Feeling Crisis

Close observation in nature was my first science—an initiation into ecology, the web of relationships it describes, and loss, long before I had the language to describe it. Words came later. First there was noticing, feeling, understanding through the body. Spoken language arises from these tangible encounters and they can either deepen or distance our experience with land.

Each summer and winter, I returned to the same coastline with tidepools erupting with a psychedelic array of life. My father offered a quarter for every sea star I found. I counted, compared, and noticed. My body memorized the rhythm of the sea long before I had words like “wave action” or “current.” 

When sea star wasting disease hollowed out the pools, I felt the loss before I understood its ecology. Later, swimming tangled in kelp beneath the night sky, I saw forests thinning during the marine heatwave known as the Blob. Not only did I earn fewer quarters; I learned ecological grief—watching a crisis unfold in real time. 

Care begins with attention. To speak differently is to care differently. Environmental knowledge emerges through observation, not declaration. The decline of bull kelp along the northern California coast, the effects of warming waters, the loss of biodiversity - these are not stories found in data alone. They are learned by looking, touching, remembering. 

Measuring kelp forest loss in cubic meters distances it; describing the collapse of homes restores gravity. Forests are processes, conversations, encounters. You learn nature through sensation, through intimacy, through noticing. Language names what the body has already known. To care is to attend to what the body knows. 

Do you listen to the land ?

When I walk a forest path or swim in kelp with otters, I am being watched. The world does not begin when I enter; it is already unfolding. Language is much larger than human speech: the howl of the wind, the feeling of moss, the glistening of seaweed. 

Deep ecology teaches that all beings have intrinsic value, not for what they provide us, but in their own accord (Naess, 1973). All organisms in the living world, i.e. non human animals or algae, have culture, values, and knowledge outside of our own. (Haraway, 2008) 

Language, then, begins with attention. It is an embodied expression, a mutual act of speaking and listening, a way to tell stories and hear them.

Direct Encounters 

(with Kelp Forests and other 

living things) 

Direct encounters—swimming through kelp forests, touching sea stars—shape environmental awareness and conservation behavior. A person’s “personalized ecology,” the unique set of sensory experiences accumulated over a lifetime, forms the foundation of their relationship with nature (Louv, 2005). These sights, sounds, smells, textures, and patterns shape values and actions toward the living world (Berkes, 1999).

Yet direct experiences are declining, replaced by indirect encounters (seeing a forest from a car window) or mediated ones (watching a documentary). Louv (2005) calls this the “extinction of experience”—a loss driven by shrinking natural spaces and reduced human desire to engage with them.

This loss feeds “nature apathy,” increasingly common due to urbanization, screen-centered lives, and limited green access (Miller, 2005). It also fuels “shifting baseline syndrome,” in which each generation normalizes degraded ecosystems, eroding motivation for conservation (Soga & Gaston, 2021).

Access itself is unequally distributed. Low-income communities and communities of color often face structural barriers to green space (Byrne, 2012; Finney, 2014). In the Global North, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous urban communities confront systemic exclusion, while in the Global South, communities sustain daily ecological contact even as they disproportionately bear climate impacts (Escobar (1999); Carruthers (2008). 

Yet modern environmentalism has historically centered white, middle-class communities, often overlooking that marginalized populations not only have limited access to green space but are also more likely to live in areas exposed to environmental hazards—oil wells, refineries, pesticide use, contaminated water, and other toxins s—and lack the resources and infrastructure to prepare for or recover from extreme climate events (Sanders, 2025).

Our experiences with the living world shape how we care for it. Restoring ecosystems requires restoring people’s direct, meaningful connections to them—and by addressing the social and structural barriers that limit access. Care follows from experience; when nature is felt, touched, lived, a sense of responsibility deepens.

What is “Nature” ?

“There is no such thing as nature. What we encounter instead is an infinite set of entanglements in which we are already caught” (Morton, 2007).

