Our Language Disconnects Us From The Living
21 October 2023 - Hubert Mansion
"Biodiversity", "ecosystemic services", "biosphere", "demineralization", "decarbonation" and so many other words: never has language disconnected us so much from the concrete, living world. This abstract language speaks to the brains of a few, but not to the senses of all: who can touch biodiversity? An ecosystem? Who decides to build a cabin in the "environment"?
Because even this last word is absurd: the environment is what's in the "around", not in the center. But is the air we breathe in the surroundings? The earth that supports us, on the horizon? If we'd been looking for a word to distance humans from nature, we couldn't have found a better one.
This vocabulary first contaminated decision-makers, the media and then society as a whole. But why this "abstracting" of things that our bodies simply can't grasp?
First of all, words generally seem more serious when they're more boring, and the specialists who use them all the more indispensable the more incomprehensible they are. This kind of snobbery, which is particularly prevalent in France, is just another way of claiming a status that society hasn't acknowledged.
But this change in vocabulary testifies to something else.
These terms come mainly from conservation biology. Every discipline has its own jargon. Law, medicine and chemistry have their own. But generally speaking, specialized lexical fields remain with the specialists. We continue, for example, to say that we have a cold instead of "nasopharyngitis", a runny nose instead of "rhinorrhea" and headaches instead of "cephalalgia". Why, then, do ordinary citizens start using the words of conservation biology whenever they talk about nature?
Because the biological point of view has monopolized our discourse on nature for the past 40 years.
It is, of course, indispensable. But it should not overshadow all others, nor narrow the vision of public and private decision-makers. Just as love cannot be reduced to an anatomical question, nature cannot be reduced to a scientific approach or conservation. There are many other voices, with much to teach us: sociology, psychology, indigenous peoples, history, children, to name but a few, deserve a voice in this monochordal chorus, because otherwise we'll never be able to understand why the West has destroyed so much of nature.
Biological obsession leads to regulations, laws and directives. The human sciences offer another way forward, and provide the understanding that might enable us to do without these rules. For biology is a product of our culture, and it is precisely our culture of the natural world that needs to be transformed.
Hubert Mansion is the cofounder of l’Université dans la Nature.
Philosopher and writer, he is notably the author of Réconcilier, vers une identité environnementale (Nullius in Verba, 2023) and presents the series La nature et les mots (Youtube).
