Landmarks

by Robert Macfarlane

At one point, labouring on a fence-building project with two cowboys from Cibecue, he listens to one of the men reciting lists of place-names to himself as he strings and then tightens barbed wire between posts. When Basso asks him why he is doing so, the cowboy answers, ‘I like to. I ride that way in my mind.’ In both Lewis and Arizona, language is used not only to navigate but also to charm the land. Words act as compass; place-speech serves literally to en-chant the land – to sing it back into being, and to sing one’s being back into it.

It is not, on the whole, that natural phenomena and entities themselves are disappearing; rather that there are fewer people able to name them, and that once they go unnamed they go to some degree unseen. Language deficit leads to attention deficit. As we further deplete our ability to name, describe and figure particular aspects of our places, our competence for understanding and imagining possible relationships with non-human nature is correspondingly depleted.

Or as Tim Dee neatly puts it, ‘Without a name made in our mouths, an animal or a place struggles to find purchase in our minds or our hearts.’

Our language for nature is now such that the things around us do not talk back to us in ways that they might.