The Ecology of Perception: We Are Losing the Words for the Living World
On glaciers, language, and the loss of ecological perception
The Ecology of Perception
Part 1
We Are Losing the Words for the Living World
We are losing the words for the living world,
and with them, the ability to perceive it.
Words once moved like glaciers; slow,
heavy with memory,
and shaping the land of our minds.
What happens when that ice begins to melt?
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Words rolled over our tongues like glaciers polishing stones — condensed minerals of primeval seabeds carried slowly in the belly of dark blue ice.
Each word traces a path through the glacial stream of our collective memory, shaping the rivers of thought flowing within us.
What whispers from the time we breathed moss, when language rose from the damp earth itself and every word was the clay of the place that made it?
What Whispers from the Ages?
The day I learned the word bergschrund, I touched the sublime.
I shimmied up a crag hoping to glimpse Lake of the Clouds, a cirque beneath Daughter of the Sun in Montana’s Mission Mountain Wilderness, on the edge of the Grizzly Bear Conservation Zone.
At first I thought the glacier was nothing more than a lingering snowfield.
Wedged precariously between a chossy1 cliff of crumbling iron and the ice below me, I watched talus boulders bounce toward the valley floor. My hopes for a glissade2 were dashed.
At some point, the only path forward followed the edge of the glacier.
Then I saw it:
The bergschrund split the ice open—a gaping maw, toothy and wide, where the glacier pulls away from the mountain. I could hear the creaking of ice like my grandmother’s bones, the quiet trickle of meltwater threading through the frozen mass.
Before that day, I had only perceived the glacier from a distance, as a snow field.
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The glaciers are retreating, and our languages are retreating with them.
Ancestral ways of knowing seep back into the earth.
After work, on weekends, we follow that old water-worn path along the river’s edge. We pick the stones where melt water once carried our gnosis into light and scattered it across the floodplain of the Anthropocene.
Cupped in our hands, the wrinkles of deep time unfold beneath the whorled ridges of our fingertips.
Amid the hypnotic scroll of hot-takes and advertisements, can we still hear the pulse of water beneath the earth?
Do our memories pool like cirques beneath snowy nunataks3 ?
When our languages dwindle like our glaciers, how do we call the living world by name?
Wrinkles smooth to glass. The dance of photons in blue ice captures to blue light, and we lose ourselves in the flicker of our screens.
What whispers from the time we breathed moss, when language rose from the damp earth itself and every word was the clay of the place that made it?
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In Blackfeet, Ktunaxa, and Salish, grammar is shaped by kinship, relationship, and vocal intonation. In poly-synthetic languages, a single word can carry the weight of a sentence, even a paragraph, in English.
These languages were born in deep time, in the Pleistocene, or perhaps even earlier. Blackfeet oral stories speak of giant beavers and glacial Lake Missoula (Dr. Nieves Zideño et al., 2021),
The earth’s memory lives within our words.
Scholars Little Bear and Heavy Head note that the key to understanding Blackfeet metaphysics lies in the very anatomy of Blackfeet words.
The world revealed through their language is a fluid event manifestation. Within this living flux, relationships between humans and the world are continually formed and renewed. Knowledge flows through story, teaching, and lived experience, and from this cyclical movement a sense of harmony gradually emerges (Dr. Nieves Zideño et al, 2021).
Here, in the languages of Northwest Montana, old memory still speaks.
Ktunaxa is an endemic language, isolated like the white sturgeon dwelling in the deep pools below Kootenai Falls4.
The falls are a profoundly sacred site to the Kootenai Tribes, regarded as the center of the world and a place to commune with spirit for guidance.
N̓səl̓xčin̓ flows in thirteen dialects, like the lilting chortle of the meadowlark over a blooming prairie; each male singing his tiny heart in his own song.
Aspen Decker5, who is Bitterroot Salish, describes her language like water moving over the earth (Decker, 2025). It is water that revives the bitterroot and brings the flower to bloom.
The Salish word for bitterroot6, sp̓eƛ̓m̓, carries this origin story. During a famine, a grieving mother’s tears gave rise to the plant that would sustain her people (Dempsey, 2025).
Just as bitterroot rises from the mineral outcrops of the northern Rockies, these languages grow from their specific ecologies: rooted, alive, and singing the earth that shaped them.
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This is a landscape shaped by ice.
National Geographic Explorer Dr. M Jackson reminds us that glaciers are deeply entangled with human lives. They are shaping and being shaped by the communities around them. Wherever there are glaciers, there have always been people in relationship with them.
She recalls one man saying, “My father used to sweep the glacier from his door each morning.”
