00:00:00.000For the Wild podcast is made possible by support from our partner, the Calliopeia Foundation.
00:00:06.980Calliopeia believes in honoring all life as sacred, working with many projects towards a shared vision for the future, rooted in an interconnected approach to ecology, culture, and spirituality.
00:00:19.920We are so grateful for Calliopeia's generous support to bring so many transformative projects to life and for helping us to bring our show to you every week.
00:00:29.560Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young.
00:00:39.260And for people to start appreciating the different worlds we're walking in,
00:00:44.480the different experiences we're all having around climate change,
00:00:47.900and in some ways allow for new conversations to happen in a third space
00:00:53.100without the burden being upon an individual's shoulders.
00:00:59.100Today, we are speaking with Heidi Quanta and Alicia Escott.
00:01:06.060Quanta was raised speaking three languages simultaneously and as a result has long been
00:01:11.700fascinated with how words influence people's thoughts, actions, and ultimately culture.
00:01:17.640Creating new words is something she loves doing and has been doing since she first learned to
00:01:22.220communicate with other humans. Adult reprisals of that's not a word didn't stop her when she
00:01:28.160is five years old, nor does it today. Quanta was inspired to create this artwork with Escott because
00:01:34.820she was at a loss for words to describe the very real emotions and feelings she found herself
00:01:40.720experiencing as our world rapidly changes due to social, political, and environmental factors.
00:01:47.080Quanta's passion as an artist and founder of the non-profit Creative Catalyst is finding
00:01:52.140innovative approaches to inspiring cultures to address the pressing social and environmental
00:01:57.280challenges of our time. This passion is a continuation of 17 years of designing and
00:02:02.640running a wide array of environmental and human rights initiatives. Quanta received a Bachelor
00:02:07.440of Science and Bachelor of Arts in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California,
00:02:12.240Berkeley. Alicia Escott's artistic thinking focuses on grappling with what it is to live
00:02:18.240a human life amid a moment that is profoundly rare in the geologic and ecological history of
00:02:23.540the planet. She is interested in how we each are negotiating our immediate day-to-day realities
00:02:28.680and responsibilities amid an awareness of the overarching specter of climate change,
00:02:34.880mass extinction, and other anthroposcenic events. She approaches these issues with an
00:02:41.200interstitial practice that encompasses writing, drawing, painting, photography, video sculpture,
00:03:10.880For nearly the entirety of human history, language stemmed from the land.
00:03:16.200If a culture was centered around a river, then their language was also centered around that river.
00:03:22.960A language birthed by salmon, bear, sea, sky, and spruce would be vastly unfamiliar to a language born of alligator or cypress, march, and mangrove.
00:03:34.920So in the wake of globalization, the rooting of language to place has largely vanished.
00:03:40.300So I'd love to begin this conversation by asking you to speak about why language, culture, and ecology are inseparable from one another.
00:03:50.600This is Heidi. So I'm first generation. Both my parents are not from this country. I'm the first of my, all of my ancestors to be born in the United States.
00:04:01.540And so it was really interesting is that my mother used to send me back to my grandmother almost every summer.
00:04:06.800no one there spoke English and the dialect they spoke is tragically now dead but it's very much
00:04:13.140a river dialect so I have this wild experience of walking in two worlds as a youth where my great
00:04:21.880great grandmother and grandfather's name is Lahnstein. Lahn is a river and so they're literally
00:04:27.780named after the river where they came from and live not too far away from. A lot of the words
00:04:34.060the diversity of words for river were so beautiful, but I didn't realize how magnificent they were
00:04:41.560until I was in the United States and found the English language lacking. So I would say that in
00:04:47.940my own small way have seen or experienced the difference and the evidence of the stripping of0.99
00:04:56.480the knowledge of the land is that the first prisoner of consciousness in Alcatraz was a Hopi
00:05:06.880So I think there's this interesting experience in the United States
00:05:10.060where I would ask people what are all these words for,
00:05:12.420and no one knew because it had been violently removed
00:05:18.320from the people who are the original ancestors of the United States
00:05:22.420through physical violence and then political imprisonment.
00:05:26.180That's kind of a long answer, but it's been interesting to notice.
00:05:29.320I don't know a lot of the language of the place where I was born and raised whereas my ancestors
00:05:35.380did. Thank you Heidi and Alicia do you have anything that you'd want to add? So there have
00:05:42.100been these studies of course I'm not a scientist I don't you know I can't I can't verify them
00:05:46.720but linking the loss of language diversity directly to the loss of biodiversity so I think
00:05:55.520you're hitting a really important nail on the head and I think when we started this project
00:06:00.640we were really thinking about new words and experiences that people are having that we don't
00:06:06.740have the language to talk about within that we always wanted to include dialogue or directly
00:06:14.140words that maybe were lost to modernity you know as everything's become so specialized and so
00:06:20.500homogenized, but that are actually really important for the times that we're now living
00:06:26.560through as the climate's changing, as, you know, we're facing adversity in our environment.
