families gathering in place and the monuments and art they left behind. As graduate student Natalie Dana Lolar said, “Historical narratives removed people. We are using a vocabulary that puts people back into the story. These objects reflect the souls of our ancestors, who intentionally created them, who are contained within them.”
A seemingly slight shift in sentence structure makes a place alive with humanity, abundant with gifts. So much more is available when we root our words in deeper meaning.
Adversaries and enemies abound in public discussion of climate change and what to do about it. And while responding to the crisis, and the powerful forces who are resisting change, certainly feels like a fight, the language of war maintains division and delay. What happens when we approach the land not as an antagonist, but as an ally?
There is another way.
Dr. Kelsey Leonard, a citizen of Shinnecock Indian Nation and Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, has proposed a new framework for adapting to the accelerating rates of sea level rise caused by warming temperatures. Leonard advocates for replacing militant and combative concepts of armoring and retreating with witnessing, mending, uniting, and moving.
The knowledge and language of Indigenous peoples abounds with similar examples of language that represents other ways of relating to the land, ways that reinstate dignity and recognize interdependency: invasive species are non-local or displaced; gathering grasses helps them to grow; the land needs our participation. Such language offers a positive view of the future, an opening to a broader array of possibilities for relating with land and solving our most urgent problems.
In her talk on “the danger of a single story,” writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said, “When we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”
U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo wrote, “We must take care of our collective imagination, to re-vision a system that will sustain and take care of all of us. We must create fresh stories and images that promote regenerative metaphor and meaning and give value to what matters.”
Language reflects the world we live in, but it can also conjure the world we want to live in: a world in which we are at peace with the weather, honest about our history, and kind to each other. A world in which tangled, mossy woods of big trees symbolizes not a primeval past but a pulsing present alive with the promise of birdsong.
This story was originally published by Maine Audubon in the Winter 2024 issue of Habitat.