Indigenous languages are founts of environmental knowledge
Indigenous languages are founts of environmental knowledge
Peoples who live close to nature have a rich lore of plants, animals and landscapes embedded in their mother tongues — which may hold vital clues to protecting biodiversity
Harrison has since studied Indigenous languages in other parts of the world — from the Pacific islands of Vanuatu to the highlands of Vietnam — and learned that many of them are nature-centric in this way, reflecting millennia of deep observation of the natural world. Scholars increasingly recognize that many of these tongues encode much knowledge about the world’s species and ecosystems that is unknown to Western science — knowledge, Harrison argues, that may prove critical to protecting nature amid a global extinction crisis.
