Language Nests
1/16/25 - learning how to reconnect language to the real world
Hello everyone:
There’s much to be said about the Los Angeles fires, and many good sources are saying it. You can start with “The love in the air is thicker than the smoke,” a Reasons to be Cheerful article about communities pulling together to support each other. There are links at the bottom of the article for ways to help.
For a tougher but deeper read, try David Wallace-Wells’ column for the Times. He cites an anonymous online source who lays out the truth with cinematic grace: “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer until you’re the one filming.” And he provides an excellent assessment of the questions swirling through the acrid smoke before curating a deep bench of other readings on the fires that are well worth your time.
As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read this week’s curated Anthropocene news.
Now on to the writing:
When tasked by a professor to imagine a new setting for Hamlet, a poet friend of mine suggested the stage be filled with a giant nest. The play’s action would take place entirely within the nest, in which the doomed young prince - haunted by one parent’s death and by the other’s rush to mate again - is the nestling who fails to launch, despite the early promise of being bounded in an eggshell and imagining himself a king of infinite space. In Hamlet, Shakespeare reminds us that the castles we think we fortify ourselves with are built as much with language as with stone.
This was back in grad school, when I was a fledgling writer acquiring my poetic license. My poems then had a Eastern European flavor - a child wandering a dark forest - but were rooted in my own habit of wandering actual woods and rivers and trying to find a new language for all that astonishing beauty and decline.
The forests we make stories and metaphors from, however, are dotted with actual nests, and they are often extraordinary creations. Humble, sure, but extraordinary, not least because for all our Shakespearean complexity we would struggle to fabricate with two hands and written instructions what has been built with beak, feet, and intuition.
Honestly, it’s a struggle simply to find words as beautiful as a good nest.
This is particularly true of Ruby-throated hummingbird nests, marvelous miniature structures that saddle a down-sloping branch and are built with a foundation of bud scales; a body of woven fluff pulled from cinnamon ferns, cattails, thistles, or other plants; an exterior shingling of foliose lichen fragments; and a thorough binding of sticky threads from spider webs and tent caterpillar nests. The nest is both sturdy and flexible, allowing the young to expand it outward as they grow.
The female Ruby-throat shapes the nest with her body, as an enthusiastic Georgia wildlife official explains: “She will actually stomp her feet on the floor of the nest in an effort to stiffen it. She shapes and smooths the rim of her creation by pressing it between her chest and neck.” (You can watch a wonderful time-lapse of a female Allen’s hummingbird doing similar work here.)
Once, while standing beside a small farm pond in early spring, I heard a buzzing that I finally realized was the sound of a Ruby-throated hummingbird hovering. I found her several feet away, plucking loose fluff from the previous summer’s cattail heads. Soon she had a wide and unruly mustache of seed fluff in her bill. She paused, rotated, and then in an Earth-bound imitation of the Millennium Falcon hitting light speed, she zipped forward and disappeared. But rather than leaving behind a trail of light, she gifted me a small cloud of unsecured fluff drifting across the pond.
My wife Heather spent a few hours learning to identify nests last weekend. It was a continuing-ed class for graduates of the Maine Master Naturalist Program, taught by a woman who is both a founder of that program and the author of the Bird Nest Finder field guide. Heather said that examining dozens of nests spread out across several tables - variations on a theme of sticks, grasses, fluff, moss, mud, and more - and working through the key for each one was both awe-inspiring and difficult. Each nest represented an ancient evolutionary process tweaked by an individual intelligence working within the complex fabric of an ecosystem. Each nest has a language, if you will, with a local accent and an individual twang.
We are taught to think of language as primarily spoken and heard, but I think it’s clear that all plants, animals, and microbes are each in their own fashion actively communicating on multiple channels: chemical, physical (structural and gestural), aural, and much more. The suite of relationships each species creates and maintains is that species’ story. Ecosystems and landscapes are texts - dramas, really - that all the players grow up knowing how to read.
