Landscape Architecture Australia
Wanting words
Words are powerful. If we don’t have the language to describe our relationship with the natural world and our uniquely Australian landscape features, ecologies and systems, can we successfully design for them?
To design landscapes sensitively, we need to be able to better describe our relationship with the natural world. Article by Jess Stewart.
Language, writes British author Robert Macfarlane, is one of the great geological forces of the Anthropocene.1 The English language in particular constructs a human-centred world. Words elicit exclusion. Grammar enables expendability. Semantics engenders extinctions. Our vernacular limits our ability to comprehend, interpret and design for diverse ecologies. We have gradually ceased using some words to the point where they have become lost, other words have become so hackneyed as to be ineffectual, and we lack the words to describe particular natural phenomena.
There has been a current surge of interest in words, reflected in recent literature. In her novel The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams puts a spotlight on the process of the inclusion or absence of certain words in the Oxford English Dictionary.2 In The
Yield, Tara June Winch demonstrates how Wiradjuri words link family, land and story.3 And Macfarlane again, in Landmarks, exhibits a lost landscape lexicon for particular landscape features of the British Isles.4
As landscape architects, our work is always mediated. We often rely more on the image than the word to translate our ideas. Language can give form to ideas, processes and relationships. It allows us to engage with a broad discourse and critique our work. It influences the way we think of, analyze, describe and design landscape. And it allows us to understand the world in different ways.
Some estimate that the English language gains more than 20,000 new words each year,5 yet our vocabularies relating to the so-called “natural” environment are getting smaller. “It is not, on the whole, that natural phenomena and entities themselves are disappearing,” writes Macfarlane, “rather that there are fewer people able to name them, and that once they go unnamed they go to some degree unseen. Language deficit leads to attention deficit. As we further deplete our ability to name, describe and figure particular aspects of our places, our competence for understanding and imagining possible relationships with nonhuman nature is correspondingly depleted.”6
Landscape architects need to be aware of the biases inherent in the English language so that we might intentionally confront them. The metaphors we often take for granted can reinforce society’s negativity toward the things we should value. We can be notoriously ignorant of the hidden, less romantic or messy components of ecosystems that are so important to biodiversity.
Macfarlane, referring to what lies beneath the surface of the earth, writes, “an aversion to the underland is buried in language.” When we use soil as a verb, it usually has negative connotations. David George Haskell writes, “Our language does a poor job of recognising this afterlife of trees. Rot, decomposition, punk, duff, deadwood: these are slack words for so vital a process.”7
Binary oppositions embedded in the English language neglect to recognize the complexity of ecological relationships: nature/culture, endangered/secure, invasive/endemic.
The language dominantly used to discuss environmental weeds is aggressive, reliant on a vocabulary of combat and metaphors of war, which directly influences the way we approach weed management. Plants are spoken about as “aliens” and “enemies” that “threaten” the environment and need “fighting” against. Aboriginal elders in the Kimberly region of Western Australia, however, use a much more passive, neutral lexicon, focused on health and care, which dramatically alters the management approach. Invasive species are described as “introduced,” “cheeky” and needing to be “watched.” Over time, weeds can even be spoken about as “belonging” to a place.8
These dualisms are not reflected in all languages. Many indigenous languages around the world use pronouns that refer to plants, animals and natural features as people rather than objects. As North Americanbased Robin Wall Kimmerer notes, there is an inherent equality encapsulated in the pronouns used for natural features, systems, plants and animals in the endangered language of her people, the Potawatomi, a group whose headquarters are in present-day Oklahoma. “This is the grammar of animacy. Imagine seeing your grandmother standing at the stove in her apron and then saying of her, ‘Look, it is making soup. It has gray hair.’ We might snicker at such a mistake, but we also recoil from it. In English, we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed to any person, as That would be a profound act of
disrespect. It robs a person of self hood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere thing. So it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family.”9
The English language also fails to make connections across systems, as many indigenous languages do. As Richard Walley told an audience of landscape architects at the 2019 International Festival of Landscape Architecture, “Ngarngk, in Nyoongar language, means mother. It’s also the name we use for the sun.”10 This speaks to the acknowledgement of interconnectivity inherent in language. Similarly, Tyson Yunkaporta writes of the silky oak tree that “…that tree cannot be examined as a specimen on its own for medicinal and other uses, because it is part of a complex system, like every other entity in the universe.
That silky oak tree has the same name in Aboriginal languages as the word for eel.
Its wood has the same grain as eel meat and it flowers in the peak fat season for eels, signalling to us that it is the right time to eat them. The fat is medicine in that season and can cure a fever.”11 This alludes to the interconnectedness of these living things, capturing just some of the complexity of the relationships between organisms through language. The Waorani people of the western Amazon don’t have names for individual species. Their language necessitates that they speak of the ecological context, uses and relationships of what we might call “species” in English.12
Some academics and practitioners are attempting to address our lack of ability to speak about our relationship with nature. Julian Raxworthy’s practice of the “viridic” (from the Latin for green, viridis, which had an implicit connection with vegetation and growth) aims to name the non-representational interaction of the designer with the dynamic and malleable nature of plants. He explains that the viridic “is a landscape-architectural version of the tectonic in architecture.”13 Significantly, this speaks to our inability to describe the salient material nature of our work and the way that language preferences the built form over the living. Our profession’s reluctance thus far to readily adopt such a term suggests an obliviousness to the effect that our language may have on our design processes.
We have not yet developed the words in English to describe distinctive Australian landscape qualities. The words we use to talk to clients, other consultants and the public about plants, ecologies and biodiversity often come under the “green” umbrella: green space, green roof, green wall, green spine, green corridor. The imagery conjured by these terms doesn’t speak to any sense of an Australian landscape character. Where are the words to specifically describe the soft, kinetic, reflective, light-filtering, dancing, expanding beauty of our grasslands? Or the harmonious, muted, fine-textured, salty vegetation of our coastal vegetation. Or the majestic, misty, dusky, cool, undulating, encompassing atmosphere of our mountain ash forests?
The limits of the English language prevent us from sensitively designing for coexistence in a uniquely Australian context. We need to rethink the words that we use, to generate, communicate, advocate and legislate for a post-anthropocentric world.
1. Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019).
2. Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words (Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2020).
3. Tara June Winch, The Yield (Melbourne: Hamish Hamilton, 2019).
4. Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2015).
5. Don Watson, Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language (Sydney: Knopf, 2003).
6. Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019).
7. David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (New York: Random House, 2017).
8. Thomas Michael Bach and Brendon M. H. Larson, “Speaking About Weeds: Indigenous Elders’ Metaphors for Invasive Species and Their Management,” Environmental Values, vol 26 no 5, October 2017, 561–81.
9. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013).
10.Richard Walley and Julian Raxworthy, “The Park as an Ongoing Process,” International Festival of Landscape Architecture: The Square and the Park, Melbourne, 12 October 2019.
11. Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2019).
12.David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (New York: Random House, 2017).
13.Julian Raxworthy, Overgrown: Practices between Landscape Architecture and Gardening (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2018).