The movement towards climate change

My ears perked up.

“What’s the pokhari? Why do they call it that?” ‘I’m not sure. We grew up knowing it as the pokhari,’ the speaker replied.

Off I went to dig up the meaning of the word, for a crude, galvanised structure that functioned as a temple, had also piqued my interest.

It was, I was told, dedicated to the god Shiva. Searching ‘Shiva Temple Pokhari’ on Google, the Ranipokhari in Nepal came up, a historic landmark outfitted with a Shiva temple. Might be coincidence, pending further investigation.

Nevertheless, a ‘pokhari’ is a small lake or pond. A former resident recalled the presence of a pond where a house now stands.

The entire area however, came to be known as ‘the pokhari’.

Today, there is not much to identify the area as swampland, as it has been developed. Most people now refer to it by the official street name or identify it by the bar on the corner.

My interest in human movement has to do with a preoccupation with physical and cultural movement along with the way in which language becomes important in relation to this. Where does the term jangee come from? Or who put that signboard along the Manzanilla stretch that says ‘Humjailah’, that is directed out to sea? A visit to Laventille, with its low walls, and narrow lanes in some neighbourhoods where cars can’t pass and one depends mainly on one’s feet, was another point of interest. It is an ideal layout for escaping the law if need be. Then there are the hills and boundaries which no doubt condition how people will think about boundaries and feel the space. The name Laventille itself was born of a description of this area where the breeze passes through. But the name suggests more than just a mild breeze, thus providing not only a sense of place, but, an impression of its past - a landscape through which the breeze flowed freely.

In 2015 Oxford University Press published a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. It provoked an outcry from such writers like Margaret Atwood, Robert Macfarlane and others. The crime: the omission of a large number of words related to nature. Some of the words gone missing: ‘heron, acorn, buttercup and dandelion’ to be replaced by ‘cut-and-paste, blog and broadband,’ to name a few.

In an open letter to the Oxford University Press, Margaret Atwood, lamented the deletion of the words as further contributing to the problem of children’s lives becoming more insulated and losing a connection with natural play and a relationship with nature.

While she acknowledged that the dictionary had the right to update in order to keep up with changes in language and culture, she also noted that, “The Oxford Dictionaries have a rightful authority and a leading place in cultural life.

We believe the OJD should address these issues and that it should seek to help shape children’s understanding of the world, not just to mirror its trends.” A spokesperson for OUP explained that, “When you look back at older versions of dictionaries, there were lots of examples of flowers for instance. That was because many children lived in semi-rural environments and saw the seasons.

Nowadays, the environment has changed.” Writer and academic Robert Macfarlane is quoted in the UK Guardian as responding to this statement by saying that while the spokesperson’s response was based in reality, it also shows “an alarming acceptance of the ideas that children might no longer see the seasons, that all childhoods are urban, that all cities are denatured, and that what exists beyond the city fringe or the edge of the computer screen need not be named…” Though most news reports focused on the omission of nature words, an article in the New Yorker magazine also identified some religious words that had disappeared – ‘saint’ and ‘chapel’ among them.

As of this writing, we are faced with the US threat to pull out of the Paris climate agreement. What does that mean for us locally? I have no specific answers except the observation that our relationship to landscape is a lot deeper than we care to think.

The naming of things, like the way in which we name children for instance, establishes meaning. We also cultivate a physical and emotional relationship with that thing or place so named.

One wonders, with the continuing climate change issues facing nations worldwide, how soon will it be before much of the vocabulary related to our local natural environment is lost or rather, further l o s t ? And so too, how m u c h of the vocabulary related to cultural practices and daily activities?