Except for us, it seems. As the “younger brothers of Creation,” humans have always been the only Hamlet on the world stage, often consumed with our own conflicts and unsure of how to live. Without the innate knowledge most species possess, we must be taught how to exist by the shared cognitive confection we call culture.
And this was true even before one particularly destructive and ill-fated version of culture spread like wildfire and converted the Earth into a globe. All human cultures are experiments, and none endure in any meaningful sense within the history of life. They emerge and pass away, but those that listen best to the living world and recognize our dependence upon it will last the longest.
In this Anthropocene moment, this age of aloneness, increasingly blind to the natural world and ignorant of even basic ecological functions, we have become aliens on our own planet often unable to speak or even recognize the languages of home.
If this self-diagnosis sounds harsh, consider that every aspect of modern life is rooted in the delusion that economic growth on a small planet should be infinite; that many wildlife populations have declined by an average of 70% in recent decades; that we spend far more time in front of screens than outdoors in natural spaces; that many kids can identify more corporate logos than plants or animals; that each generation knows less about their non-human neighbors than the previous one.
Worse, our complete disruption of the natural world’s text has made it hard for other species to read it. As we disrupt in mere decades many of the plant and animal communities that have evolved together over millions of years, we make them strangers in a strange land too.
It’s no wonder that despair often fills our nest.
The good news is that we still feel the stirrings of the old languages. We’re still the weird apes who have an affinity for animals and who feel deeply the poetry of place and plants. Better yet, like Heather many of us still actively learn what we can, then share and teach what we know. Even science, which has driven much of the global disruption, is busily revealing more details of these hidden languages every day, from the endless hidden cities of mycorrhizal networks to the cultural subtleties of whale songs.
Human language is, or was, as much a part of ecological systems as birdsong. There’s a reason visual storytelling often pairs beautiful singing with beautiful natural scenes. Our voices were voices in the wilderness before that term meant being lost. When we lived on the land and water we spoke of land and water. When we knew those places intimately through the gathering of food and medicine, they were woven deeply into our cultures and our languages. The land had sung us into being, and good cultures taught us to return the gift.
This is a truth that still thrives in remnants around the world.
The story that started me on this essay’s path is a beautiful, heartening article in Hakai magazine, “To Speak the Language of the Land,” about the Māori people in Aotearoa New Zealand and their successful work to revitalize their language after two centuries of colonial subjugation. One of the first and most important steps they took, back in the 1980s, was the creation of Māori language/culture preschools called kōhanga reo, “language nests.” As the kids aged, more advanced Māori schools were founded for them, “like building new tracks ahead of a speeding train.” (It’s a vital lesson in a truth that American poet Kwame Alexander is fond of reciting: “The mind of an adult begins in the imagination of a child.”)
The article focuses on a Māori kura reo taiao, a “language school of the natural world” for adults, which is part of a newer push to reconnect their language with the poetry and purpose it once had when it was rooted in the wild.
“Classical Māori,” says the author (who is Māori), “is especially rich in allusion, poetry, and metaphor that draw on the natural world. We explain people’s behaviors by likening them to the birds, the winds, the tides, the gods.” But European settlement tore apart much of Maori culture at the same time it “hammered the ecosystems and species that help give the language its life.” Today, three quarters of New Zealand’s native species are threatened, and modern Māori folks “overwhelmingly live in urban centers, largely divorced from the natural world our language rests upon.” There’s a real desire to improve all of that, so the session that the author attended sold out in days:
People are hungry to decolonize their conservation work, and to recover the nuance, the poetry, and the collective, kinship-based worldview contained in the old people’s speech. The immediate goal is to reconnect our language to the natural world through the proverbs and vocabularies of old. Long-term, the goal is more ambitious: to revolutionize how Indigenous languages are taught by unifying language reclamation and conservation work.
