Eds. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 327 pages. $24.95.
Lethologica is an inability to remember the right word. A compelling term, but that’s not quite it: what if a rambling explanation circles not a forgotten word, but a negative space, a hole where a word should be? More than a pedant’s problem, lacking words signals lacking ideas themselves. An Ecotopian Lexicon confronts the lexicographical void opened up by the climate crisis, introducing language for reckoning with its mercurial realities and unformed futures. In thirty essays, An Ecotopian Lexicon introduces thirty new words to the English language. As a whole, the project strikes an invigorating, forward-leaning stance. It takes for granted that climate change exists, is overwhelmingly caused by developed nations and disproportionately impacts developing nations. What got us into this mire is clear: how to navigate without sinking still deeper, is not.
The words of An Ecotopian Lexicon are diverse, drawn from an array of languages, from contemporary poetry and speculative fiction, from subcultures and niche academic disciplines. Each essay begins with an epigraph giving the pronunciation, provenance, part of speech, and a usage example for the word. Notably absent is a concise definition. The decision to eschew the traditional directness of a dictionary and to define ecotopian words in context is a canny one. The writer has flexibility in how they elucidate the word, and the reader gains a richer, deeper experience of each new piece of language. This structure honors the nuanced histories of words and works against sloppy appropriation.
And while all of humanity could use ecotopian words, these terms are especially new and necessary for citizens of Western and capitalist nations. Linguistically, what we English speakers need are words to define how we can relate to the environment, to each other, and to our own internal states in the midst of a climate apocalypse. I use apocalypse here to invoke its narrative arc: when everything changes, words lose relevance. Meaning disintegrates. In this chasm of the unspeakable, we must envisage new language. Thus, An Ecotopian Lexicon positions itself mid-catastrophe, anticipating our need for words to describe a dissonant present and articulate a desirable future.
Part of how we understand new words is by locating them in relation to words we already know. For instance, the word apocalypso hinges on revision. From Evelyn Reilly’s book of poetry by the same name, apocalypso “absorbs and modifies the word apocalypse” to resist the “inertial drag of cynicism and paralyzing hopelessness in the face of catastrophic futures.” Instead, apocalypsoic visions, texts, or events “reveal and revel in the possibilities of a troubled present.”
I feel that inertial drag and, frankly, I find that most climate change literature tends toward the apocalyptic rather than the apocalypsoic. Scientists study the phenomena, measuring in parts per million and predicting in degrees per year. Diplomats discuss accords in international metropolises. Activists chain their bodies in the path of bulldozers to protest terragouging (an ecotopian verb, terragouge hails from environmental science fiction and means to extract natural resources). But for the rest of us—aside from staying abreast of these happenings elsewhere—what is there to do? When portrayed as diffuse and distant, the climate crisis fails to invite participation.
An Ecotopian Lexicon offers a fresh mode of engaging. As the epigraph from Amitav Ghosh states, “The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.” While its causes can be diagnosed scientifically and the course of action argued legally, climate change is also a social issue affecting communities and individuals. Seen as culture crisis, climate change takes on a newly personal light, empowering individuals as participants, even producers.
It is easy to agree, in all the shimmery vague ways, that we need change, but specifics vanish like heat haze as we approach. An Ecotopian Lexicon succeeds in its specificity. Concrete details stretch our thinking, challenge our unspoken assumptions. What if we had twenty-six seasons instead of four? See nakaiy. What if we could taste the history of the food we ate? Consider cibopathic.
Words become exigent when they strike a chord of familiarity but also of difference, allowing us to describe an experience we have been unable to put into words. Take gyebale, a passing greeting in the Ugandan language of Luganda. Gyebale is often translated as “well done,” but with it a speaker praises mundane, ongoing work rather than superlative, completed work. With gyebale we can acknowledge the “necessary but unglamorous work” performed ceaselessly by people all around us—salting sidewalks, hauling trash, fielding a child’s endless questions—to whom we may otherwise feel we have “nothing appropriately quick and unobtrusive” to say. Greetings are the first step in dialogue, and in the collective work of “living well in uncertain futures.” Gyebale offers a chance to reexamine what forms of work we as a society find noteworthy, causing us to relate to the world in a new way.
Similarly, ghurba refines homesickness for the particular pangs of the climate crisis. The Arabic noun defines homeland as a “conceptual place of familiarity and safety,” and the essay’s authors suggest that ghurba can help English speakers name the precarity of climate change. Our sense of safety is at risk: with a backdrop of shifting weather patterns and the refrain of unprecedented events, “we risk becoming strangers in places we thought we knew.”
There is an anxiety to needing words for ideas we don’t yet have. We lack a vision for the future and the language to envision it. This paradox of the climate crisis is beautifully recast by sehnsucht. The German noun hinges on an “unflinching acceptance” of the past paired with a “utopian hopefulness” for the future. The dual emotional state mirrors the external reality of a world breaking apart and, in so doing, opening to radical possibility. Rather than immobilizing us, our linguistic ouroboros becomes a powerful motivator, “a pleasure in the ruins of today that might help propel us towards the unknown pleasures on the far side of ecological horrors.”
As I read, carrying An Ecotopian Lexicon with me all through the dystopian summer of 2020, I mused about the limits of the project. It is one thing to meet a new word in a book, to recognize it within the tidy confines of an essay, beneath a running header bearing its name. It is another to bring that word into your personal lexicon and to recognize the idea out in the world.
But then I meet a word in the wild. Or rather it sprang up, striking me as the only word to properly describe the arresting cover of the December 2020 issue of National Geographic. Unfurled into a three-panel panorama, within the iconic yellow border was a photograph of a lakeshore. Thunderheads darken the dune and its weathered boardwalk. Caught on the horizon, a dazzling band of golden light is pressed between the far edge of the stormfront and the dark mirror of Lake Michigan. Rain streaks the centerfold, blurring sunset with cloudbank. Under different light this beach would be glittering waves and sun-soaked sand, the poster child of a Pure Michigan tourism campaign, but the cover story here, overlayed in white block capital letters, is “Saving the Great Lakes.”
Godhuli, I exclaimed.
I first encountered this word reading under the canopy of a massive black walnut in an unspooling Michigan summer sunset. At the time, I saw godhuli in its literal form, as a time of day and a quality of light, as twilight refracted through atmospheric dust. A Bengali portmanteau of cow (go) and dust (dhuli), the cow dust hour has wide-ranging literary and religious associations absent from simple twilight. It evokes a “temporality that doubles as potentiality” and even “demands human participation and action.”
This is precisely what the National Geographic cover conveyed: a luminous twilight meant to compel viewers to act, to conserve one of the largest freshwater ecosystems in the world. Without godhuli I still would have intuited the appropriateness of the image, the way the photograph resonated with the text to create meaning. But with godhuli I could invoke a concrete concept and connect my individual perceptions to a broader conversation.
The An in the title An Ecotopian Lexicon functions as an invitation. The indefinite article signals that the collection is not interested in being the definitive ecotopian lexicon. This is a project ongoing, and the project is not simply to assemble words into edited volumes, but to utter them, to ourselves and with others.