Episode 22: Rewilding Language

Episode Overview

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.

Key Takeaways

1. The Extinction of Words Drives the Extinction of Experience: Editorial decisions to replace natural terms with digital jargon are not neutral updates; they reflect a cultural retreat indoors. Quantitative corpus studies show a 60% decline in everyday nature nouns across English literature since 1800, creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop that severs emotional attachment to the outdoors (nature connectedness).
2. Plant Blindness as a Cognitive Spam Filter: Without specific nouns to identify local flora and fauna, the human brain’s predictive processing mechanisms treat complex biodiversity as visual background noise. We do not simply lack names; our visual cortex actively filters out organisms, collapsing living ecosystems into an undifferentiated wall of green.
3. Shifting Baseline Syndrome & The Windscreen Phenomenon: Successive generations normalize increasingly degraded and fragmented ecosystems as the default “pristine” baseline. Because younger drivers never experienced the massive insect clouds that once coated highway windshields, or the sky-darkening starling murmurations of the mid-20th century, catastrophic biological collapses pass by unnoticed and unmourned.
4. English as a Real Estate Spreadsheet: English is historically optimized for mobile commerce, property ownership, and centralized administration. Rooted in the Norman Conquest (which divided Germanic vernacular farm terms from elite French legal property words like forest and beef) and cemented by the Industrial Revolution, English grammar objectifies ecosystems—forcing speakers to label sentient relatives, ancient rivers, and 300-year-old trees with the inanimate pronoun “it”.
5. Verb-Centric and Animate Grammars: Unlike noun-heavy Western languages, Indigenous languages like Salish and Scottish Gaelic operate on Verb-Subject-Object (VSO) structures and lack direct verbs for possessive ownership (“to have”). By expressing the world as a network of unfolding processes (“the land is at me”) and grammatically encoding rocks, trees, and weather systems as living relatives (the grammar of animacy), language serves as an indestructible moral and navigational atlas.
6. Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk): Healing ecological amnesia does not require artificial linguistic isolation or abandoning digital technology. Through Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall’s framework of Two-Eyed Seeing, modern tools (like citizen science biodiversity apps) can be combined with Indigenous place-names and kinship ethics to restore our cognitive bridge to the land.

Timestamps & Chapter Breakdown

• 00:00:04 – Introduction to Eidos: Welcome to the modern dinner party where art, technology, philosophy, and ecology share the table; hosted and edited by Ira Gardner.
• 00:00:36 – The Quiet Deletion: How the Oxford Junior Dictionary quietly swapped acorn and bluebell for broadband and voicemail; the vanishing bug splatters of the “windscreen phenomenon.”
• 00:01:33 – The Mechanics of Ecological Amnesia: Shifting baseline syndrome, environmental generational amnesia, and why we cannot mourn or protect an ecosystem we lack the vocabulary to describe.
• 00:02:30 – The 60% Drop: Tracking nature vocabulary in English literature since 1800; Robert Pyle’s extinction of experience and the loss of nature connectedness as a mental health buffer.
• 00:03:55 – Indigenous High-Definition Maps: Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK); Sámi snow taxonomies (300+ terms), Gaelic hill topography (80+ terms), and Anishinaabemowin animacy.
• 00:04:57 – Dùthchas & Reciprocal Geography: The Gaelic ethos of being owned by the land, multigenerational oral history, and Māori whakapapa granting legal personhood to the Whanganui River.
• 00:06:55 – The Deep Dive Begins: Dictionaries as cultural mirrors; how un-naming the world rewires human consciousness and sensory perception.
• 00:09:05 – Quantifying the Loss: Miles Richardson’s 2025 Google Books Ngram study in Earth; Margaret Luthen’s 2021 Montana study proving nature vocabulary loss hits rural communities just as hard as concrete cities.
• 00:11:49 – Plant Blindness & The Cognitive Spam Filter: The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in action; how the brain’s predictive processing deletes unnamed organisms to conserve mental bandwidth.
• 00:13:41 – 100 Pokémon vs. Five Trees: The 2002 Balmford study; how commercial digital tags crowd out the sensory reality of local biodiversity in children.
• 00:15:18 – Peter Kahn’s Houston Study: Normalizing pollution; Daniel Pauly’s shifting baseline syndrome, insect collapses, and the 87% decline of UK starlings since 1967.
• 00:18:11 – The Trap of Short-Term Adaptability: Why human psychological flexibility prevents individual despair while silently enabling ecological ruin.
• 00:19:24 – The Roots of Disconnection in English:

