Cultural Clearcutting
"Every language is an old growth forest of the mind." Wade Davis
The quoted statement above conjures an image of a pristine forest. Inside this massive ecosystem, one finds competing thoughts and values, developed over time. Totemic visualizations. Pillars of learning and perspective built by human imaginations in the context of the natural world. Songs. Cries. Whistles. Roars. All kinds of voices and intonations inhabit this vast landscape of the mind.
As a child of the Pacific Northwest, it is not hard for me to imagine this old growth forest of language and also to fear its destruction by industrial forces. Both my father and grandfather worked in the forest industry. I witnessed the serenity of the wilderness and the power of industrialism from a very young age. Passing a clearcut section of the forest, the sudden absence of life was startling and sad. Yet necessary? There was always someone ready to convince me so.
Our languages are our deepest roots to our biological and spiritual identities. Keeping them alive requires environmental and social stability—a sustainable way of life, now a luxury in the age of the machine. Over successive generations, our languages have been mowed down for the sake of expediency. Rarer dialects and oral traditions have gone and are going extinct. Now, AI is the artificial field in which we are asked to root ourselves. If languages are old growth forests of the mind, what we are about to receive is an industrial-scale clearcut. Oh how our imaginations will be limited once firmly penned in digital contraptions. It’s like paving paradise to put up a parking lot.*
Wade Davis describes our many languages and cultures as an ethnosphere, rooted in the biosphere. Decades ago, he warned that the impending extinction of half the globe’s languages would result in a severe loss of knowledge pertaining to landscape and survival. I am interested in the sphere that is replacing our traditional ways of life and thus the foundation of our languages—the technosphere. Biosphere, ethnosphere, and technosphere are simply synonyms for topia, utopia, and dystopia. A language rooted in dystopia is a playground for fascism and mind control. In my view, the best way to limit war and authoritarianism is to preserve world languages and the environments to which they are connected.
I was disappointed in Wade Davis’s essay on Palestine, published in his 2024 title Beneath the Surface of Things. His critique of the occupation was far too soft, considering the degree of fascism, human rights violations, war crimes, environmental and historical destruction, and outright tyranny that transpires there. A harsher critique was needed to gather resistance to genocide and the clearcutting of international rights and freedoms that has also taken place over the last couple of years.
Still, Davis’s metaphor of language as “an old growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibility” is a powerful window of words for future generations. May they know and discover their heritage in the outside world, blooming wild and free.
*Joni Mitchell