Language for the natural world

I spend a lot of time thinking about the language we use to speak and write about the natural world. I think it can tell us a lot. It's also an opportunity for us to re-shape how we connect with other species. The language we use to describe other species and elements of the natural world is deeply personal. In this post, I explore the journey to finding the right grammatical conventions.

First, an easy one. For me, referring to animals as 'it' is a no-go. It objectifies and commoditises other species and makes them disposable like any other object (think how you'd react if someone referred to a person as 'it'). "I saw a Kingfisher yesterday! It was so pretty, and I saw it fishing" becomes "I saw a Kingfisher yesterday! She was so pretty, and I saw her fishing." I find it improves my connection to other beings. It's easy for me with trees and other plants, too. "My willow tree drops its leaves in my neighbour's garden" becomes "My willow tree drops her leaves in my neighbour's garden."

I switch between 'they', 'he', and 'she' freely. It feels right for me. I know gender is a social construct, so why not always use 'they'? That's a difficult question to answer. Perhaps it's because 'they' as a pronoun is a construct or a preference, too. So I just use what comes naturally to me. I'm not worried that referring to other species using human-made pronouns is 'anthropomorphism' - partly because every word of our language is human-made, but mostly because I reject anthropomorphism as a concept.

Meadow Brown butterfly, Newtown Nature Reserve, Isle of Wight

But is it right to say "my willow" when referring to a tree growing in my garden? Is it right to consider that we own other living beings? We're clearly happy with "my dog" so perhaps it does no harm. But wild beings (even in gardens) aren't pets. Does it make a difference whether you planted the tree? Does it do any harm to claim them? Or does it merely support personal connection? How about humans from certain regions who refer to "my Claire" or "our Sandra" as a means of displaying personal connection to their friends and family? Perhaps "my willow" can be taken in that way, instead of denoting ownership. "My willow" could refer to a tree not that I own, but that I have a personal or spiritual connection with.

How about referring to other species generally? I've experimented with using "more-than-human beings", which is better than "non-human beings" but still relates everything back to humans. But there are many circumstances, because of the damage humans have wrought, that we do need to refer to every species except humans. I've mostly settled on "other species", although it's a bit clinical, or "other beings".

Caldey Island, Wales

What about when we're talking about entities that haven't been given a species, though? In my degree I came across the term "non-human entities", referencing everyone and everything except humans, including other species but also mountains, fields, soil, hydrological cycles, carbon, all elements of the natural world (perhaps, in some uses, even including the non-natural world like the built environment). And why would we need to refer to everyone and everything except us? Mostly, to discuss our relationship to the world around us and to prevent us continuing to trample all over everyone and everything else. I've used it, for instance, in discussions about how we represent other species and non-human entities in political processes - e.g., the idea that someone could speak on behalf of the water cycle when decisions are made about sewage spills.

Speaking of living beings - there's the question of how far to extend this within our grammatical conventions. For entities many of us feel a spiritual connection with this is quite easy - like mountains and lakes. But what about entities most of us are less strongly connected to, sometimes that (who?) we don't even know the name of, like an agricultural field in Yorkshire or a stretch of beach in Cornwall? How far do we go in constituent parts (if it's ever fair to refer to anything (anyone?) as a constituent part)? E.g., if River Wharf is a living entity, how about her pebble beaches? Are the pebble beaches a living entity, too? How about each individual stone? Certainly, I'm of the view that stones can be and are living* and/or spiritual entities, but how does that affect how we write at length about these entities? Perhaps it's situation-specific? Indeed, some days I walk along the river and would undoubtedly see the ever-shifting pebble beaches as a living or spiritual being; other days, perhaps, they are part of the river. How does this translate into our writing? I often conceive of a river as she or he or they but less often conceive of stones in that way, even though I believe them to perhaps be living and certainly to be spiritual in many ways. I break my pronoun convention and use "it" to refer to rocks sometimes, and certainly to beaches and fields - does that undermine my grammatical conventions? I don't intend to create a divide between some natural entities and others, and referring to rocks and fields as living does not challenge my conceptions emotionally but it does challenge them linguistically, particularly in writing.

* 'living' is a lose concept - think not only of beings that grow, but also beings that hold history, change over time, support other life, form part of the living Mother Earth.

Kingfisher at Attenborough Nature Reserve, Nottingham

What about the Earth or the natural world herself? Should we always conceive of her as a living being? Is she female? Mother Earth? Viewing nature or the Earth as dead or unliving has opened the door to brutal exploitation of our planet, so returning to conceptions, or creating new ones, of Earth as living, is incredibly valuable for reestablishing kinship with nature. How these conceptions manifest, and the terminology used, will be deeply personal and will vary by community and geography. I think people should be free to use whichever terminology is meaningful to them, provided it isn't offensive or exploitative of the natural world or other people.

Aysgarth Falls, Yorkshire

How should we refer to rivers? It feels right to capitalise their name: the River Wharf. But "the River Wharf" is objectifying. You wouldn't say "the Hayley Kinsey" (I hope). So should we talk about her as if River is a forename and Wharf a surname? Does "I was walking along the River Wharf" become "I was walking along River Wharf"? How about starting a sentence? "The River Wharf sometimes deposits sediment from the moors" becomes "River Wharf sometimes deposits sediment from the moors" - does that work? It feels less linguistically easy than some of the other changes I've considered here. In that sentence, we've also inadvertently created a divide: River Wharf is named and capitalised (and "the" is dropped) but we still refer to "the moors". This is justified, I suppose, by the fact that naming all of the moors that might contribute sediment to the River Wharf would be unwieldy in the sentence (you see I've slipped back into "the River Wharf"). Perhaps we can see "the River Wharf" as a powerful, rather than objectifying, "the", in the way we'd refer to a powerful cosmic force (or like Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson').

