The Case for Environmental Keywords
Environmental Storytelling is More Vital Now Than Ever
Why We Need Environmental Keywords.
Environmental keywords will be important tools in helping us tell new stories about environmental problems and their solutions: improving stories we already tell, but also helping us tell the stories that go untold.
Human-environment relationships involve a complex tangle of social, cultural, ecological, political, economic, technological, and scientific stories.
To make sense of this complexity and tell new stories that can heal damaging human relationships with the natural environment, writers, scholars, and scientists are contributing to new toolkits of environmental keywords to tell more powerful stories that compel people to take action. Dan Heath, in his wonderfully practical, no-nonsense guide to effective storytelling, Made to Stick: Why some ideas survive and others die, writes:
“You will not get people to change without appealing to the rational, triggering the emotional, and oftentimes addressing the practical, such as a lack of alternatives.”
— Dan Heath
What words can help us get individuals, groups, organizations, governments and maybe even society, to change? Do the words we use even have the power to induce change?
I think they do. And if that’s true, then it’s important to find words we can use as more effective tools for change.
I explore a new environmental keyword each week. I hope you might find these keywords useful in your own writing, and telling new stories about the environmental and social issues you care about.
In this post I ask: what does inheritance mean and why does it matter?
Inheritance
We live in a time of mass extinction: extinction of natures, cultures, and languages.
We live “in a time of ongoing colonization, of diverse human and nonhuman lives” writes environmental philosopher Thom Van Dooren.
In his research on conservation efforts striving to save the ‘alalā, the endangered Hawaiian crow, van Dooren says,
“… .taking care is always a historical and relational proposition: if we’re doing it right, care always thrusts us into an encounter with ghosts, our own and others’”
These might be evolutionary ghosts, like plants still waiting for seed dispersers now extinct to visit them. Or they might be historical ghosts, like Indigenous Hawaiians haunted by the illegal annexation of Hawai‘i in 1893.
For ‘alalā, these ghosts also include their language, a complex vocal repertoire of calls and songs lost over time as generation after generation await to leave their rehabilitation in captivity for a place in the wild.
Deborah Bird Rose calls this kind of inheritance “the work of recuperation.”
The Hawaiian writer, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, powerfully describes how Hawaiians navigate inheritance in his essay, ‘We live in the future: Come join us. He writes:
“Our genealogies are a backbone stretching to the very inception of these islands, and when we understand our genealogy, we know our origins, where we have been. We always have our ancestors at our back. That certainty gives us a wider possibility of movement, a more supple way to navigate through the world.”
How might we do the work of cultural and ecological recuperation well?
How might we better inherit the hauntings of extinction, colonial violence, and cultural loss that both ‘violently elect us,’ as Jacques Derrida famously puts it, but that we also have the potential to transform?
What kinds of histories have we inherited whether chosen or forced on us— familial, emotional, cultural, social, political, economic, educational, colonial, ecological — and which ones can we (or must we) recuperate to better navigate an uncertain future?
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If you’re interested in learning more about environmental storytelling, you can check out other writings of mine on the topic below:)
