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In a speech delivered in 1952, Rachel Carson warned, "Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, in his cities of steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water and the growing seed. Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world."
Carson voiced these worries before the triumph of television or shopping malls, before the advent of air-conditioning, personal computers, video games, the Internet, cell phones, cloning, genetic engineering, and a slew of other inventions that have made the artificial world ever more seductive. Unlike Earth, the artificial world is made for us. It feeds our bellies and minds with tasty pabulum; it shelters us from discomfort and sickness; it proclaims our ingenuity; it flatters our pride. Snug inside bubbles fashioned from concrete and steel, from silicon and plastic and words, we can pretend we are running the planet.
By contrast, the natural world was not made for our comfort or convenience. It preceded us by some billions of years, and it will outlast us; it mocks our pride, because it surpasses our understanding and control; it can be dangerous and demanding; it will eventually kill us and reclaim our bodies. We should not be surprised that increasing numbers of people choose to live entirely indoors, leaving buildings only to ride in airplanes or cars, viewing the great outside, if they view it at all, through sealed windows, but more often gazing into screens, listening to human chatter, cut off from "the realities of earth and water and the growing seed."
The more time we spend inside human constructions, the more likely we are to forget that these bubbles float in the great ocean of nature. A decade before Carson issued her warning, Aldo Leopold, in A Sand County Almanac, recognized this danger as the central challenge facing the conservation movement: How do we nurture a land ethic in people who have less and less contact with land? How do we inspire people to take care of their home places if they feel no sense of place?
If we aim to foster a culture of conservation, we'll have to work at changing a host of things, from ads to zoos, from how we put food on our plates to how we imagine our role in the universe. Out of all these necessary changes, I wish to speak about one that is close to my heart as a storyteller, |
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which is the need to root language once more in the earth. We need to recover the fertile meanings of words that arise out of our long evolutionary contact with dirt and wind, rivers and woods, animals and plants.
At the root of language, we often find an earthy wisdom. Take the word growth, for example. When Donella Meadows and her colleagues published a report in 1972 on the prospects for the continued expansion of the human economy, they called their book The Limits to Growth. The very title provoked outrage in many circles, because a prime article in the technoindustrial creed is that there are no limits to growth. According to this creed, any constraints imposed by nature will be overcome by technical ingenuity or the free market. Mining, drilling, pumping, clearing, plowing, manufacturing, and consuming-along with the human population that drives it all-will expand forever, the boosters claim. Politicians and business leaders speak of growth as unbounded and unambiguously good.
Our ancestors knew better. If we dig down to the root of growth, we find a verb that means to turn green, as grass does in the spring. In fact, grow, grass, and green all rise from the same Indo-European stem. Grass turns green in the spring, shoots up vigorously during the summer, then dies back and lies fallow through the winter. Season after season, the wilted grass turns to humus, enriching the soil. Molded into this word, therefore, is a recognition that growth is bounded, that it obeys the cycles of sun and rain, that it restores to the earth more fertility than it takes out.
If the phrase "sustainable growth" means perpetual expansion, then it is a delusion. Cancer shows that rampant growth soon becomes malignant. The sprawl of cities over the countryside and the spread of bellies over belts teach us that, beyond a certain point, expansion leads to misery, if not disaster. Nothing in nature expands forever. Certainly nothing on Earth grows unchecked, neither bodies nor cities nor economies. Buried in the word growth is the wisdom of people blessed with outdoor understanding, people who watched the grass rise and fall each year like a green wave.
Copyright 2002, Scott Russell Sanders, All Rights Reserved
"A Few Earthy Words" (c) 2002 by Scott Russell Sanders; first published in Helen Whybrow, ed., The Story Handbook: Language and Storytelling for Land Conservationists(Trust for Public Land, 2002); reprinted by permission of the author.
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