Language, writes British author Robert Macfarlane, is one of the great geological forces of the Anthropocene.1 The English language in particular constructs a human-centred world. Words elicit exclusion. Grammar enables expendability. Semantics engenders extinctions. Our vernacular limits our ability to comprehend, interpret and design for diverse ecologies. We have gradually ceased using some words to the point where they have become lost, other words have become so hackneyed as to be ineffectual, and we lack the words to describe particular natural phenomena.
There has been a current surge of interest in words, reflected in recent literature. In her novel Pip Williams puts a spotlight on the process of the inclusion or absence of certain words in the Oxford English Dictionary. In , Tara June Winch demonstrates how Wiradjuri words link family, land and story. And Macfarlane again, in , exhibits a lost landscape lexicon for particular
