by the forest, just as to gaze at the surrounding forest is to feel oneself exposed and visible, to feel oneself watched by the forest.
An Inuit woman was interviewed about this shared language:
In the very earliest time
when both people and animals lived on earth,
a person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance
might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen -
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this.
That's the way it was.
As technological civilization diminishes the biotic diversity of the earth, language itself is diminished
As there are fewer and fewer songbirds in the air, due to the destruction of their forests and wetlands
human speech loses more and more of its evocative power.
For when we no longer hear the voices of warbler and wren, our own speaking can no longer be nourished
by their cadences. As the splashing speech of the rivers is silenced by more and more dams, as we
drive more and more of the land's wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own languages become
increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly resonance.
== the above are quotes from a book by David Abram titled, The Spell of the Sensuous
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