John Taylor Gatto: Beyond Money

Audio only but well worth the 45 min. to listen. Listening to Gatto is like finally stepping outside and breathing fresh air after you've been sitting for hours  in a closed room with smokers. Enjoy!

Nature Needs a New Pronoun

Robin Wall Kimmerer says calling the natural world “it” absolves us of moral responsibility and opens the door to exploitation. Here's what we can say instead:

“Ki” to signify a being of the living Earth. Not “he” or “she,” but “ki.” So that when we speak of Sugar Maple, we say, “Oh that beautiful tree, ki is giving us sap again this spring.” And we’ll need a plural pronoun, too, for those Earth beings. Let’s make that new pronoun “kin.” So we can now refer to birds and trees not as things, but as our earthly relatives. On a crisp October morning we can look up at the geese and say, “Look, kin are flying south for the winter. Come back soon.”

Language can be a tool for cultural transformation. Make no mistake: “Ki” and “kin” are revolutionary pronouns. Words have power to shape our thoughts and our actions. On behalf of the living world, let us learn the grammar of animacy. We can keep “it” to speak of bulldozers and paperclips, but every time we say “ki,” let our words reaffirm our respect and kinship with the more-than-human world. Let us speak of the beings of Earth as the “kin” they are.

We humans look rather different from a tree. Without a doubt we perceive the world differently than a tree does. But down deep, at the molecular heart of life, the trees and we are essentially identical. --Carl Sagan

--by Robin Wall Kimmerer, syndicated from Yes Magazine, Jun 06, 2015

For the full article, CLICK HERE.