00:06:33.560And I think also one of the things I'm personally passionate about is inviting people who still
00:06:39.960speak the language of the land where I currently live to share with me what they know. And that's
00:06:45.700been beautiful and i think there's kind of this not realizing that there's still a lot of native
00:06:51.340american communities in california they still do speak their language they still do know the names
00:06:57.560of many things and if you honor and respect what they're doing it's still there too so a personal
00:07:04.920passion of mine is consciously going out and meeting with people and sitting and listening
00:07:09.960I think there's still a lot that can be learned. One of the words that this woman, Kamala, who hails from Oakland, she came to us when we had our pop-up. We have three ways that we collaborate with the public to create new words.
00:07:25.120We have an evening salon in which we invite a select group of people, and then we have this literally mobile bureau that we bring to public spaces and simply ensconce ourselves in neologisms.
00:07:37.380We have a banner that says the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, and we're then sitting in our uniforms and open to anyone and everyone engaging in a conversation about the power of words.
00:07:46.320And when we were at Banffa, the Berkeley Art Museum, Kamalo came up to me and she's a healer. And she said, I want to create a word for the fact that when we strip plants of their indigenous name, we lose the wealth of knowledge that comes with that plant. And when we give it a Latin name, we're losing the knowledge of place.
00:08:08.020So I think there's still also a rich opportunity to learn from the words that still do exist.
00:08:15.280So I think we're an and-and project where it's also listening to what is there and then seeking to fill the gaps for what is not.
00:08:23.920This biodiversity crisis that you mentioned has deafened not only the songs of our plant, animal and fungal kin, but also the songs of human linguistic diversity, which we've been mentioning.
00:08:36.900and the immense cultural and ecological implications that this loss of language carries
00:08:43.180are not to be understated. For in the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer, who wrote Braiding
00:08:48.660Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss, she says that, quote, when a language dies, so much more than
00:08:54.100words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a
00:09:01.240prism through which to see the world, end quote. And cultures living in reciprocity with the earth
00:09:07.220for millennia surely saw their natal ecosystems through shifts, through times of both scarcity
00:09:14.280and abundance. And I think about the breadth of adaptive ecological wisdom that we aren't even
00:09:22.040comprehending that's being lost right now. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on the consequences of
00:09:28.060this severe bottleneck of indigenous languages in regards to our ability to respond and adapt to
00:09:34.680climate chaos? One of the interesting things as someone who my first language was not English
00:09:40.860is that globally English outside of Chinese is one of the dominant languages. By only speaking0.97
00:09:48.920and limiting yourself to English, you are missing a wealth of knowledge, not just the actual word
00:09:58.020but a social structure behind that word or relationship to other sentient beings like so
00:10:03.240for example when you start talking to people from other languages you realize the spectrum of
00:10:09.160worldviews and philosophies and approaches that are just such richer and so different so for
00:10:14.500example when we did a salon on the immigrant experience it was all in tagalog neither alicia
00:10:22.360and i speak tagalog but we just facilitate these spaces and one of the revelations that came forward
00:10:27.440was that before the Philippines was colonized, the word she and he didn't exist. You never refer
00:10:34.460to someone as he or she. And when this revelation was brought forth in the Salon, it made us realize
00:10:40.040like, wow, we have a very myopic relationship to one another, to the earth and to other sentient
00:10:46.780beings in many ways reflected in the dominant language that is now used globally. And I like
00:10:52.940to think what if we allowed for other languages to come forward to reveal their wisdom and knowledge
00:11:00.840by the very way that their language is structured or their words exist. That to me always provides
00:11:07.680new perspectives that I've completely not been aware of. I unfortunately, this is Alicia, I
00:11:13.480unfortunately, English is my only language and the architecture of it has always felt like it's not
00:11:21.180necessarily the habitat that I would be most comfortable with. And maybe that's because
00:11:26.460how I've become an artist and worked in the visual fields and things like that.
