I've just been sailing for a week, in the Coral sea on a 45ft yacht. There is a whole language of sailing used to describe every nook and task on the boat. It is a distinctive language, not only do new words describe aspects and items I've never known before, but new words describe known elements uniquely.
 
A sail is not a sail it is a main, or a headsil, a jib or genoa. A rope is not a rope, its a line or a sheet. Shade cloth is called a bimini. Left is actually port. Right ceases to exist and becomes starboard. The front of the boat is not 'the front' it's the bow. The back is the stern. The kitchen is the galley, the toilet is the head. Other interesting words flew about the cabin, like skeg, jammer, transom, stanchion and vang. 
 
While all the words could seem like flotsam and jetsam to someone who is not intimate with the vessel or the sport, these words are far from whimsical descriptions of odds and ends. To a sailor who literally sees the sea differently, who reads the wind and who feels the tidal depth and direction, the bespoke linguistics are more than meaningful. They belong to a world that is storied with ancient practices, voyages and skilled discovery. They recreate a world view so the boat is connected to its past and so encounters specifics, detail and meaning in 'things' and occurrences like wind and tide and swell. Many words describe elements that may not occur as relevant to the greater population, but to the sailor, this felt, spoken and oft sung knowledge describes the nuances of the lands, skies and waters and the boats relationship with them in ways that honours all its parts and with the immense gravity of all beings who have lived through stories of being driven off course by one of its elements.
 
It reminds me how language is creative. Language lives in how we speak and what we say. We have been taught to think that our words describe the world. We typically think of language as words used to describe an implicitly external world. However, rather than descriptive of a fixed externality, our words are creative. We create the world with our language.
 
Words can eliminate or create new perspective. Our habits of speech and patterns of naming reflect and create worldviews and our relationship with nature. How we name, describe and label objects, sports, animals, people and places affects how we think of them.
 
The Brisbane River is not a discreet thing with clear boundaries, despite its singular name. It is fed by several rivers, creeks and tributaries which are formed by rain and runoff, and the river's end cannot be demarcated, it simply merges into the Bay which is the sea. Naming a river, might make us think that a river is a fixed thing. Real water is very different and more dynamic than we may have words to describe. A lack of words reflects a lack of detail but this is not accurate, only eliminates detail, nuance, story and flow from our awareness.
 
A study by Ethnobiologists Jonathon Loh and David Harmon found a correspondence between loss of diversity in ecologies, including loss of species of plants and animals, and the loss of language. This correlation led them to study the link between language and biodiversity. In their research report Biocultural Diversity: Threatened Species, Endangered Languages, they discuss their findings that show a parallel relationship between the destruction of forest habitat and language loss.

My family lost my dear stepmother last week, wife and best friend of my dear dad. I am urged to write about the nature of loss and the loss of nature.
We are losing nature. The scale and pace of the loss of nature on earth is unprecedented. The last 100 years have shown massive loss of biodiversity, habitats, species, ecological systems and communities. The pollution of our earth’s air, waterways, oceans and soil has reached beyond measurable levels to encompass whole-ecology breakdowns. Plastic is now in the food chain. Industrial chemicals are affluent in mother’s milk. Ocean water contains mercury. Air quality is so rich in carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide that the earth’s climate is warming. Clean water is sold in plastic bottles, and in cities around the world masks must be worn because the exhaust-filled air is un-breathable. Bees that pollinate our edible plants are dying and animals once threatened are now extinct or only live in zoos. Our planet’s polar ice caps are melting and ocean temperatures are rising. Pollution by carbon particles and plastic have peaked at the highest levels ever recorded in human history. Terms like deforested and desertification and pacific gyres have been invented to describe the annihilation of ecologies, the removal of forests, the mountains of litter in the ocean and the creation of deserts where once arable land thrived. The nature of these environmental crises are global. This is the loss of nature, and its remedy is what we call 'sustainability'.
While this is happening a unique, lingual species watches in awe, naming these events, and then returns to business as usual. As nature constantly plies contamination away, seeks to break down toxins and stabilise systems to retain balance, human beings watch as the earth’s ability to compensate for our lives is drastically reduced.
Is it impossible to lose nature? When I write ‘nature’, I refer to the seemingly automated earth-systems of air, water, soil, biodiversity and energy that create and maintain our world so that conditions are suitable for all of life. This nature provides ‘resources’ for all of humanity’s needs. Nature also deals with the waste we all produce on a microscopic and global scale - from plastic litter to methane. 
Nature, the whole of earth, has a certain capacity to do this; a capacity that is so miraculous it seems to have been taken for granted. However, nature is not unlimited in supply or capacity. We are in ecological debt. Global overshoot. Every moment, nature works overtime to cater for human needs. Every day we mine, dredge, cut down, fish, farm, pollute, burn, and throw away. Over the last 50 years, the consumption of nature by human civilisation has been using up nature’s capacity faster than those automated systems and cycles of nature can supply. Now, every year, the earth’s natural capacity to produce the resources humanity needs for the year will be all used up before the end of the same calendar year. We, as humanity, are literally using more than our planet can provide and faster than our planet can deal with.
This is what is unsustainable. We can Google this, we can watch. We can hear about the consequences of this unsustainability in distant locations and on our doorstep; we can YouTube scenes of our polar ice melting and watch documentaries about methane blow outs or how our most beloved animal species are becoming forever extinct. But the loss of nature is not only the loss of distant wilderness, species and biodiversity, it is the loss of life as we have known it. The loss of nature around our world isn’t only external and surrounding us, it also marks an unprecedented loss of human understanding of our relationship with the nature of life and our own living.
The loss of nature is played out through its removal and over-use but also, more subtly, through the removal of nature from our sense of civilisation and community. We have come to live as though we are not reliant on nature. We have come to truly believe we are independent. However, we can’t cook a meal without the support of plants, weather, bees or animals. Our reliance has been disguised by packaging and intellectual property, air-conditioned halls of commerce, super markets and sky scrapers, roads and real estate, concrete and car parks. However, we can’t survive without rain. The tick of time charts our calendars. Nature’s galactic switch of night and day guides our lives. We rely on the movements of the moon, not battery-operated clocks. However, we don’t live like this, do we? We live like we survive by the technology of our own initiative. 
We live in an inaccurate reality, an illusion, a dream. We have been taught to speak of nature as ‘wilderness’, ‘resources’ and ‘real estate’ as though it surrounds us, like a backdrop for human existence or something to own and possess. However, as long as we imagine nature as an external surrounding environment, our crucial dependency will carry on being concealed.
When we lose something, or someone, we re-see value and re-member their beautiful presence in new ways. We notice how we forgot or took for granted. We see deeper levels of truth, beauty and value. We gain the wealth of hindsight and hopefully love even stronger. Loss is deep, and occurs as a mysterious absence of what was. We can feel both deeply connected and alone. Importantly, the value of loss is for us to make.