• 1066 Norman Conquest: French legal and property elite terms (forest, beef, pork) divorcing Anglo-Saxon vernaculars (wood, cow, swine) from the soil.
• Wilderness as Moral Chaos: The historical linguistic shift from wild home to conquerable wasteland.
• Humus to Human: Recovering the original etymology of human as “soil-being.”
• The Enclosure Acts & Factories: How urbanization rendered ancestral plant knowledge economically useless.

• 00:22:19 – Robin Wall Kimmerer & The Grammar of “It”: How calling living organisms “it” reduces ecosystems to a transactional warehouse of natural resources.
• 00:23:32 – Comparative Linguistics (Salish & Gaelic):

• VSO Word Order: Action taking priority over static nouns; seeing the world as an interconnected web of events rather than objects.
• The Missing Verb of Possession: Why you cannot “own” the land in Gaelic or Salish (“the land is at me”).
• Dinnseanchas: Topographical storytelling, Cashel Manannan, and the moral geography of Scottish Gaelic hills (meall, cnoc, sgùrr).

• 00:26:40 – Salish Place Names as Survival Guides: Mount Spokane (sq́ʷiməs) as a medicinal map; transformer stories as living ethical monuments.
• 00:27:52 – The World of Animacy: Apache “stalking with stories”; the existential devastation of language erasure through forced assimilation.
• 00:29:02 – Linguistic Rewilding in Practice: Robert Macfarlane’s The Lost Words, Katie Holten’s The Language of Trees, and regional dialect gems (caitean, snowbones).
• 00:31:04 – Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk): Elder Albert Marshall’s framework; pairing digital citizen science apps (iNaturalist) with local Indigenous ecological names and ethics.
• 00:33:43 – The Rebellious Act of Naming: Final reflection on looking at a sidewalk weed or distant horizon and choosing to break the amnesia.

Comparative Linguistic Models

Linguistic Feature	Modern Standard English	Indigenous & Relational Languages (Salish, Gaelic, Anishinaabemowin)
Dominant Sentence Order	Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) — e.g., “I see the river.”	Verb-Subject-Object (VSO) — e.g., “Flows the river near me.”
Concept of Ownership	Direct possession verbs (“I own this land”, “This is my property”).	Relational prepositions (“The land is at me”; land cannot be possessed).
Grammatical Status of Nature	Inanimate object / pronoun “it” (commodifies living systems).	Grammatical animacy (“who” / kinship markers; land as family).
Place Names (Toponyms)	Commemorative or arbitrary (Mount Spokane, Victoria, New York).	Descriptive, pedagogical maps (sq́ʷiməs = place of dried medicinal flora).
Ethical Relationship	Instrumental, managerial, extractive.	Reciprocal obligation, ancestral belonging (Dùthchas, Whakapapa).

