Story at a glance
- The Living Language Land project identified 26 words in endangered and minority languages that highlight humanity’s close relationship to nature.
- The words were identified ahead of and presented at the Cop26 climate summit.
- The project’s creators said they wanted to offer a new way of thinking about the climate crisis to Western leaders.
An art project celebrating Indigenous languages unveiled at the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow this week encourages Western leaders to change their approach to the climate crisis by recognizing humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
The Living Language Land project, funded by the British Council and developed by researchers and artists in the U.K., Colombia, South Africa and Namibia, identified 26 words in endangered and minority languages ahead of the global summit that highlight humanity’s closeness to nature.
Those words, recorded and posted on the organization’s website with Indigenous artwork and videos, include an Indigenous Chilean word for the tangible and intangible elements of life, a Native American Lakota word for consciousness, and an Indigenous Peruvian word for women’s strength.
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The project’s creators said they aimed to offer a platform to minority and endangered language-holders and offer a new way of thinking about the climate crisis to mostly Western nations that need to be reminded of humanity’s dependency on the natural world.
“The conversations in Cop26 are dominated by a western notion of how we address climate change,” Neville Gabie, one of the project’s visual artists, said at the conference. “We’re trying to say part of the solution is a change of thinking, which can be inspired by other communities who have lived with nature in a very different way to our own.”
“It’s opening ourselves to those different voices, that different conversation, and a different dialogue with nature and the environment that I think is so vital and necessary,” he added.
“Our project is aiming to say it’s all about relationships. From a sense we belong in nature, and that it’s not a battle between either we win with our development model, or nature wins and we have to give up all that stuff,” Living Language Land researcher Philippa Bayley told The Guardian. “We’re on the same side: we’re in a relationship with each other. The earth wants us to be here, because we also support her: there’s a mutuality about it.”
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