"Connectivity is a term I have drawn from ecologists and environmental philosophers.
It is intended as a conceptual framework that focuses on relationships,
flows and connections. Imagining an expanded ecology"
Jessica Weir, Connectivity, 2008

I can trace back my first thoughts on imagination and environmental education to when I was travelling to different primary schools to teach workshops about water on behalf of a local water authority. I would present a scripted PowerPoint lecture about the water cycle and do some activities with the kids. It seems simple enough, but I became deeply frustrated. 

As I talked to the students about the world’s water systems I felt that I was hand-balling them a worldview that was distant and defunct. I spoke to a diagram called 'The Water Cycle'. We were inside a classroom, I was effectively the holder of knowledge, hoping to pass it to them by telling about the world ‘out there’, as though this would teach them effectively and they would learn about this as a topic that could be covered.

I heard myself telling them inadvertently that knowing how to spell ‘precipitation’ basically meant that you knew more about rain. That reciting the terms ‘condensation’, ‘evaporation’ and ‘transpiration’ affirmed the global water cycle was being covered. Never did I walk outside with them and ask them to look at the sky. I never sought to inquire into their imagined worldview as the inner frame of their knowledge concepts or ask them how they imagined the rain was created or encouraged them to inquire how that very tree they saw every day in the playground contributed to the whole cycle. 

My frustrations grew with experience; I became depressed and alienated from teaching. I quit. Instead,
I worked for a theatrical education company for a while where I - no kidding - sang songs about being a raindrop.

Years later, living in the city with my small child, a young girl next door mentioned one day that she was learning about the water cycle at school. Cynical, I gently asked her what she had learned. Waiting to hear her recite the definition of ‘precipitation’, she answered calmly, ‘We are all connected you know’.

‘We are all connected you know’

I was lit on fire. My frustration burst into fascination; how did she learn that from the knowledge of the water cycle? What did her teacher do differently? How was the knowledge of the water cycle given, created, presented? How did it occur to her like this!? 

‘We are all connected, you know’ seeped into my dreams. When the knower or learner is positioned as separate from the knowledge, they are at once positioned as separate from the world. When kids are given knowledge about the world, the world is no longer theirs, no longer the one they live in.
Instead, the world becomes an external surrounding unreality that is to be gone to and returned from, manipulated, known about, bought, owned, sold, used, and possessed. When told this knowledge, they are told they are separate from the world and either entitled to it or responsible for saving it. 

The more I looked, the more I saw evidence of this false imaginary. Knowledge about our world has become an external power that translates into dispossession. This imaginary is false because it makes us imagine nature is external and knowledge as a kind of separate and elevated authority. The cost is not only genuine understanding, but of belonging, we lose a sense of place and an accurate orientation of self and world in relationship.

Through learning about nature, children become adults totally displaced from the living world that constitutes their being. Lives are lived without noticing that breathing, eating, drinking, bathing, birthing and knowing are intrinsically nature too. 

Examining how we imagine nature is connected to how we imagine knowledge about it. Because while we name ‘nature’, plan for sustainability, protect ‘the environment’, and talk about it, we have become largely blind to the reality of connectivity. The world is not isolatable because we name it and it isn't external because we think about it. Nature is all the world, all life, including all thought and being. Perhaps, and possibly, our earth is changing drastically because of this radical and false disconnection that all knowledge discourses seem to perpetuate.  
 
The knowledge that we are thinking of things severs us in fact from the actual things. - Jean Piaget, 'The Child’s Conception of the World,  1997.

We can watch as everyday we pass around imaginary landscapes that depict the knower as somehow separate and above the world as a result of their knowledge about it. In school and at work, people are invited to become elevated above the world by virtue of knowing about it. This is socially tempting, professionally smart, and economically sensible but ontologically and spiritually divisive.

I believe this very familiar, pervasive and regular discourse of learning about environments re-creates a false paradigm where humans, nature and knowledge are torn apart. We become individual. Autonomous. Independent. Smart. Resourceful. But we lose belonging and genuine understanding of our connection with the subject of our learning and knowing. We lose consciousness of reality that was once alive as a child; a truer imaginary, where self and world are intrinsically connected, inextricably linked and profoundly co-constituted.

Perceiving knowledge as an exclusively human power over, rather than a gateway into connectivity, is a great loss and must be reimagined.

Are there ways of speaking of knowledge and nature that assert an essential connection between human and planetary wellbeing rather than tear them apart?