lingua franca

I live between the circles of a non-intersecting Venn diagram. One circle contains environmental knowledge. The other is consumer culture.

Recently, I attended a parent meeting for the Montessori Model United Nations program my youngest is participating in. We discussed selling t-shirts to fundraise and the tri-fold displays kids take to the conference. Thousands of students from all over the world converge onto NYC with these tri-folds. When my oldest attended, we were too busy to savor the displays and after the conference, her tri-fold foam board sat in my basement for three years until I threw it away.

When my middle daughter participated, I spoke in Environmentalese about the tri-folds and t-shirts. Since the MMUN topics include slave labor, deforestation, drought, water pollution and economic inequity, we had an opportunity to make real life connections between how what we global northerners consume is intertwined with the people, issues and countries our students will research. Maybe we should bypass the tri-folds and t-shirts—products of slave labor that contribute to drought, water pollution, deforestation and economic inequity.

This year I was mute, knowing Environmentalese would fall on deaf ears, again. Of course parents are excited to see their students display their knowledge on tri-folds. Of course Clifton’s dad wants to see his artistic son’s design on a t-shirt. Of course we are super proud of the MMUN program and want to promote it through t-shirts.

The two non-intersecting circles of the Venn diagram represent two languages, two cultures, that don’t speak to each other:

Environmentalese— Here’s the environmental footprint of a t-shirt. Do you know a single t-shirt requires 700 gallons of water and crisscrosses the globe to get to you?

Consumerese—Let’s get t-shirts made for every occasion. And season. And event. And in every color. For everyone.

Like all languages, Consumerese is passed on by family and culture. In the world of Consumerese, what we want and need materialize as goods and services, as commodities. Our homes, communication, education, food, beverages, entertainment, recreation, celebrations, life events (weddings, births, deaths) and healthcare are forms of consumption, not the result of our direct personal industry. Common words you hear in Consumerese are ‘cheap’ and ‘convenient,’ because satisfying the immediate desires of the Self is primary.

Since language shapes our ideation and therefore perception and understanding of the world, Consumerese determines our relationship to our planet. For example, take the term, ‘pest control.’ Pest is a vague, elastic word for an irritant. To name other living beings sharing our ecosystem, ‘pests,’ justifies our desire to kill or ‘control’ them.

Do we know about the impact of pesticides on health, water, soil, air? Do we know how pesticides originated? Have there been long term studies on groundwater impacts? Indeed, do we know anything about where what we consume comes from or goes to? Are we aware of who and what is effected along the way? If not, why?

Consumerese, as a language and as a culture, doesn’t delve into these questions unless it can turn the answers into yet more untested, unquestioned commodities. Of course those who speak Environmentalese know and try to share this knowledge but their efforts fall on deaf consumer ears. The tagline for one pesticide company, "outside is fun again," is a dominant language in my neighborhood, not 'go native' or 'food not lawns,' Environmentalese taglines.

When I worked as an environmental educator in an after school program, I taught Environmentalese: how our everyday lives intersect with ecosystems and people worldwide: how built infrastructures impact natural ones. We examined energy systems, food systems, vehicular infrastructure, air quality, trash and recycling infrastructure and more. Understanding what undergirds our modern lives should be basic knowledge, basic environmental literacy, for everyone. But everyone I know outside the environmental movement, seems content with Consumerese. Most of us, like the parents mentioned, speak Consumerese.

Don’t get me wrong.

We’ve always consumed from earth for our necessities and desires. But we’ve crossed to sheer exploitation to serve fantasies which have become normalized. From year round fresh fruit and flowers in the Midwest to massaging recliners to wristwatches that turn on ovens, Consumerese is the lingua franca. This language and its culture is driving  us and other species to extinction as well as driving ecological collapse.

Unfortunately the speakers of Environmentalese and Consumerese do not intersect meaningfully or understand each other. What we see instead is the equivalent of Environmentalese sprinkled into Consumerese as in, “here’s five things you can do to save the planet.” Or Consumerese sprinkled with Environmentalese as in, buy metal straws.

But according to scientists the world over, we are in ecological free fall. Despite the efforts of those in the Environmentalese circle, the Consumerese circle continues to grow, untouched by environmental efforts that aren't commodifiable. The circles aren't converging.

If we have any chance of saving ourselves we must create a new language to bridge the chasm between Environmentalese and Consumerese. It must be a language rooted in earth literacy. A language in which we are fluent in our understanding of ourselves as earthlings part of a global community with other earthlings. Earthlings, subject to the limitations and rules governing the natural ecosystems on which we are utterly dependent. Our earth-based language must be facile enough to widen our understanding of ourselves, others and the inexorable ways we are interdependent on our earth.