And yet today, she explains, “It is almost unimaginable in the face of the dazzling diversity of human beings…and the immense geographic diversity of glaciers, that we know ice today largely through a single story of melt… Just as no two people are ever the same, neither are two glaciers. (Jackson, 2019).”
The ice I met beneath Daughter of the Sun is technically no longer a glacier.
Too small to grow and breathe like a glacier, these bones of the Pleistocene are classified as a “stagnant snowfield”. In the 1880’s, about 150 years ago, over 80 true glaciers lived in the Mission Mountains. Today, two remain. Maps do not record that rather intimidating “snow field”. No one monitors the slow decline. The ancient ice hangs forgotten, quietly feeding the crystalline waters of the Swan River. For me, I hold the Mission Mountains in a special place in my heart, and I was honored to recognize that “snow field”.
How We Lost the Bundle
Bone bundles.
In Northern Plains traditions, these sacred bundles carry ancestral remains of animals considered kin, and are cared for across generations. They hold spiritual life: a connection to the past, to the Creator, and to the stories that shape a people.
Metaphorically this is what we carry in our bones- ancestral knowledge, memory, relationship, story - the whispers of our foremothers as we were cradled in our mother’s arms.
In many Indigenous traditions, these bundles are still carried, protected, and fought for.
But in others, especially within Western industrial culture, something was set down.
In Europe, Proto-Celtic breathes into the marrow of language. Words gather meaning in clusters of relationship: landscape, animal, season, kinship. Patterns carried in the tongues of Europe’s ancestral bone bundle (Hillyer, n.d.). The Celtic Ogham alphabet, rooted in trees, speaks from a time when words were carved into wood and stone, when language grew from the forest itself.
Botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger7 reminds us that the great forests of Ireland were cut to build the ships that carried settlers across the ocean to the New World (Beresford-Kroeger, 2020).
As the forests fell, something in the language fell with them.
On the North American continent, oral traditions shaped in the wake of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet now dwindle like our glaciers.
What happens when the species that nurtured these languages turn to dust beneath trampling cattle hooves?
Like a wild bison taken from a lingering herd and released into the fenced confines of the English language, these stories wander a landscape of barbed wire and cattle guards—hemmed in by state funding models and colonial systems of education.
What disappears is not only knowledge, but the ability to perceive the world as alive, responsive, and in constant exchange…
with us.
The Last Frontier is the Mind
Across Montana, communities are working fervently for language revitalization. As cultural historian Thomas Berry reminds us,
“The environmental crisis is fundamentally a crisis of the mind, a crisis of thought, a crisis of story.”
As a high school teacher, it sometimes feels like my students speak a different language—a digital-native dialect shaped by memes and trends.
I swear I am not that old.
If language follows culture, and culture is shaped by environment, my friends, we may be in ye olde proverbial skibbidi toilet.
Of course I could not resist the joke.
Children today can name dozens, sometimes nearly a hundred, corporate brands, but struggle to name even a handful of the plants growing around them.
We are beginning to see the effects of a generation raised on Apple, Google, Meta, TikTok and SnapChat.
Images scroll faster than rivers. Algorithms curate our perception, and the landscapes that once instructed the mind are reduced to aesthetics on a grid.
If colonial expansion once fenced the prairies and cut the forests, the newest frontier of enclosure may be the mind itself.
In January 2026, neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath testified before the U.S. Senate that Gen Z may be the first generation in modern history to show measurable declines in memory, attention, and problem-solving compared to their predecessors. Whether the causes are technological, educational, environmental, or some tangled combination of all three, the warning resonates with many teachers: the environments shaping young minds have changed dramatically.
As an art teacher and outdoor educator, my professional life is a form of resistance. My work, in many ways, is an architecture of the mind.
Which makes the irony of this essay difficult to ignore: I am writing these reflections about language in English.
Many monolingual English speakers rarely consider the cognitive filters this creates.
English carries a deeply Cartesian inheritance—a mirror for how modern culture imagines the world. Subjects act upon objects in neat linear sequence, structuring reality as discrete things rather than the “fluid event manifestation” described in Blackfoot metaphysics.
The result is a grammar of separation: mind over matter, observer over observed, the self standing apart from the living world.
Contemporary cognitive science suggests that perception is also not a passive recording of reality. We do not see the world as it is, we see what we have been trained to expect. Language is one of the primary ways these patterns are formed: by influencing perception, memory, and cognitive habits, a concept known as linguistic relativity.
Robin Wall Kimmerer points to a similar truth in the language of plants and people: many Indigenous languages encode relationships directly into their grammar. As those languages are displaced, so too are the relationships they carry.
If much of what we see arises from within us, what happens when those inner prophecies are trained by an algorithm?
When our attention narrows, and memory sifts through us like sand?
