Words for Wild Integrity

. . . we have an amazing opportunity to rebuild our culture and our relationship with the natural world through language.

David Lukas (Language Making Nature)

      Every word is, in itself, a conceptual lens through which the expression of ideas, experiences and relationships in a verbally communicable form is made possible.  In a social sense, what cannot be spoken is, in many cases, rendered invisible.  An idea may exist as an intuitive feeling, but it will not coalesce into clarity until it can be voiced and, more importantly, understood by a listener. 

     Thus, every word spoken or written must be carefully considered so that the intended meaning is not lost in translation.  One mischosen word can do more damage than all the sticks and stones in the world.  And one perfect word can imprint a heart with lasting warmth and change that heart, if not the world, forever.  But words are little more than noise until they are embedded within the larger conceptual frame of a language.

      Language no doubt evolved thanks to the adaptive advantage it offered for rapid collective behavioral changes in response to survival threats and/or opportunities.  However, with this ability came a dark potential: the means to deceive in a way that cannot be verified with other senses.  George Orwell named the extreme expression of this potential doublespeak.  And never before in human time has doublespeak been so prevalent, especially in politics where bald-faced greed disguised as public interest has finally managed to infiltrate the White House.  One factor above all others made this possible: language abuse.

      Such abuse, and the very real damage it does in the world, will only worsen until linguistic integrity is restored.  The first step is to realize that to use language is to engage in a moral act, no matter how trivial the communication might seem.  Every word matters.  In terms of fostering personal and collective behaviors that preserve or undermine individual, cultural and ecological integrity, no force can equal language. 

      This force goes deeper than specific words to the very linguistic structure itself.  For example, languages with formal and informal, masculine and feminine word variants tend to produce a populace more accepting of economic, class and gender stratification.  Languages rooted in alphabetic abstraction prove more portable and ecologically permissive than those rooted in natural landscapes; when the metaphors and meaning derived from the Earth are minimized, the ability to overexploit the Earth and move on is much easier than would otherwise be the case.  Noun-heavy/verb-light languages promote the objectification of a subjective reality and thus ease its conversion into property. 

      For those of us who interface with the greater world through a language that does all of these and more, to speak without prejudgment in terms of place, process and relationship is hampered, and in some instances completely disabled, by the structures of our language itself, no matter the words we use.  On top of that, there are vital concepts for which no words exist at all, or if they exist, they are sufficiently uncommon to dissuade usage.  Thus, we enter a Catch 22: we won’t grow comfortable with the words unless we use them, but our discomfort prevents us from using them. 

      So, we’re stuck with a language full of holes.  Many of these holes prevent us from engaging in clear communication about the very subject for which it is most needed: rising to the challenge of ecological integrity.  Each of the terms and concepts below is an attempt to help fill a hole.  Some of the terms and concepts are original and some (cited) have been coined by others, but owing to their present obscurity and underuse have been included here.

Terms

Antecoda: the prefix ‘Ante-’ means before or beginning.  And ‘Coda’ means tail or end.  So, an antecoda is way of recognizing that an end is also a new beginning.  The cycle of life is affirmed, in a word.

Anthropangea: a name for the technologically-knitted super-continent on which most humans are presently born and live their whole lives.  This singular planetary land mass has been made possible by the literal resurrection of energy from the Carboniferous era, the last time, coincidentally, that all Earth’s continents were joined as one.   And, as with that world 300 million years ago, the same future is at hand.  Break up.

Autopoeisis: coined in 1972 by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, autopoeisis means ‘self-made,’ as in generated or born through internal processes.  The way the proto-horse Eohippus evolved, from birth to birth over millions of years of natural selection, to become the modern horse exemplifies an autopoeitic evolutionary process (or the way Australopithecus evolved into Homo sapiens).  The contrast to autopoeisis is allopoeisis, which means ‘other-made,’ as in manufactured or constructed by a greater, outside agent or designer.  An example of allopoeitic evolution would be the evolution of a technology, say, the automobile, where each ‘generation’ has no actual connection to the previous, but is the product of an external design and manufacturing process by a third party. 

Cointegrity (Cointegral, Cointegrated): Cointegrity (as opposed to coexistence) acknowledges the distinct but inseparable nature of all forms of life as well as the inescapable influence each form has on the integrity of others.  A cointegral relationship can be negative, neutral or positive.  Only the latter leads to optimal health for all.