00:11:33.620You know, we reference this term linguistic relativity playfully, but we really, and there
00:11:40.140are implications to that term that we don't want to take on. But I think in some of our initial
00:11:45.560discussions, it was, we were thinking so much about how if we don't have the words to think
00:11:52.960about things, the words to put thoughts into kind of those vessels to hold thoughts, it's like they
00:12:00.460don't really exist for us. You know, we think within our language. It's not just how we express
00:12:07.080and communicate to each other. It's how we perceive our own world. So not just the individual words,
00:12:12.880you know, which this project kind of quirkily works with, the structures of language,
00:12:19.100the ways of thinking of those, you know, we're losing all of that, you know, as we lose
00:12:23.560language diversity. But what's also beautiful is that there's still hope, because I feel that at
00:12:30.980the end of the day, we are sentient beings. And the beautiful thing about this project is when
00:12:35.880we identify gaps, it's not to say that someone somewhere on the earth doesn't have a native word
00:12:43.220for it. They've either just been murdered or it's been killed literally through violent conquest and
00:12:49.840being subdued. But what I found so beautiful about this project is that you start realizing
00:12:55.320this collective trying to find a word for something and you'll see people go, I have this
00:13:01.360feeling and what's so beautiful is that our feelings are still very real and our feelings
00:13:06.280still unite us and what's been so beautiful about this project like solastalgia is a neologism
00:13:13.200created by glenn albrecht in australia and it means that you have a longing for your homeland
00:13:19.100similar to solastalgia but the tragic thing is you haven't actually left your homeland
00:13:24.300it has been so radically altered due to human activity like clear cutting of a forest or extreme
00:13:30.980mining that it is no longer the homeland you once grew up with. And so you long for it. And so it's
00:13:36.500solastalgia. And when we shared this neologism with people who had gathered in Paris for the
00:13:42.200climate change talks in 2015, they all immediately said, I feel this. And then they would create
00:13:49.720neologisms to express the type of solastalgia that was very specific to their homeland. And so the
00:13:55.600beautiful thing is that what is not lost, if we really listen, is a sentient connection
00:14:01.380to the earth and a sentient connection to one another. And perhaps words have been lost,
00:14:07.600but there's still some beauty in the power of creating new words to honor feelings and sensations
00:14:13.940that just don't go away. I don't know if that makes sense. No, I'm really intrigued. It's not
00:14:20.240something that I've explored before. And so it's opening these little fissures in my mind. And I'm
00:14:29.000really enjoying hearing this. And I'll add to that. So solastalgia is a word that was one of
00:14:36.080the first words that I encountered and that I had started to make artworks in response to
00:14:42.420in the years preceding this project. And I found so many artists and thinkers when they
00:14:53.240encountered that term had such a strong response to it. And they interpreted it in so many different
00:15:02.300ways that weren't really what Solastalgia was about. Glenn Albright was really talking about
00:15:08.080something very specific. But so many people felt such a void and such a need for that word that
00:15:15.040they kept packing all of these ideas and all these feelings and all these melancholia inside of it
00:15:20.580about their particular concerns, worries, fears about what was happening to our planet.
00:15:28.380It was just this huge revelation that there needed to be more terms to talk about what was
00:15:35.940happening. And a couple years after that, the word Anthropocene started coming to the forefront
00:15:42.420of a lot of people's thinking and minds. And that word, again, just really, you know, as an artist
00:15:48.840who's been dealing with these issues in so many different media for so many years, I realized
00:15:56.260it shifted the way that people thought about our role on the planet when that term was introduced
00:16:04.920more than any other media for talking about those things. Having that new word really shifted
00:16:12.840something in people's brains. And so that's when Heidi and I got together and we realized that
00:16:18.660there should be a broader lexicon for these terms that would, you know, be placeholders for
00:16:24.420the large feelings that we're all going through and the specific small ones as well.
00:16:30.820one thing that's been sticking with me from both of you your last response was describing this
00:16:39.440longing for a place you never left because it's now unrecognizable whether that's altered by
00:16:46.340development or by climate change of for example rising shorelines could you say that word again
00:16:53.040I think you were that term is called solastalgia it was created by Glenn Albright who's an
00:16:59.720incredible thinker and philosopher um he's based in australia and he created that term
00:17:07.760in i believe 2002 but i could be incorrect on that and then we saw so many art i saw so many
00:17:15.360artists and thinkers glob onto that term and then heidi was mentioning we later on when we were at
00:17:22.640the cop 21 climate talks we made specifications yeah so what happened to us when we were at cop
00:17:28.62021, we had our mobile field study office, which is basically a desk, bureaucratic desk. Alicia and I
00:17:35.500sit behind it wearing our faux uniforms with our seal. And then we have a big banner behind us
00:17:41.740that says the Bureau of Linguistical Reality. And then we're ensconced in neologisms. So we
00:17:47.180literally use the power. I'm also a behavioral science geek. I love how people learn and change
00:17:53.020the behavior. So that's been a parallel track of mine. So we're using the best behavioral science
00:17:58.000where we have curiosity factor we're not coming at people we're letting them come to us so they
00:18:04.400believe it's self-driven learning and also we're making people do riddles they're familiar with
00:18:11.460a bureau but then it's attached to something unfamiliar the linguistic reality and the way
00:18:16.460all these neologisms around solastalgia came about in paris was that people would come into
00:18:21.540our space. They would see the word solastalgia. They would go, oh my God, I am feeling this in
00:18:28.620my homeland. And then we would invite them to personalize and localize the solastalgia experience
00:18:35.300by creating their own word in their own language. And Alicia can share a beautiful word that was
00:18:41.040created by a woman from Haiti to express her very place-based experience of solastalgia in her own
00:18:48.020language. So that term's Sanjay Kukui Mom. And she grew up in a rural area, a rural mountainous
00:18:55.760area of Haiti. And she talks about how lovely it would be with the sound of rain. And then the
00:19:04.780cicadas would come and fireflies would come and there's not a lot of electricity where she's from.
