What words do you hear children using when they talk about Nature? What were the words you used as a child, but don’t hear anymore?
I love reading books on nature. One of my favourite writers in this genre is Robert Macfarlane and a favourite is his book Landmarks. This is an extraordinary book about the words used to describe the natural world. It is also a book of place – the British Isles. I was born in the UK and lived there, in the Wiltshire countryside, until I was eight and we then moved to New Zealand so I must admit it has an immediacy for me. It evokes parts of the landscape of my early childhood, but its themes are universal.
There is a passage in his book that actually made me cry. My cry was a lament for our landscape and the loss of connection to it. I mourned for our children. I feel this passage is so powerful that I am reproducing it here to share with you.
My cry was a lament for our landscape and the loss of connection to it. I mourned for our children.
“The same year I first saw the Peat Glossary, a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant [my emphasis] to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words introduced to the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail.”
Are we really prepared to let the words of our natural world be deleted from the dictionaries of our children? If we deny them the words to describe natural world how can they feel part of it? How can they understand its nuance and relevance to their lives?
How can we let nature become so invisible, so obsolete, when it is the very thing we all depend upon? How can we hand the next generation a world to care for if they do not even know what to call it?
How can we hand the next generation a world to care for if they do not even know what to call it?
In one paragraph Robert Macfarlane has shown us how we have become so irresponsible with our children’s futures. This deleting of the vocabulary of nature is happening against a backdrop of climate change, biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, pollution, an ocean of plastic and the powers that be don’t really seem to care about that either. Not really. Isn’t there some saying about if you don’t know the names of those you kill then it doesn’t matter so much? Is that what we are doing? Erasing the names of nature so we can’t see or care about what we are laying waste to?
The greatest gift my parents ever gave me was a childhood growing up in the countryside, surrounded by nature. I can see how that formed me, and while sadly I do not have children of my own, I love teaching children about the magic and beauty of the natural world. I love to see them see things differently – the weed that heals, the animal that answers when you call, the trees of myth and legend, our place - not as ruler, but as equal in this fabulous web of life… our place in the oneness of things.
I don’t want to live in a world where children don’t know that a dandelion is a dandelion. Do you? It is up to us to show our children, our communities, our politicians, our business leaders that nature counts. Because without it we are nothing.