Kelp is not a thing but a continent: of slugs, worms, sea stars, otters, octopuses, microbes—and us. To enter a kelp forest is to lose one’s edges, to realize that the human body is not a self-contained unit but a site of constant exchange. As Stephen R. Palumbi observes, “Kelp forests live between land and sea, sun and darkness, movement and rootedness”(Palumbi, n.d.).  They remind us that human life is also suspended in such thresholds, woven through wider ecologies of exchange. Stacy Alaimo calls this trans-corporeality: “the recognition that the environment is not ‘out there’—it is always the very substance of ourselves” (Alaimo, 2010).

Words have the power to distance us from the things they name. In Western thought, “Nature” has often been imagined as something separate from humans, a place “out there.” (Merchant, 1980; Daston & Park, 1998).  It is a word that marks distance, functioning less as a description than as a boundary. But our bodies are not sealed containers; they absorb, exchange, and are composed of the lives around them. The challenge lies in unlearning this fiction of separation and learning instead to feel the truth of our  entanglement.

This illusion of separation is held in place by Western language. Nature comes from the Greek phusis, meaning “to grow, to be,” (Dear, 2006) and once described a world intimately entangled with us (Ducarme & Couvet, 2020). Natural philosophy bound observation, ethics, and wonder together. But the Scientific Revolution and its accompanying colonial vocabularies narrowed this expansive sense of being into numbers, laws, and resources (Merchant, 1980; Daston & Park, 1998). 

Language facilitated this transformation: from living beings to usable things. This shift from animacy to resource is evident in the renaming of vibrant ecosystems. To call kelp a “marine resource” or “natural capital” collapses its “aliveness” into a commodity. Even the term “kelp beds,” once common, domesticates vast forests into units of human utility. Words build categories—alive/not alive, human/nonhuman, natural/unnatural—that shape what we see as valuable or worthy of protection.

In contrast, Indigenous vocabularies offer a path to repairing this forgotten kinship. In Anishinaabemowin, the word for nature, inaandiziwin, means “way of life,” (Kimmerer, 2013) refusing the distinction between human and nonhuman. Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa calls mining scars “wounds of the forest” (Davi Kopenawa, 2022) and refers to climate change as “the revenge of the earth,”  (Davi Kopenawa, 2022) giving agency to processes that Western vocabularies objectify. Robin Wall Kimmerer proposes a “grammar of animacy,” in which rivers and birds are spoken of as “someone,” not “something” (Kimmerer, 2017). Such practices of naming are more than poetic gestures; they are acts of ethical reorientation, restoring kinship and beginning the long process of healing our relationship with the world.

This re-evaluation of language is not a softening of scientific rigor but a broadening of its scope to include embodied and emotional truths. The words we choose have tangible consequences for conservation, policy, and our sense of responsibility. Research shows that naming stress and grief is itself a survival strategy. 

A 2019 study found that the term “climate crisis” elicited a 60% stronger brain reaction than “climate change,” highlighting how a single word can shift perception and urgency (SPARK Neuro, 2019; Warner 2025).  Calling people “citizens” rather than “consumers” increases responsibility  (SPARK Neuro, 2019). 

Arran Stibbe argues vocabularies are rarely neutral (Stibbe, 2018). They carry colonial and racialized residues, reinforce hierarchies, erase ecological agency, and privilege certain types of knowledge over others (Cheng et al., 2023). Terms such as “invasive species” or descriptors that label animals as “aggressive,” “dominant,” or “hypersexual” show how language encodes harmful assumptions and projects human social hierarchies onto nonhuman life (Stibbe, 2018). Projects like Bird Names for Birds and the Entomological Society of America’s Better Common Names Project intervene in these systems, renaming species as an act of collective justice. This “communal justicing” does not weaken scientific rigor but expands it, creating space for more ethical ways of naming and knowing.

The Bureau of Linguistical Reality argues for inventing and reviving terms, such as Solastalgia, which names the grief for a degraded home, and Koyaanisqatsi, meaning “life out of balance,”(Bureau of Linguistical Reality 2014) which anchor emotional truth within the scientific record, acknowledging that our feelings are a valid part of ecological experience. They note that English often lacks the capacity to hold ecological complexity. The limits of our language are also the limits of our imagination.