The rewilding movement is delivering positive change around the planet, and the momentum behind it continues to grow. Through a plethora of interconnected projects, humanity is honouring nature and offering reparation for past misdeeds. Yet, within society at large, much of the language that we use in describing the more-than-human world is rooted in a history of exploitation.
For any politician or business leader who seeks to perpetuate the ideology of humans as rulers and other life as resources – a worldview that shackles the scope of rewilding and other bold ecological initiatives – the linguistic status quo is more than convenient. This is because it enables a framing of government policies and corporate strategies in which unrestrained overreach into the ecosphere is considered acceptable, as are such practices as the industrial rearing of domesticated animals.
As noted by Eileen Crist, an ecological scholar and spirited advocate for rewilding, the humans-as-rulers mindset has led to “renaming fish ‘fisheries,’ animals ‘livestock,’ trees ‘timber,’ rivers ‘freshwater,’ mountaintops ‘overburden,’ and seacoasts ‘beachfront,’ so as to legitimize conversion, extermination, and commodification ventures.” What’s more, this lexicon of implicit domination is not the only troublesome aspect of language with respect to the ways in which we represent our other-than-human kin (more on that word later).
Other problematic facets include: the habitual use of terms that set humans apart from nature; a profusion of idioms and metaphors that normalise violence towards, or are otherwise derogatory to, our animal relations; and an insufficiency of pronouns for acknowledging personhood beyond our own species. Those of us wishing to speak with respect and reverence for the more-than-human world must be aware that numerous pitfalls lurk in the English language. (And I suspect that similar considerations apply to most, if not all, other modern tongues.)
Below, I offer brief elaborations on each of the troublesome linguistic facets, as well as proposing a few alternative choices of words. I hope that my suggestions show that when we exert our attention and apply our imagination, it is possible to find more considerate ways of speaking about our non-human relatives. For inspiration here, I am indebted in different ways to fellow members of the Global Rewilding Alliance team and several other colleagues, including the editors of The Ecological Citizen.
Terms that legitimise exploitation and elimination
The examples mentioned in the quoted passage from Eileen Crist – such as ‘fisheries’ for populations of free-living fish – are among the turns of phrase that position individual organisms and broader living systems as automatically and unconditionally subordinate to human wants. This kind of framing is evoked, inadvertently or otherwise, when people describe the ecosphere in terms of ‘natural resources’ or ‘ecosystem services’ or ‘natural capital’; when they talk of ‘stocks’ or a ‘harvest’ of wild animals; and when they speak of ‘weeds’ or ‘pests’ or ‘alien invasives’. We see it also in constructions such as ‘wasteland’, for self-willed areas not being put to human profit, and ‘improved grassland’, for fertiliser-soaked earth that supports few plant species.
In many cases, alternative terminology exists that does not implicitly devalue other organisms. A neutral substitute for ‘stocks’, to give an illustration, is wild populations, while instead of ‘harvest’ we might, with greater honesty, say killing. And, if we allow ourselves to be a little more creative, we could replace ‘weeds’ with, say, opportunists.
What’s more, in seeking other ways to talk about nature, we might go beyond equitable phraseology to find words that explicitly celebrate agency, sentience, liveliness, and interdependencies in the more-than-human world. Instead of ‘natural capital’, for instance, we could talk about ecologies of countless interconnected individuals, whose vitality underpins the flourishing of all our lives.
Turning to consider discussions of rewilding in particular, there is a special opportunity to explore the deep connection between wildness and freedom – and, in doing so, to champion the rights of other-than-human actors to live on their own terms. In such language lies support for a new, non-domineering way of seeing and for a world in which the rewilding movement will prosper in the long term.
Expressions that separate humans from nature
A second set of expressions for which care is needed are those that signal a separation between humans and the ecosphere. An example of such a term is ‘the environment’. When this is used to describe the ecology in which we live our lives, it summons a false dualism between humans, on one hand, and nature, on the other. ‘The natural world’ is also often employed in a similar way. Yet understanding that we are part of nature’s single fabric is a key step both for unseating ideas of species supremacy and for rewilding our existence.
At the same time, terms like ‘the environment’ and ‘the natural world’ are well established as succinct descriptors, and alternatives that try to avoid an implied disconnect are generally more cumbersome. Consider the potential awkwardness of dropping other-than-human nature into an informal conversation. Or imagine the loss of snappiness that would result from changing the name of the Nature Needs Half coalition to Non-Human Nature Needs Half. That is to say, there will necessarily be trade-offs in our chosen words when placing a single linguistic umbrella over the soil, the trees, the flowers, the bees, and everything else to the chimpanzees.
Derogatory metaphors
Now, we head into more unpleasant territory, starting with the various kinds of animals who are used metaphorically as put-downs for humans. When someone is said to be a pig, a rat, a weasel, a snake, a cockroach, a slug, or a maggot, the name-caller is not just transferring a feeling of disgust but also, with a single word, denigrating multiple species and countless individuals with whom we share the Earth. In the case of ‘pig’ – as used to describe a greedy or dirty person – the added insult is that the traits being referred to have emerged from the close confinement in which these mammals are generally placed under domestication.
Along the same lines, the use of the term ‘animal’ or ‘subhuman’ as a more generic form of disparagement reinforces the idea of a hierarchy in nature – the ‘great chain of being’ – in which humans are positioned above the fellow members of their kingdom. Once again, then, the operative ideology of human supremacy reveals itself.
Happily, there are also animal metaphors that convey positive sentiments, and it is on these that we need to focus in demonstrating respect and reverence for nature. So let us keep calling people lion-hearted and eagle-eyed and continue to celebrate busy beavers and wise owls. Over time, in a rewilded society, this list of compliments will only grow.