The Badger Stone, Ilkley Moor

Speaking of capitalisation, how should we refer to species or groups of being? In real life, I'll often use the word "person" when referring to other species or a group of other species - for instance, at Bempton Cliffs, Jack and I will often say to each other "there aren't many people here today" or "wow, lots of people have come back!" - referring to how many birds are nesting on the cliffs. When you know somebody well and are with them in real life, it's easy to work out from context whether they mean human people or bird people, but that distinction is harder to grasp when reading. We're so used to using "person" to describe humans, that even readers who already believe in the personhood of other species can have a hard time knowing quickly whether the author means human people.

So, I tend to use the name commonly given to a group of species when writing. I'd naturally capitalise the common name of a particular species, like Emperor Moth, but what about when we're talking about moths? Do we talk about Moths? How about Birds? Is it "the Birds and the Bees" or "the birds and the bees"? Perhaps we can draw parallels with how we refer to humans? We often capitalise names for groups of people, like Scousers or Scots. But sometimes we don't: mothers, farmers, conservationists...humans. Maybe, then, we capitalise species common names, but we don't capitalise common terms for a group of beings, like moths or trees. That seems an agreeable distinction. But how about when there's only one (or one common) species? The convention when discussing foxes or moles in England is to refer to "fox" or "mole; there's no need to distinguish particular species, because we only have one common species of each. People know when I'm talking about England and I say "fox" I mean "Red Fox" and when I say "mole" I mean "European Mole", but is it more respectful for me to include the full common species name each time? Or does it just interrupt the flow of writing? Perhaps including the full common species name even creates some distance, some formality and unfamiliarity? Would it work to capitalise all words referring to other species, species name or not (e.g. "Fox" and "Mole") or would that make it difficult to read? Would it be strange to see some common names capitalised (where we only have one species in the locality, like "Fox") and other common names not capitalised (where we have more than one species in the locality, like "oak" or "squirrel")? Probably - so maybe this distinction doesn't work.

Perhaps the distinction, instead, is about whether we're talking about a particular individual or group or are talking generally. So we might say "I saw a Mole dashing across the grass. After the breeding season, young moles are sometimes seen above ground" or, applied to a particular group "the Guillemots at Bempton Cliffs look elegant in monochrome, like Audrey Hepburn. When ready to go to sea, young guillemots will jump from the cliff into the sea." This is the approach Robin Wall Kimmerer takes (below).

A Guillemot at RSPB Bempton Cliffs

What about the troublesome "a'"? In trying to reduce objectification of other species in our language, we might capitalise their name or avoid using "it", but should we still use "a"? This is a similar consideration to whether we say "River Wharf" or "the River Wharf". Do we say "a kingfisher" (or "a Kingfisher") or just "kingfisher" (or "Kingfisher"). I suppose we might say "a mother" or "a Scouser" without objectifying the person we're talking about, and getting rid of "the" or "a" in these contexts makes the writing style unfamiliar. Perhaps, then, we keep "the" and "a".

If we employ all the suggestions in this post, does it create a way to connect with the natural world and overhaul our damaging relationship with nature? Or does it create a convoluted mess that's difficult to read and therefore inaccessible or unenjoyable?

As I continue learning and writing, I'm going to work on developing my preferred way to refer to other species and the natural world. I take inspiration from other writers - here's Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass:

So, we see that Kimmerer would write about "a Kingfisher" if referring to a person, i.e., to a particular individual, and "the Kingfishers" when referring to a particular group of individuals, but would refer to "kingfishers" (lowercase) when talking generally about the category of species. This is at odds with some other nature writers, who would capitalise Kingfishers when talking about the category.

Instinctively, I'd like to capitalise the category, but that raises questions about where to draw a line (and I hate drawing imaginary lines) - we could capitalise Oaks, but then would we capitalise Trees? If not, we're capitalising for certain groupings of beings and not others - and this categorisation doesn't neatly map onto taxonomic rank (weirdly, we do tend to capitalise the name of a taxon, like the kingdom Animalia). So, are we capitalising only for a certain granularity of groups of species (often, but not always, the genus in the taxonomic rank)? If so, what about entities that humans have not chosen to assign a species to? Do we apply the same logic to other entities - do we talk about rocks (lowercase) but Gritstone (uppercase), because rocks is a wide category but gritstone is more specific? Or is it only entities commonly seen as living, and entities commonly seen as non-living but given a name (like the River Wharf) that are capitalised?

Having said all of this, if the content of the writing is love and appreciation for the natural world, does it really matter which words are capitalised or which other grammatical conventions are adopted? There are some aspects that I think make more of a difference to our connection with the natural world (like not referring to other living beings as "it") and some I think are less important (like whether we put "the" before "River Wharfe"). But the way the English language works means that drawing these grammatical rules means drawing other rules too, about hierarchy of entities, that we don't always want to draw.

You can see that it's easy to get in a mess - especially for someone like me, who favours grammatical consistency. I don't advocate one set of 'right' grammatical rules for writing about nature that should apply to everyone, but it would be nice to settle on my own approach, if only it weren't so fraught with difficulty!

I'm studying old nature books to see how authors of the past have referred to the natural world. You can read about the project here.

Have you noticed any other conventions of your favourite nature writers? Are there conventions you adopt that convey your connection to the natural world? I'd love to hear from you.

A Grey Heron on the River Trent