Blackberry: The Bush is Omitted. The Device is Added.
Does anyone you know still doubt the severity and urgency of addresssing the seismic cultural shift away from engagement with life-processes and seasons and waterways and weather?
Does anyone still deny that these interactions with the non-human environment have been replaced by the wholesale adoption of experiences provided by electronics and the material products produced by mechanics?
The substitutions made in the latest version of the Oxford University Press Childrens' Dictionary provides glaring evidence of this trend.
It proves that back-to-nature environmentalists who fear people have lost their footings on the earth are also loosing their Earth vocabulary. One example: the dictionary cut blackberries that grow on bushes and added the Blackberry that is manufactured in factories.
In addition, nature terms such as heron, magpie, otter, acorn, clover, ivy, sycamore, and willow have been eliminated. In their place, the university publishing house has substituted blog, MP3 player, voicemail and broadband. Each replacement reinforces the seismic shift toward media and away from sensual interactions with living matter.
The environmental movement developed to both assess and redress such human-centeredness because it leads to neglect and abuse of the environment. Those who pursue this course as artists typically search for visual vocabularies capable of reestablishing connections with our life-lines with other species.
Now it seems they must pusue this course without many of the the verbal tools that conceptualize, explain, and convey the earth-centered sensibilities that are diminishing from everyday life!