How do we create a new language, thereby shape a new earth-based cultural paradigm? How do we create a lingua franca based in ecological literacy?

Think about it. In America alone, there are 40 million families.

That means:

* 55 millions students

*  being educated in 133,000 schools

* employing  6.2 million people in the educational sector

Imagine.

We renovate the educational system.

The spine of K-12 curriculum becomes ecology-based. All subject area curriculum and extra-curricular activities emanate from that spine. School personnel--from maintenance to cafeteria workers to board members to coaches to school nurses and security guards--are also educated so they can connect their vocational habits and choices to how those draw from and impact our ecological worldwide web.

We no longer marginalize study of how we interact with the natural world by containing it in an after school club, a one-off field trip to test water quality or dump it on the science teachers to squeeze into a six week unit. So in a sense we no longer marginalize the natural world. That is the Consumerese mindset; let’s consume some green experiences for a unit.

From working in the environmental field, I saw firsthand that siloed lessons didn’t take root. For example, how useful is it to teach a group of twenty kids the ills of Styrofoam while Styrofoam is ubiquitous in schools? But imagine if the 55 million students and six million educational employees understand Styrofoam as the costly toxic that it is rather than as merely a cheap commodity via Consumerese. We would get schools back on durable trays. One person or twenty personally foregoing Styrofoam doesn't stop the production of Styrofoam--what ultimately needs to happen. But 55 million students schooled in Styrofoam can take down that industry and generate a more sensible one.

Imagine those students as adults working in the restaurant, hotel and hospital industries; anywhere we now see Styrofoam. They would be empowered to not only push manufactures to create more environmentally sensible products but they themselves will be more environmentally sensible manufacturers. This is because they would have been immersed in an earth-based language and curriculum that gave them tools, community and support to imagine and manifest a different reality.

So instead of telling people what they should or should not do as those who speak Environmentalese do, we teach the why. We follow the strands of why to include the myriad injustices embedded in extractive capitalism. We examine externalized costs and who, what, where pays them. We look at the geopolitics that enable destructive systems. We look at stories, struggles, conflicts, history and art of people worldwide impacted by Consumerese. This way, every discipline speaks into the creation of a new earth-based language.

For a new earth-based paradigm requires the aperture of all subject matters. We need everything in our educational toolbox to respond to our ecological collapse and craft new systems. That isn’t the job of science, one tool, alone. Science can’t determine if its progeny is worthwhile, ethical, sustainable, detrimental, or just. Science after all, gave us Styrofoam, massaging recliners and pest control.

But history, art, music, economics, government, physical education, language arts, psychology, philosophy, religion must together shape the new earth-based language we desperately need to create holistic, integrated paradigms that take into account the needs and rights of all living beings.

Learning a language is transformative. We don’t know how various subject areas will evolve as they reorient themselves to be earth-based. We don’t know how we as a culture will evolve from Consumerese to earth-based. We don't know yet what industries will fall and rise as a result of deep, full spectrum inquiry. 

What I do know is Environmentalese and Consumerese are communicating insufficiently for the dramatic task at hand. Just this morning, I read yet another article about individual actions to stop climate change with the same tired solutions-drive less, eat less meat-that are statistically ineffectual.

Again this is Environmentalese sprinkled into Consumerese without context, without a depth of understanding or push for the systems change necessary to actually move the needle on ecological collapse. It is akin to me feeling good about myself when I say Gracias to a Spanish speaker. That doesn’t make me fluent in Spanish. Personal environmentally piety within earth destroying systems is tokenism.

We are dangerously beyond that.

We have put our lives and the lives of our children at stake with our Consumerese and environmental illiteracy. As we can see from erratic, dramatic weather events, species extinction, drought, flooding, fires, our earth is speaking quite clearly. It is our ethical imperative to create an earth-based language to respond. We need the paradigm shift that comes when one is fluent in another language. 

Think about it.

School is the one place where thousands of people gather consistently en masse during their formative years for nearly two decades. Imagine students K-12 absorbing an earth-based ethos in every subject matter and grow up to be the farmers, doctors, investors, bankers, builders, cafeteria workers, educators, artists, athletes, beauticians, homemakers, lawyers, city employees, politicians, voters, and who knows what else, of the future. We must empower a generation to use their imagination, empathy, ingenuity to transform ideation and therefore orientation toward and relationship with our only habitat. 

An earth-based language, an ecological literacy, must become our lingua franca. Otherwise the chasm between Environmentalese and Consumerese will consume more earthlings.