00:19:10.260So the light of the fireflies was so profound. And the sound of the cicadas was so also profound, because it was quiet where she was. But because the weather's been changing, the insects aren't coming in the ways that they historically had, as they did when she was growing up in her memories of childhood.
00:19:33.300And so it's a particular longing for that experience that she's no longer getting to experience.
00:21:45.120I don't feel comfortable writing the word.
00:21:47.460I give you the Bureau permission to share my definition and feeling and sensation with
00:21:53.660others and have them coin this neologism.
00:21:55.800And I think one of the most powerful definitions that we've received so far is from Rodney Ewing, who's actually a San Francisco-based African-American artist.
00:22:06.800And he said, look, as an African-American male in today's United States, I do not feel safe.
00:22:13.520And he's an older gentleman, so he has seen a lot.
00:22:16.680And he's saying, when I walk down the street, I don't feel safe.
00:22:20.500I'm worried about getting attacked or jumped by the cops or others for no reason at all other
00:22:26.600than I'm African-American. So when I walk down the street, this consumes me. And he said,
00:22:31.800when well-meaning white environmental activists tell me that climate change is the most pressing
00:22:36.920issue and I need to really focus on this, I have no idea how to communicate to them.
00:22:43.640look until my own personal safe person when I walk down the street is safe I just do not have
00:22:51.220the energy mental physical and other to think about anything else he said I long for a word
00:22:58.100that would allow people to understand that I am not oblivious to the climate change challenge
00:23:04.280but until I am respected by other human beings and I'm able to walk down the street I don't have
00:23:10.360the bandwidth to think about greater climate change. And I think this word is so powerful
00:23:15.920because it shouldn't be on Rodney to explain every time someone's talking at him or talking
00:23:21.580down to him about climate change. And the hope is that if we can create this word,
00:23:26.280it would allow for the burden to be taken off of Rodney and for this word to be the focal point
00:23:33.160of understanding and for people to start appreciating the different worlds we're
00:23:38.880walking in, the different experiences we're all having around climate change, and in some ways
00:23:44.480allow for new conversations to happen in a third space without the burden being upon an individual's
00:23:51.580shoulders, if that makes sense. And I'll add to that, this is Alicia. I really respond to what
00:23:58.620you were saying about like creating connective tissue between people. And I think that that's
00:24:04.120creating, you know, what Heidi just said about that third space. So the project does that
00:24:09.880literally by creating spaces. So when Heidi is referencing our mobile field offices,
00:24:15.480we're creating these spaces where we'll have 20 or 30 neologisms that have been created through
00:24:23.500the project up and people can engage those and then they can have conversations with us directly.
00:24:29.020and in those conversations sometimes we make a word but sometimes we just identify the feelings
00:24:37.920that we're going through and then Heidi also mentioned our field studies where we bring
00:24:44.100small groups of people together around a particular theme that their different diverse work
00:24:51.260addresses and we'll create this space to have a conversation and to share our different
00:24:58.620specialized language to talk about that theme. And we'll often find that once somebody identifies
00:25:05.640this feeling or phenomenon that they don't have the language to talk about because it's so new,
00:25:11.560that they will often have this great relief when they realize that everybody else in the room or
00:25:18.380several other people in the room totally identify with that. And it goes from taking them from
00:25:24.320feeling like they're experiencing something in isolation to realizing that this is a larger
00:25:30.260phenomenon that we are all experiencing or that many of us are experiencing. By creating the word
00:25:36.580as a vessel, the project really does create these points of connectivity between people and allows
00:25:44.520and legitimizes their experiences and makes them realize they're part of a greater collective.
00:25:50.920negotiating the feelings and experiences that we are having as the climate's changing I've never
00:25:58.720thought about climate change as independent of social injustice or independent of all these
00:26:07.860other things like we just think that everything is so intimately tied together and that if you
00:26:13.240pull a string on one thing it affects something else and so to me I don't think that we're ever
00:26:19.920going to solve the issues of the CO2 in our atmosphere if we're not also bringing people
00:26:28.480out of poverty and addressing all the issues that are intimately connected to that in terms of
00:26:35.880our human animal. I can't help but think of how even before climate change and this era of great
00:26:45.820unraveling, that English lacked the wherewithal to describe our intrinsic relationship to Earth.
