Last week, in lieu of the Inspiring Women Among Us week Michelle Brass and Melanie Goodchild talked about climatic change and indigenous people.  Needless to say I totally felt sympathy for the women, since they introduced themselves in a very humble, friendly yet straightforward way, it was clear that they came to deliver a message.

Later, during their talk, I could not help it but change the sympathy for empathy. I could not help but agree with their message, is time to go back to our roots, is time to stop thinking about climatic change as a foreign, is time to conceive ourselves as a part of the everything, as a part of the collectiveness.  I still feel somehow alienized when I try to explain the direct relation between us and the nature. Is not being above it, inside it, below it, behind it, neither. Is being with it on a network where everything is connected. There is no distinction. We are not saving the planet, we are the planet.

My empathy grew even bigger when they mentioned the linguistic impediments that impide the English language to get that feeling of involvement. You can call me a fanatic phenomenologist/post-structuralist, but If you have a second to read me out you’ll know that I’ve been through a fully immersive exposure of a language different from my mother’s tongue:

Once that I went over the threshold between ‘speaking as a mean to survive‘ to  fully immerse my thoughts into English, to use it as the means for processing the information it was easier for me to analyze the phenomena that my brain had been going through: in my experience, different linguistic expressions can reconfigure the mindset and hence the meaning of reality. It just does.

Perhaps we need to identify ourselves within a non-perfect system, language, culture. I think that we should encourage ourselves towards the improvement, towards analyzing us ‘outside the box’.

When it comes down to conservationist coming from indigenous people, I couldn’t help but wonder is it the wrong message then?

I’d say no, is only that maybe we just don’t know how to read it and we pretend we do.

Thank you for reading, really.

Best,

Sergio