Digitopia: The virtual reality utopia in which more and more people are trying to live on-line.

Ebbline: The opposite of the Frontier: the boundary of contraction where the wave-front of civilization reverses direction and recedes, leaving re-wilding landscapes in its wake.  These landscapes might be called Ebblands.  This land designation will persist until the contraction of the Ebbline is complete, at which points, the prefix Ebb can be dropped.  The Earth will simple be a world of diverse landscapes again.

Ebboriginals: The first, and all following, ecologically integrated inhabitants of the Ebblands.  As with the Ebblands themselves, once the Ebbline completes contraction, enough time will have passed for everyone then living to go from being Ebboriginals to being indigenous to the landscapes they call home.  Healing will be complete.

Holon: coined by Arthur Koestler in 1967, a holon is a whole that is at the same time part of a greater whole.  The clearest examples of holons are nested watersheds where the boundaries of whole watersheds can be clearly defined, but those watersheds may also be parts of another whole watershed with equally distinct boundaries etc.  No matter how tiny watersheds are, none of them can be removed from the greater whole they help compose.  In the central Oregon Cascades, the Wolfwish Creek, Owl Creek, Horse Creek, McKenzie River, Willamette River, Columbia River, and Pacific Ocean watersheds are all related holonically, Each whole/part is inseparably nested within the next.  Atoms, molecules, cells, organs, bodies, landscapes, planets, solar systems, galaxies, the cosmos are also holonically related.

Holonomy (Holonomous): coined by Elisabet Sahtouris, holonomy refers to a multi-layered self-identity that extends beyond the individual to include everything from subatomic particles to the cosmos as a whole.  A holonomous self-identity contrasts with an autonomous self-identity in that individuality represents only one minor aspect the meaningful self.  The ability to perceive from the point of view offered by the different holonic levels of self requires learning how to shift reference holon.

Holarchy: coined by Arthur Koestler, the holarchy refers to the total assemblage of inseparable and inclusive holonic levels.  It also refers to the nested arrangement of holons and contrasts with pyramidal arrangement of separable and exclusive parts that stack rather than nest to make a hierarchy.

Landcestor (Landcestry, Landcestral, Landescendant, Landescendance):  predecessors-in-place are our landcestors: we are part of their landcestry.  We will be followed by our landescendants in the passages of our brief individual lifetimes in the places where we live.  Many of us have no ancestors in those places.  And so, it is to the land itself as well as our landcestors that we must turn for the human stories that will ground us in the local landscape.  Only by delving deep into the shared lore of all our Earthly relations will we be able to learn what it means to inhabit the little part of the planet where we live, the part perhaps best understood in terms of the area accessible by foot — within walking distance.  Who lived here over the millennia, how they lived here, who lives here now and how, and what it will mean to live here indefinitely through the years to come are the vital questions we must answer.  In learning answers, we must remember, we too are not just the ancestors of our children, we are the landcestors to everyone who will follow in our footsteps for as long as there are human (and non-human) feet in the places we roam, and the places we call home.

Predapt (Predaptation): Anticipating a change in conditions and consciously modifying behavior to accommodate the change.  This action can actually help facilitate the change itself, for better or, as we’ve seen throughout history, for worse, as with preemptive military strikes in anticipation of an attack that never would have come.

Preligion (Preligious): A spiritual tradition devoted to the preservation of perceived connectivity to the source of life, as opposed to re-ligion with its self-professed role as a guide to re-connection.  Both words share the same suffix, ‘ligio,’ which means connect (think, ligament).  But, with religion, the prefix ‘re’ means to recover, to restore, which implies prior loss.  Preligions exist to honor the inherent connectivity of all life.

Concepts:

The Golden Law: this law states that “What you do unto others you are also doing unto yourself (and vice versa).”  The Golden Law takes the Golden Rule — “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — the next step by recognizing the reality of inescapable consequences that the Golden Rule overlooks.  You can choose to ignore the Rule, but not the Law.  Your every action will cast ripples.  Your choices determine the kind of ripples you will cast.

The Law of Holonic Reciprocity: in an act of collaborative imagination, my friend, Gary Gripp, and I have conceived of this law in recognition of the fact that the optimal health of each level of the Universal Holarchy depends on all levels being mutually supportive in the way that cells in the body must serve not only their own health, but the health of the organs and tissues they compose as well as the body as a whole.