00:26:54.460English is the predominant language of colonization and capitalism, and it can really
00:27:00.720lack animacy and a spiritual connectedness to the Earth and cosmos. And it's severed us from0.93
00:27:08.400the fabric of life and from one another, as we've been talking about. And I think the dissociation
00:27:14.580that has accompanied the domination of English has allowed us in many ways to enact and condone
00:27:21.860such pervasive destruction. But then on the flip side, English is also very flexible and we're now
00:27:30.060gifted an opportunity to reimagine English in a regenerative way. I think of, again, the Potawatomi
00:27:37.360ethnobotanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, who proposes an alternative pronoun for it, which could be
00:27:44.860ki or kin, plural, once again imbuing life into the way we speak about our non-human relatives.
00:27:53.480Or instead of regarding a body of water as a dead noun, one could transform the noun into a verm
00:27:59.260to be a bay, which releases water from bondage and let it live, which is a quote from Robin.
00:28:06.500And I also think about Chinua Achibe, a Nigerian novelist and poet and professor who said, describing his intent to indigenize the language, quote, let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it, end quote.
00:28:26.920So I would love to hear your thoughts on how to dismantle the hegemony of the English language and re-infuse it with animacy and sacredness.
00:28:38.840The beautiful thing, when you actually study the history of the English language, and this is why I love this project so much, because we come across as whimsical and comical.
00:28:48.600we have a fake bureaucracy when we're performing we have glasses without lens in them to
00:28:54.460re-emphasize through visual cues that we're making fun we don't need a bureaucracy to create words
00:29:00.260human beings have been creating words for centuries without asking for permission from
00:29:05.500anyone the moment something was not familiar to us even in the english language we create it
00:29:10.120so the word smog is a portmanteau of the word smoke and fog and it was coined by a doctor
00:29:16.780who was treating these horrible lung ailments with the advent of burning of massive coal during the
00:29:22.640industrial revolution people were suffering a completely new lung ailment that had never
00:29:27.220existed before and he was sick of trying to describe it and so at a medical conference
00:29:32.060he said this is smog we are no longer dealing with fog it's a combination of smoke and fog
00:29:37.540and people were so elated to finally name this horrible substance it was adopted like wildfire
00:29:42.720so we've always been doing this and I think we need to remind ourselves that it is already there
00:29:49.320we just need to let it be free like children completely on their own when they're learning
00:29:53.680English will constantly create new words and it's only due to adults saying to them that's not a
00:30:00.140word but what if we radically shifted our culture and encourage children okay you go forth what is
00:30:06.920it you want to say what's the word you want to create because children have also added to our
00:30:10.820lexicon. And I just want to finish this thought with, I created a word with Ash Arder. Ash is a
00:30:17.740beautiful artist from Detroit, Michigan, who works both in textiles with nettles and also sound.
00:30:25.420And her family hails from Mississippi and Alabama, and they moved to Detroit. And her father works
00:30:32.400the line. And what we did is we created a word called quia seed. And the definition of quia seed
00:30:39.280is a seed that due to social trauma stays consciously dormant not out of oppression
00:30:45.740but rather due to a deep intuition which senses not to seed until it finds itself in a fertile
00:30:53.000fecund environment and so i feel like people already organically want to knit the social
00:31:00.900to the environmental and dismantle these silos that only exist because we allow them to exist
00:31:07.720that's a beautiful word I'm really loving all of this creativity and I come back to creativity a
00:31:17.560lot when I'm feeling stuck in the immensity of the tasks ahead of us how we can tap into this
00:31:26.440deep well of creativity and play and bring in these ideas that have been dormant or
00:31:34.060potentially haven't felt like they were even possible to us, like creating new words to be
00:31:39.780able to describe what's happening for us individually, collectively, and so on and so
00:31:46.240forth. And it's brought up a few other thoughts for me as you've been speaking about these people
00:31:52.740from all over the world with very different experiences. I think about how the dominant
00:31:59.220language surrounding race and gender have worked to compartmentalize the fluid expansiveness of
00:32:06.680our identities. Even the confines of white and black can dishonor our complex heritages,
00:32:13.620further disconnecting us from the lineages we stem from. And I wonder about things like,
00:32:19.380what if we said European supremacy instead of white supremacy? Perhaps it would propel us to0.89
00:32:26.140reflect a little deeper on the origins and trajectory of such supremacy this project always
00:32:33.100invites such a rich investigation of the nuances of just our everyday experience you take that term
00:32:42.960white supremacy and shifting it to european supremacy but even just the fact that we say
00:32:49.360the term white supremacy as a negative idea, but it still binds the words white and supremacy
00:32:57.960together. And I feel like we just shouldn't even use that word. You know, we shouldn't say as a
00:33:03.520derogatory that, oh, they're a white supremacist, because the idea of white supremacy is so just0.97
00:33:08.940absurd. I mean, and those, those words shouldn't be together. And so it's this constant investigation0.90
00:33:15.220of language I so hear what you're saying about how what Heidi was saying about the siloing and
00:33:22.020and I don't think it's just language I mean this project you know takes it as a crack but looking
00:33:29.820at all the systems for which we take for granted and then by by identifying that we're all
00:33:36.640experiencing and feeling things that we don't have the words to talk about together it gets a way to
00:33:42.560take the everyday things, the everyday systems that we're all living within and get to examine
00:33:49.960those. And so those are the architecture of the English language that so much of the world
00:33:55.860is communicated through, or it can be looking at late capitalism as a system that we just take
00:34:05.000for granted as the way that things should be done. I think also the power of this project,
00:34:10.480And perhaps it's something I've always done is that you can just refuse to use certain words.