Glossary of Key Concepts

• Environmental Generational Amnesia: A psychological condition coined by Dr. Peter Kahn wherein each generation perceives the degraded, fragmented environmental condition into which they were born as the pristine, natural baseline.
• Plant Blindness: A cognitive perceptual phenomenon where the human visual processing system, lacking specific semantic vocabulary (nouns) for plant species, dismisses surrounding flora as irrelevant background noise, seeing only a uniform wall of green.
• Shifting Baseline Syndrome: Coined by fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly; the gradual incremental shift in human expectations regarding what a healthy natural system looks like across generations due to a lack of historical memory.
• Extinction of Experience: A concept popularized by Robert Michael Pyle positing that as urbanization and indoor living separate children from nature, their local biodiversity vocabulary declines, reducing their emotional connection to the outdoors and accelerating biodiversity loss.
• Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: The linguistic theory that the structure and lexicon of a language deeply shape, mediate, and limit the cognitive perception and categorization of the physical world.
• Grammar of Animacy: A linguistic concept highlighted by Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, wherein non-human living entities (plants, animals, rivers, weather phenomena) are grammatically recognized as animate subjects with agency, rather than inanimate objects (“it”).
• Dùthchas (Scottish Gaelic): An ancient Scottish Gaelic concept denoting the deep, reciprocal bond between a community and its ancestral land, emphasizing that humans belong to the land rather than the reverse.
• Dinnseanchas (Scottish Gaelic / Irish): The “lore of places”; an oral tradition where historical, mythological, and moral teachings are permanently anchored to specific geographical features and landmarks.
• Whakapapa (Māori): A foundational Māori concept of genealogy and relational ontology connecting individuals directly to their ancestral mountains, rivers, seas, and lineage before personal identification.
• Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk): A framework championed by Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall advocating for learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledge systems and from the other eye with the strengths of Western sciences, using both together for the benefit of all.
• The Windscreen Phenomenon: An anecdotal yet empirically verified indicator of the global decline in terrestrial insect biomass: modern long-distance drivers rarely need to clean insect residue from their windshields compared to motorists decades ago.

Featured Studies & Literature

• The Oxford Junior Dictionary Editorial Analysis: The systematic removal of natural world terminology (acorn, bluebell, adder, kingfisher) in favor of digital technology terms (broadband, cut-and-paste, voicemail).
• Miles Richardson (2025), Journal of Earth: Corpus linguistic study utilizing the Google Books Ngram Viewer tracking 28 everyday nature words across English literature from 1800 to 2019, documenting a steep 60% decline.
• Margaret Luthen (2021): Empirical linguistic attrition research in Montana demonstrating that nature vocabulary loss affects rural communities just as severely as urban centers due to centralized media, schooling, and screen time.
• Andrew Balmford et al. (2002), Science: Landmark ecological literacy study showing that 8-year-old children could identify 100 fictional Pokémon characters far more accurately than five native British tree or wildlife species.
• Dr. Peter Kahn (1995), Houston Environmental Study: Fieldwork investigating children’s perceptions of pollution in industrial Houston, revealing that children normalized severe environmental degradation because it was their only lived experience.
• Robert Macfarlane & Jackie Morris, The Lost Words (2017): An illustrated “spell-book” of poetry and art designed to conjure excised nature words back into children’s everyday vocabularies.
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013): Foundational exploration of Indigenous botany, traditional ecological knowledge, and the Potawatomi grammar of animacy.

Memorable Quotes

“A few years ago, the Oxford Children’s Dictionary made a quiet update to its pages. They removed dozens of nature words like acorn, bluebell, and kingfisher and replaced them with tech terms like broadband and voicemail… You aren’t just updating vocabulary. You are literally rewiring human consciousness.”

“When you don’t have the specific nouns to differentiate an oak tree from a willow or a bramble, your brain treats an ecosystem like a computer spam filter. Your visual cortex simply collapses it down into an invisible, generic background of greenery.”

“A teenager driving today can go hundreds of miles through the country, get out, and their windshield is perfectly clean. And because they don’t have the baseline memory of those massive insect swarms, they just think, ‘Oh nice, a clean car.’ They have absolutely no idea they are staring at the catastrophic collapse of insect populations.”

“You cannot mourn, you cannot protect, and you cannot vote for what you do not even realize you have lost, because we literally don’t have the words to remember it.”

“English operates like a giant real estate spreadsheet. It is optimized for commerce and property management. It needs to be universally applicable, which means it must prioritize abstraction and completely rid itself of any deep ties to a specific local ecosystem.”

“In Gaelic or Salish, you literally cannot say ‘I own this land.’ You would say something closer to ‘The land is at me.’ You cannot possess a process. The world is a web of verbs happening around you, not a warehouse of static objects waiting to be claimed.”

“What if taking ten minutes to learn just one local indigenous name for a plant in your own backyard is actually one of the most rebellious, effective acts of conservation you can take today?”