Communion

The ice caps are melting. Reuters ran an interesting article about the inability of arctic languages to describe environmental changes of the last decade, which include the appearance of elk, robins, hornets, and other animals migrating north. There are no words.

The assumption is often that communion brings peace, that travel brings good relations, that communication brings understanding. But isn't it just as often the case that some things weren't meant to commune - that the world is held together by an intricate lattice of exclusion - that communication is war, that travel bring tourism? In other words, isn't it just as possible to communicate ourselves to death? When non-native organisms are introduced, whole ecosystems must adjust. In 19th C. U.S. one of four trees was an American Chestnut until the Chinese Chestnut was introduced, wiping out the entire population. Currently, the redwoods in California are threatened by a strain of the Irish potato famine fungus. Kudzu in California and Georgia, gypsy moths in Pennsylvania, mongoose in Hawaii - the list goes on.

The case of the arctic languages gives us an analogue by which we can cross the nature/culture divide - that languages as social architectures are as much a part of natural ecology as genomic material or the weather. Certainly we have become used to the gradual process of communicating non-English languages out of existence. Here, our practices of communication (commuting, mostly) have forced an ecological shift that threatens the language in much the same way as did the introduction of kudzu to California, small pox to the American continent, or English to the airwaves.