00:34:17.640And the beautiful thing about the way that language is transmitted, at least English in the United States, is that if you're at a party and you throw a new word in, the way that we behaviorally approach language and we've been raised to approach language is that if someone throws a new word in a sentence with confidence,
00:34:36.300the listener the majority of the time assume that they don't know the word and then the more often
00:34:44.020not ask you oh what does that word mean so the beauty of this artwork is that you can spark
00:34:50.180and inspire and see shifts in the simplest way it doesn't cost money it doesn't cost advertising
00:34:59.760it just is that just like when you hear rap music just start introducing new words and they're so
00:35:06.940delicious and so intoxicating that people start adopting them that's the beauty of this project
00:35:11.920you don't need to ask permission from anyone you just have to decolonize your mind and grant
00:35:18.760yourself permission to express yourself in the way that you desire to express yourself
00:35:24.740and to rethink the words you've ever used
00:35:29.040and to abandon those that no longer serve you
00:35:53.480and then the non-binary pronouns such as they, Z, etc. And I feel like while in many circles these
00:36:00.620have become commonplace, the depth that such restrictive alienated language is entrenched
00:36:06.820into the psyche of the dominant culture still remains a hurdle for the masses. And so I'm
00:36:13.120wondering if you could speak about the power in shedding such alienating language around identity
00:36:17.620and walk us through some of the different pronouns and words being widely celebrated today.
00:36:23.480One thing I wanted to introduce, too, is that I think it's finding early adopters, right? So there are thought leaders in every community and knitting together the thought leaders of every community who can seed within that community.
00:36:38.760I fully respect that we still do have in many ways a segregated United States, but there is a beauty in people who are like-minded, who transcend these silos and having them seated to your point, having them seated in other communities where they may not access or ever go to.
00:36:57.500one of the salons we had which is where we bring together people in an evening for an intimate
00:37:03.220conversation riffing off what you were saying about gender words was to examine what does it
00:37:09.400mean to be maternal in today's world and again riffing off of taboo subjects of what you were
00:37:14.720saying it's it's taboo if you're at a dinner party and if you say as a woman if you say as a woman
00:37:21.360I've decided not to have children the common response at a dinner party or setting is like
00:37:28.220oh you're childless or you're less than as if there's a certain stage in your life
00:37:33.620that you are never going to experience and then therefore your life is unfulfilled or it's
00:37:39.500you're only realizing 80 percent of your life on this earth however when you really talk to a lot
00:37:45.260of the women who choose to do this you'll find that some of them have such a deep massive maternal
00:37:51.260instinct that the reason they choose not to have children is their consciousness of all sentient
00:37:56.640beings and the impacts humans are having on other sentient beings and the natural resources of the
00:38:02.060earth but there's no word that celebrates such a vast deeper maternal instinct and so in this
00:38:09.860salon we investigated new ways to show and reveal this beautiful level of being maternal and in
00:38:17.180another salon i did one of them we started using well let's use words that have come from a maternal
00:38:22.420background like the italian language so honors the female mother figure so we created the word
00:38:27.960which means grandmother fear but it's based from a place of love and maternal and using a language
00:38:33.540that honors the female at a special level and another word is kinkara and the definition is
00:38:41.840a person of any gender who plays an active maternal role in helping to raise children
00:38:47.880they have not physically birthed, yet whom they thoughtfully and lovingly help to raise.
00:38:53.940They are a non-biological chosen family who actively contribute to a constellation of care.
00:39:00.080This nurturing involves everything from helping with the everyday tasks of raising a child
00:39:04.700to teaching to unconditional love. And it comes from the word kin, which all the way
00:39:11.640back comes from the Greek genesis and Latin word meaning race, and kara, which is Latin for meaning
00:40:28.440The result was that we always observe beautiful crystals after giving good words,
00:40:32.620playing good music, and showing, playing or offering pure prayer to water.
00:40:36.580On the other hand, we observe disfigured crystals in the opposite situation, end quote. And I think about how when we use language, we can use it in a way that is healing. And we can also use it in a way that's completely destructive.