The language nest model spread quickly out of New Zealand and around the world after its origin in the 1980s. The Hakai article notes that there are 32 Indigenous language nests in Canada alone, and this Wikipedia page also notes examples in Oceania, Europe, Russia, and in Hawaii and tribal lands in the continental U.S..
This is heartening, as I said, but I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture here. Even in New Zealand, where language nests have had the most profound impact, and most Māori are now comfortable speaking at least a little of their native tongue at home, only 4% of the nation’s population is conversational in the language. Weaving better nests does not restore the forest. “There are more and more people speaking the Māori language,” the article explains, “but fewer and fewer Māori things to speak about.”
Which is why restoring te taiao—the natural world—is essential. The long-term vision of the founder of the kura reo taiao, Tame Malcolm (Ngāti Tarāwhai), is to make language learning and environmental restoration inseparable. He wants the country’s planting and conservation programs all to involve learning te reo, and language programs nationwide to revolve around being in, and working for, the natural world.
This may be the healthiest Anthropocene vision I’ve ever encountered. A planet of Hamlets is desperate for this kind of nest. Far too few of us still occupy a culture that embraces what the world once was, but enough of us recognize the need. In most cases, the languages of ecology and natural history will suffice, as long as they strive to be as beautiful as a hummingbird nest.
If we can connect the vitality of language to the vitality of the land, and work to restore the forests that drive our metaphors, and in the long run at least partially rewild the landscapes that sang us into being, all while learning and teaching what we can of the languages of life, then maybe whatever it is we’re making of this beautiful world will still feel like home.
Thanks for sticking with me.
In other Anthropocene news:
I want to start by reminding readers that Hakai, the wonderful magazine that I cite above, and that has focused on coastal stories from around the world, has closed, but that the staff and spirit of the magazine has moved to bioGraphic, a natural history magazine from the California Academy of Sciences. Be sure to subscribe. They’re currently running stories on whales, invasive salmon, peregrine falcons, mongoose, the ethics of wildlife photography, and much more.
From High Country News, an interview with a Los Angeles wildlife biologist on the impact of the fires on wildlife. In the vast but crowded built environment of L.A., a burning neighborhood is also a burning ecosystem: “I think a lot of people don’t think about our neighborhoods as ecosystems and habitats, but here, they really are,” Ordeñana said.
Also from High Country News, “Why the West Needs Prairie Dogs,” an excellent long piece on the ecological value, cultural problems, and long-term fate of these fuzzy subterranean architects.
From Nautilus, a lyrical and informative short essay on how our bodies, like plants, are light-eaters. Or we are at least much more closely tied to the Sun than we thought, as our exposure to light sets a multitude of circadian rhythms in our body.
From Mongabay, Ogoni women from the oil-scarred Niger Delta have been restoring mangrove forests for several years now. The Nigerian government is paying attention, and has hired the women for an official large-scale mangrove restoration project.
From the U.S. Dept. of Transportation, an announcement of $125 million in grants (via the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) to states for the construction of wildlife crossings. You can read details for planned projects in Oregon, Idaho, Maine, Nevada, and Florida. This is vital work for road ecology, as I’ve written about in some depth.
From the Guardian, many of the great whales may be able to live far longer than we had thought. Unsurprisingly, two centuries of relentless slaughter had skewed both the data and our understanding.
Also from the Guardian, an op-ed by climate scientist Peter Kalmus that gets to the nexus of our corporate and climate problems: “To resist the climate crisis, we must resist the billionaire class.”
From Canary Media, a progress assessment of the U.S. clean energy manufacturing revolution. Quick answer: it’s real, but has a long way to go. The details are worth reading.
Yet again, another inexpressibly eloquent essay where every word tells the beautification of all we hold sacred in our hearts. Thank you for continuing to gently imprint every day of our lives.
With immeasurable gratitude, Jason.
The richness of this article alone is worth the price of subscription. There is so much food for the soul here.