Changing Language to Accommodate Changing Meanings

I was walking to breakfast on a crisp autumn morning when I noticed that one of the two trees flanking Pembroke Arch had a name tag. Over time, I became more well-acquainted with Bryn Mawr’s campus, and I found name plates on quite a few of the trees I pass by on my way to class or elsewhere. On their name tags, their identities are represented in two different denominations: their common name, and their scientific name. They might be adequate for someone who is only interested in enjoying their daily walk through the college’s arboretum, but to a person observing the trees with a view to ecological intelligence, the limits of their names become apparent, and even problematic. The common name, for example, of the trees outside the entrance of my dorm is the Fastigiate Ginkgo. However, in conversation and in my mind, it is never their common name that I recall first. Rather, I know the trees for their fan-shaped, chartreuse leaves that carpet the ground beneath my feet. I know them as unmistakable features of my dorm, signs that I am in the right place at the end of the day. A girl in my anthropology class knows their leaves as the real-life analog of the tattoo she has permanently etched on her arm. The landscapers who planted them know the trees are all male, which, interestingly, is a counter to Haverford’s ginkgos, which are all female (Bryn Mawr College Tree Tour). The land knows the ginkgos as being members of one of the oldest species of tree to inhabit the Earth, their roots dating back into the Permian geologic period. The trees themselves might see each other as competitors for the same resources that are critical to life.

What I have described are a few of infinitely many “codifications” for the Ginkgo biloba (Friere, 11). They are “pictorial representation[s]...laden with the meaning of ...existential experience,” (Friere, 11). The ginkgo’s meaning is most locally distributed in its codifications, its meanings that are individually shaped and re-shaped through experiences. But in the act of imagining the ginkgo in terms of its common name, its meaning becomes less local, and this effect is augmented in the use of its Latin binomial nomenclature, which is universally attributed to the tree regardless of its regional names. Without considering the codifications of words, we lose the multiplicity of meanings that can lead us to ecological thinking.

Thinking ecologically demands that we explore the ways we are able to “[take] into account the interacting patterns, ranging from how behaviours ripple through the field of social relationships...to how an individual’s actions introduce changes in the energy flows and alter the patterns of interdependence within natural systems” (Bowers, 46). To practice this form of intelligence, we have to acknowledge the complex of complexes that everything is a part of. When we realize that “all agents share the same shape-changing destiny, a destiny that cannot be followed, documented, told, and represented using any of the older traits associated with subjectivity or objectivity,” we can begin to grasp the extent of our implication in the great scheme of the Earth (Latour, 15). Ecological thought allows us to be cognizant of the network of relationships between agents, and it begins to be taught in language.

Language, and furthermore, education as an elaboration of language, is frequently unsuccessful in spreading ecological intelligence, by permitting its users to buy into “the myth of not being part of the interdependent cultural and natural ecosystems, but rather being a separate observer, thinker, and actor” (Bowers, 46). To address this lack of ecological intelligence, we must begin to talk about things in a way that conveys their entanglement with everything else. It entails connecting the dots, but also connecting the connections. It entails knowing a ginkgo tree’s existence is being transformed physically and philosophically by its relationships with the Earth, by understanding that existence is membership into an ecosystem consisting of bodies that are related to each other by their meanings. To accomplish this, we must use language. Language gives meaning agency, and when we realize the codifications of words, we can understand how “every encounter between bodies modifies the bodies that encounter one another, such that their affects-their capacities for acting and being acted upon-gain or lose power” (Alaimo, 3). Education can be reformed to encourage this interrelated way of thinking and communicating by teaching students to employ their individual codifications of words in their lives. Teaching ecological thought involves adapting language in a way that does not neatly compartmentalize entities and their meanings. Language must be considerate of the notion that “existence and meaning are synonymous,” and it has to be adjusted so that our words provoke the recognition of the larger community of Earth and its entities (Latour, 12) To think ecologically is to fathom that "we are all of us compendiums-of ancestral patterns, a thousand subsequent overlays," and its practice is "a defiance of the plasma membrane and the loneliness it has brought” (Angier, 256-7).

Works Cited

Bowers, C.A. "Steps to the Recovery of Ecological Intelligence." OMETECA. 14-15. 43.Bowers, C.A. 

Freire, Paulo.  "The Importance of the Act of Reading." Trans. Loretta Slover. Brazilian Congress of Reading, Campinas, Brazil. November 1981. Rpt. Journal of Education 165, 1 (Winter 1983): 5-11.

Latour, Bruno.  "Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene." New Literary History 45, 1 (Winter 2014): 1-18.

Alaimo, Stacy. "Stacy Alaimo: Porous Bodies and Trans-Coporeality." Larval Subjects. N.p., n.d. Web. 6 Dec. 2015.

Angier, Natalie. Woman: An Intimate Geography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. N. pag. Print.