00:40:56.160even how Alicia you were talking about white supremacy and we shouldn't be using those two
00:41:02.640words and every time we say white supremacy perhaps it digs that zeitgeist a bit deeper
00:41:10.320it digs the cultural significance deeper in rather than I guess using words as the change
00:41:19.280we want to see it's really interesting to go this deep into how our engagement on so many levels
00:41:29.440impacts our culture and how we create our culture or how we engage in the perpetuation of the
00:41:37.580culture we don't want to be in and how poetry and art can be a tool and something that we have
00:41:47.280Well, I guess the dominant culture has yet to put a lot of respect behind how that can drastically shift culture, belief systems, patterns of engaging with each other, with the world, with non-human creatures, and that we have tried a lot of other tactics that aren't working.
00:42:12.440And science alone isn't shifting climate change. And what I mean by that is many people at this point have heard about climate change, have read the statistics, but the statistics alone are not shifting people quickly enough.
00:42:30.140And so I think that there's more to reaching the depth of the human than this purely reductionist way of explaining the world and how we can tap into these deep wells of creativity and love and enticement to give the power back to the people in that way.
00:43:19.620So I really appreciate both of your work
00:43:22.500and your bravery and your willingness to think outside the box and actually do something about
00:43:31.280it and put yourselves out there. And I just think that in itself is such an incredible lesson for
00:43:37.180everybody listening that during this time of great chaos and destruction, we can support each other
00:43:46.820to be courageous and also i didn't get a chance to interject was that when you um because i'm
00:43:53.700really fascinated by social change and so i've always looked at big social change movements
00:43:58.860all social change movements have been led like the french revolution was literally led by poets
00:44:05.940and playwrights and what they were doing was writing about the world people wanted to live in
00:44:10.740You know, and they created that catchphrase fraternity, and it literally, I mean, it went bad with the guillotine, but it literally allowed people to visualize where they wanted to go. Or you look at the civil rights movement in the United States, there were songs and some of those speeches I consider outright poetry, not where we are, it was about where do we want to go.
00:44:34.900So when you look at any social change movement globally, at the forefront are lyrical poets, playwrights, storytellers, and they are all, yeah, they're giving a nod to where we're at, but they are all talking about the world we all want to live in.
00:44:53.480And I think that is literally how radical, massive change has occurred. And so that is historically what's worked. And so I feel like, you know, why mess up a good thing? That actually is how it works.
00:45:08.580I think it's interesting how we've been fed a story that that isn't the case. So in a way, we're being told to not do that because that's not serious enough, or that's not effective, efficient, and so on and so forth.
00:45:26.540And so it kind of stops people from going down that path. And I even think about children and how children in a lot of the current school systems are not being nurtured to have this creative force behind them.
00:45:44.440And then how you were saying in the French Revolution and so much of these social change
00:45:48.600movements, that itself is where the real power of the heart lies, is in the artistic expression
00:45:57.380of how do we see the world moving forward?
00:46:05.780And it's just interesting to look back and go, wow, do the powers that be understand
00:46:11.880that so deeply that they're stripping that from our cultural structures so that more people don't
00:46:19.540feel safe or nurtured to step into that kind of work. I even think about how in the United States,
00:46:28.280how so much of the arts are not being funded and how that plays into it.
00:46:32.900Yeah. And what's really, really interesting. And so for a lot of the work we do, I end up
00:46:37.300being the fundraiser. So that means I have to interact directly with foundations. When you look
00:46:42.540at the majority of foundations in the United States, and what they'll fund when it comes to
00:46:48.420environmental work, I have literally been told, oh, that's too outside the box. But what they're
00:46:54.960currently funding is not working. And many of the foundation structures are literally mirroring
00:47:04.080a model of not empowering people from communities who know best how to do things in their communities
00:47:10.460it's literally a foundation saying we've decided how we're going to control you via how you do or
00:47:15.480don't use the money as opposed to i give you this money i trust that you know the language that works
00:47:20.840best in your community i trust that you know best how to rally your community and someone was trying
00:47:26.700to comfort me with all these no's from environmental foundations and they said look
00:47:31.660not one foundation gave money to martin luther king and it's not like the civil rights movement
00:47:37.600didn't try you know he's like this is not old so this is how it goes and i was like i know you're
00:47:43.000trying to comfort me but you're kind of depressing me and he's like i just want you to know it's
00:47:48.080never worked this way they don't get it and so i feel like the funding that is quote the core
00:47:54.940funding of current major environmental groups in the United States is also flawed. It is not
00:48:01.540built on trust. It is not built on letting people in their own communities do what they know works
00:48:07.200best. And that is something that also needs to be called out because it's real. Yeah. The structure
00:48:15.140of the foundations themselves and basically the structure of the support systems of the movement
00:48:20.480are lost in the bureaucracy and the reductionist mind frame that also controls the dominant