Fluid Event Manifestation
Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that the ecological crisis is also a crisis of imagination.
How do we reopen the mind to wonder, to the intricate web of relationships that sustain life?
Mycelial networks pulse through the soil beneath our feet, threads of communication older than any language we speak. These webs look like the neurons in our brain, and Neuroscientist Srini Pillay notes that our neural networks mirror the cosmos.
Our thoughts carry as much electricity as a supernova.
(Pillay, 2017)
Wonder is not a luxury of childhood but a biological capacity; the mind remembering its kinship with the living world.
“Glaciers are not solid ice; they are riddled with tunnels, channels, and all sorts of other features. As the glacier morphs, the internal geography of the ice is always transforming (Jackson, 2019.)”
We too are like glaciers. Impressionable, ever changing, and complex. When we open ourselves to wonder, our mind begins to flow, opening channels of attention and restoring our experience of the world as a fluid event manifestation.
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In the next essays of this series, I’ll share practices I use as an educator to help minds flow again, ways of turning over the many-colored stones so that we may rediscover our innate, wild intelligence.
Small rivulets gather and water finds its path.
Slowly, together, we begin to build soil on the floodplain of the Anthropocene.
Part 2:
Bibliography
Beresford-Kroeger, D. (2020). To speak for the trees : my life’s journey from ancient Celtic wisdom to a healing vision of the forest. Vintage Canada.
Cahoon, Heather. “Horsefly Dress.” (2020). Horsefly Dress: Poems. University of Arizona Press, pp. 3–3.
Decker, Aspen & Cameron. (2025, Feb 2). Our Belongings: Sqelixʷ (Salish) Art and Toolmaking [John White Series:Lecture]. Northwest Montana History Museum, Kalispell Montana.
Dempsey, L. (2025, May 8). CSKT Gathers for a Community Staple: Bitterroot. Char-Koosta News. https://www.charkoosta.com/news/cskt-gathers-for-a-community-staple-bitterroot/article_3127b5fa-b576-4c2f-8d2b-482af1cb0a41.html
Hillyer, Carolyn. (n.d.). Her Bone Bundle/si knâmi grendyo. Braided River Books.
Jackson, M. (2019). The Secret Lives of Glaciers. Green Writers Press.
Dr. Nieves Zideño, María, Pickering, Evelyn & Lanoë, François. (2021). Oral tradition as emplacement: Ancestral Blackfoot memories of the Rocky Mountain Front. Journal of Social Archaeology. 21. 146960532110198. 10.1177/14696053211019837.
Dr. Pillay, Srini. (2017). Tinker Dabble Doodle Try. Ballantine Books.
Solcomb, Steve, director. The Story of the Bitterroot. Looking Glass Films, 2004.
Chossy is a term used in rock climbing to describe rock or terrain that is loose, crumbly, unstable, or dirty, making it unsafe or unpleasant to climb. Northwest Montana is full of it, due to a massive “oxygenation period” in an ancient ocean.
Nunatak is an Inuit word meaning “lonely peak”. They are formed when glaciers erode surrounding terrain, but the highest peaks remain above the ice surface.
The white sturgeon sturgeon is separated from other Columbia River Basin populations since the last ice age, for about 10,000 years, creating a distinct population. In the 1980’s the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proposed a hydroelectric dam on Kootenai Falls. My friend Roger Sullivan, a young environmental lawyer at the time, told me the project halted due to an exploratory dive that found the white sturgeon living below the waterfall.
Aspen is an incredible artist and speaker. Her website is here: https://xwlxwilt.com/
Bitterroot’s Latin name, Lewisia rediviva, means “revival,” a nod to its resilience. The root can endure long droughts and come back to life when returned to soil. Lewis Merriweather pressed samples on the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Orphaned at a young age in Ireland, Diana was the last child to receive a full Druidic education in ancient Celtic wisdom.
Instantly subscribed! Thank you for this beautiful piece. My life changed in a quiet but profound way when I read that in the Apache language, the root for the words ‘land’ and ‘mind’ are the same (ni’). Kimmerer mentions this in Braiding Sweetgrass and the anthropologist Keith Basso researched and wrote extensively on Apache conceptions of and relationships with the land. The mutual reshaping between our natural world and language is so fascinating and so worth examination and preservation. 🌎🩷🦋
Wow! I feel so connected to your writing. You are so right about the connection between indigenous languages and the land. In Irish theres nearly 50 words for the English word field because grass burnt by the sun is not the same as a field covered in morning dew. I am Irish but a few years ago I went to Missoula and left a part of my heart there. There is a connection to the land in Montana that nearly rivals our own <3 Reading this was such a gift Thank you!