Violent idioms
Another insidious aspect of language in relation to other lifeforms lies in a collection of explicitly violent idioms – phrases that have no place in a nature-loving culture. A representative case, one that targets an already-mentioned domesticated animal, is the expression ‘bleeding like a stuck pig’. It is hard to think of a suitable alternative that conveys rapid blood loss without some level of violence, but there are other idioms for which substitutes readily emerge that preserve the intended meaning: ‘To kill two birds with one stone’ could change to: To feed two birds with one nut. ‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat’ could become: There’s more than one way to peel a carrot. And ‘flogging a dead horse’ could transform into: watering a plant in the rain.
There is also one existing turn of phrase that honours nature and deserves special mention here. Coined by the conservationist Aldo Leopold, and used as the title of an essay in his Sand County Almanac (a book published in 1949, shortly after his death), the expression is this: Thinking like a mountain. Leopold applied it to represent an awareness of ecosystem dynamics, including what we now call trophic cascades, but it could also be employed to describe an openness to rewilding the Earth.
Pronouns that deny personhood
Finally, we arrive at what is arguably the most intractable linguistic area of all when it comes to talking about nature: one that centres on a superficially innocuous two-letter word – ‘it’. In referencing other-than-human life, we wield this pronoun almost ubiquitously; and every time that we do so, vibrant sensate beings are denied personhood and instead rendered as mere objects. “We don’t need a worldview of Earth beings as objects anymore,” opines the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer in an article denouncing the use of this impersonal pronoun. “That thinking,” she adds, “has led us to the precipice of climate chaos and mass extinction.” Yet so instinctually do we use the troublesome two-letter word in our modern lives that even when we try to stop ourselves, it still has a habit of popping out.
By way of illustration, the author of a recently published book advocating the extension of justice considerations to invertebrates makes the commendable choice to use personal pronouns (she, he, they, etc.) in describing his subject matter, a decision that he explains in a footnote. But in the very sentence within which this footnote is cited, he inadvertently let’s the impersonal pronoun escape: “an Australian paralysis tick […] decided to make her* home in my five-year old where it did what ticks do so well.” (The asterisk indicates the footnote citation; the italics are added.)
Now, assuming we can keep our instincts in check, and if we happen to know that the organism being referred to is male or female, then the job of avoiding ‘it’ is straightforward. For a female bison, say, we can use she and her. The task is even easier if we are referring to a group of individuals, as we cannot help but say they.
But sometimes we do not know the sex of a particular organism, while on other occasions we may wish to describe a lifeform with an asexual mode of reproduction or a hermaphroditic being (many trees, for instance, bear flowers of both sexes). Here, the path of least resistance in moving away from ‘it’ would be to employ they as a singular pronoun.
A different solution to the ‘it’ problem – one that is more radical, in proposing two new words and going beyond ‘he’ and ‘she’ in celebrating nature – has been offered by Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her earlier-cited article: “ ‘Ki’ to signify a being of the living Earth. Not ‘he’ or ‘she,’ but ‘ki.’ So that when we speak of Sugar Maple, we say, ‘Oh that beautiful tree, ki is giving us sap again this spring.’ And we’ll need a plural pronoun, too, for those Earth beings. Let’s make that new pronoun ‘kin.’ So we can now refer to birds and trees not as things, but as our earthly relatives. On a crisp October morning we can look up at the geese and say, ‘Look, kin are flying south for the winter. Come back soon.’ ”
Ki was taken by Kimmerer from the end of the word Bemaadiziiaaki. This is a term meaning beings of the living Earth in Anishinaabe, an indigenous tongue of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, to which she belongs. To adopt ki and kin would therefore be a genuine case of rewilding our language – not coining something new but reviving older and greater wisdom.
To close this discussion on pronouns, I want to add that there are also two ‘it’-type words that present similar challenges, namely ‘which’ and ‘that’. The former, when employed as a relative pronoun (e.g. ‘the bird which is closest to us’), reduces the described organism to an object. A clear alternative that preserves the lifeform as a subject is who (e.g. the bird who is closest to us). ‘That’ is often used as a relative pronoun, with the same objectifying challenges applying as in the case of ‘which’. Additionally, ‘that’ is also used as a straightforward pronoun (e.g. ‘That is a beautiful sparrow’), again with devaluing connotations. In such cases, it would be preferable to select an appropriate personal pronoun: she, he, they, or ki.
Concluding thoughts
My intention in this discussion has been to highlight the many facets of our language to which we must remain vigilant, and apply creativity, if we wish to speak with respect and reverence for nature. Such efforts, I believe, can make a profound contribution to rewilding our culture. And hopefully, one day, it might even become possible, without any need for accompanying explanation, to write: Kin are beautiful sparrows.
Joe Gray is a Founding Editor of ‘The Ecological Citizen’, Lead Editor for Rewilding Successes and a writer for us at the GRA. In this series, which is named Rewilding Reflections, Joe is taking us on some thoughtful journeys through the wider dimensions of rewilding.
Photo details
- Eurasian magpie (photo by Alexis Lours; CC-BY-4.0).
- Sardines (cropped from a photo by Lakshmi Sawitri; CC-BY-2.0).
- Grey wolf (photo by Raed Mansour; CC-BY-2.0).
- Chimpanzee (photo by Ray in Manila; CC-BY-2.0).
- Barred owl (photo by Mdf; CC-BY-3.0).
- Mountain above clouds (public domain).
- Geese in flight (cropped from a photo by Jiaqian AirplaneFan; CC-BY-3.0).