(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).

Our experiences with the living world shape how we care for it. 

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.

Natural things, such as kelp, were framed in relation to what they provide for us: forests became timber, rivers became resources, kelp became a commodity.

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.

To speak differently is to care differently.