00:48:30.240government structures. And so we're not able to break through with the support. And so the support
00:48:37.680is just going to perpetuating the same systems that aren't working. But that's the beauty of
00:48:41.920art and creativity, is that if something is so delicious, it's so inviting and people gravitate
00:48:47.940towards it. And I also feel like, literally, when people go to battle, this is what is used to
00:48:54.060inspire them to face death. You know, like, if this works for you to possibly die, there's got
00:49:00.400to be something behind it, you know? That's an amazing point. Because a lot of times I think
00:49:06.340about this addiction to consumer culture and to fossil fuels. And why are we not willing to
00:49:16.080sacrifice our comforts for the sake of the earth why are we not willing to sacrifice this that or
00:49:24.140the other let alone our own selves to protect the remnants of biodiversity and other cultures
00:49:32.900and people and then you talk about how art can inspire people to go to war to potentially give
00:49:41.980their lives for this greater good and it's not necessarily being used on the flip side of that
00:49:50.780of how do we use art to push ourselves to be more engaged stewards and also to recognize that that
00:50:01.900it's there's not a nature and then us we're not at battle that whole language in the environmental
00:50:09.300movement of like fighting climate change. It's using the language of battle when really it's
00:50:14.760not. It's about saving ourselves. We're not independent entities of nature. We're one
00:50:20.760aspect of nature. We're one species in a plethora. Like it's all, it's about our own survival
00:50:27.580as much as the survival of anything else. I think Alicia also nailed it. The fact that we use the
00:50:34.900verb fighting climate change, you know, as if it's this thing that's coming at us rather than
00:50:40.180it's something we created, you know. I also wanted to say that an obvious phrase that's outdated,
00:50:47.560riffing off some of the other phrases we've talked about that are outdated, is that in the United
00:50:51.780States, even the most thoughtful parents who seek to be incredibly elevated in their footprint on
00:51:02.180the earth will still use the outdated expression to their children go throw that away and that's
00:51:09.340telling a child at a young age that there's this false away yeah where is that yeah there there is
00:51:16.680no way into a way and i feel i've seen some parents go as they say the phrase but they haven't yet
00:51:24.060empowered themselves to not say it and to say something else i think people are now saying i
00:51:30.300I mean, I do see people now saying the words landfill, like, oh, that's going to landfill.
00:51:36.160So, I mean, I do think there's like there are the powers that be, but like culture rises, you know, and then the powers that be appropriate it, you know.
00:51:49.020And it doesn't really speak to the consequences of our actions.
00:51:52.940It buries the consequences of our actions under these words that aren't really describing what's going on. And so it allows us to very quickly move through our day and not actually think about what we're doing.
00:52:08.520And then I think, again, with the fighting climate change, it is this interesting us against them. It's us against Earth's natural systems, rather than we are a part of climate change, we have caused the current climate change, or we must save nature, or let's go to nature, or, you know, all of these things.
00:52:32.820of course, and it's so true what you said, it is separating us. And then our whole belief system
00:52:39.180is built upon this separation that language taught us. It's really interesting how deep that goes.
00:52:48.660Yeah. And when you look at other languages that are still alive and vibrant and being spoken,
00:52:54.280nature is not a separate entity. You know, they have never created it as such. And I mean,
00:53:00.480Not to dismiss the concept of wild, but we are all wild. Everything is wild. There is no wild. I am wild. It's all wild in the most beautiful of ways.
00:53:14.620I would love if we could start to end this conversation by perhaps telling the audience how to find out more about you, how to get involved, and what you see as some of the most pertinent practices that people can start to be a part of.
00:53:37.520our mobile field office is called the mobile field office for a reason we do take it places
00:53:45.840um so if you would like for us to take our mobile field office somewhere we can always do that
00:53:53.560that being said i think we both the bureau of linguistical reality is is at a point where we
00:54:01.760also welcome other people to as long as they give the bureau credit to take what we've done
00:54:09.720and talk to us and host host their own salon style field studies um with our guidance um that can be
00:54:18.700a way but really it's just like a constant examination of language and as language as a
00:54:25.120way to examine the world for me it doesn't the fact that we're using language here is not the
00:54:32.680primary it's just to me always I'll use whatever medium it could be smell it could be an object
00:54:39.480but to get people to think differently about their place in our time yeah riffing off what
00:54:46.680Alicia was saying I was saying some people will adopt a practice of meditation and some people
00:54:52.300will adopt a practice of doing a physical exercise to get back into their body and we would like to
00:54:59.260invite listeners to get into a practice of thinking about the words you use and why and perhaps
00:55:06.900beginning to use new words that are more in alignment with everything of who you are and to
00:55:14.200be bold and experiment and some people have said to us i just would feel so weird saying this word
00:55:19.660And I said, the beautiful things you don't know until you try.
00:55:23.420And when we were in Paris, we were on a panel because what we also do is we do these faux academic presentations about our findings as if we were literally anthropologists discovering new worlds.