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. 

Kelp drifts, bends, 

releases, adapts. 

Watching it is a lesson in entanglement. To understand, you must be inside it: your hands brushed by its fronds, your legs tangled, your breath exchanged with the sea. 

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.