Who chooses the words?

Climate change, solitary confinement, and the power of naming.

THE BEST REASON to pay close attention to language, and how it works, is that those who do so shape the beliefs and perceptions of those who don’t.

Understanding how—and by whom—important concepts get packaged in words seems to me the duty of an engaged citizen. That’s one reason I write these little essays.

The way we see things depends greatly on what we call them. So long as tobacco companies could dismiss lung cancer as a “risk factor” rather than a leading cause and proven consequence of smoking, the more cigarettes they’d sell now and the later would come the class-action lawsuits. If “grabbing ‘em by the pussy” is defined as “unwanted touching,” it largely negates the trauma inflicted on the victim. That trauma is better conveyed by a phrase more raw and urgent, such as “sexual violence.”

WHO CHOOSES the words? It’s always wise to consider that question. The United States, with about five percent of the world’s population, houses about 25 percent of the world’s imprisoned population. None of the brutal autocracies that throw dissidents and the unwanted in jail without due process—Iran, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia—has an incarceration rate higher than that of the home of the free. Only El Salvador and Rwanda, with tiny fractions of the U.S. population, lock up a greater proportion of their citizens.

Solitary has proven universally harmful. Solution: let’s change what we call it.

Solitary confinement, widely used in the United States, is a form of torture that has been proven to damage not only the inmate, but also the institution in which he’s locked away and the outside community to which (if he’s lucky) he returns.

In a recent report, Columbia University’s Center for Justice stressed the dangers of solitary in New York City specifically. Rather than addressing the practice, the NYC Department of Correction addresses the language. Solitary confinement becomes known as “structurally restrictive housing.” Presumably that won out over “individually dissociative habitation.”

A more accurate term is “isolation torture chamber,” but the people who did the renaming weren’t concerned with accuracy. Their goal was to rebrand solitary confinement, making it more anodyne, more difficult to imagine, more palatable to the public. The same principle is at work when genocide is labelled “resettlement,” and prisons are called “re-education camps.”

AND WHAT of our planet’s present trauma? There have been five mass extinctions, the most recent—65 million years ago—being the one that killed off the dinosaurs. The sixth is coming, and it’s different from its predecessors: human beings may be hastening its arrival. We weren’t around with the dinosaurs to extract and burn fossil fuels, pump carbon dioxide into the air, dump toxic chemicals into waterways, and extract anything of value from the earth’s surface and crust and oceans, no matter the effect on the biosphere. What should we call this trauma?

The world’s other trauma—the weakening of democracy and rise of authoritarianism —is closely linked to the first. Refugees fleeing untenable heat, flooding, and starvation have led to the migrations underway on several continents. These masses of refugees strain recipient countries, which leads to anger, resentment of immigrants, and ultimately to the elections and outright coups that empower autocrats claiming to have solutions.

Wallace Broecker introduced the terms “climatic change” and “global warming”

IN 1975, ABOUT the time the human population hit four billion, an American geochemist, Wallace Broecker, first used the phrases “climatic change” and “global warming.” The alarm had actually been sounded as early as the 1950s and ‘60s, by the likes of Rachel Carson (who published Silent Spring in 1962) and Edward Abbey (his Desert Solitaire appeared in 1968). I remember as a kid watching David Suzuki on CBC television issue ominous warnings and glum predictions, but he was dismissed by many as a kind of cranky, academic Chicken Little.

What were they warning us about? “Climate change” sounds innocent enough. We change our plans, our clothes, our hairstyles. The weather changes, the seasons, our moods change. I once watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Familiar, neutral associations make climate change seem like no big deal— certainly not a systemic crisis that is making our lives more difficult by the year and promises to make our great-grandchildren’s unimaginably more so.

“Global warming” is more descriptive and specific, but it, too, sounds innocuous and fails to capture the gradually accelerating disaster unfolding on our planet. We put on warm clothes, offer a warm welcome to our guests, and give actors in a play a warm ovation. Global warming feels about as dangerous as a warm bath. Calling the unfolding crisis climate change or global warming is like calling missiles raining down on Gaza “unwelcome distractions,” or a mass shooting at a school an “unfortunate occurrence.” It fails utterly to convey the gravity, urgency, and horror of the situation. “Inadvertent climate modification,” anyone?

Lahaina, in Maui County, Hawaii, after being “globally warmed” in August 2023.

COMPLICATING matters is that we can’t, without using generalization and abstraction, see the climate crisis as a complex whole. Paradise, California, burns to the ground. Six species are declared extinct. Tens of thousands drown when a dam bursts in Libya. New York registers the worst air pollution on the planet. Famine in East Africa puts millions at risk of starvation. Fort MacMurray, Alberta, burns to the ground. The world’s largest iceberg breaks off from Antarctica. The planet records the hottest month on record. A battle erupts over Colorado River water rights. Lytton, B.C., burns to the ground. Coral reefs are dying off in Australia. Hurricane Ida slams Florida. Lahaina burns to the ground. Pope Francis warns: “The world in which we live is collapsing.”

Seeing these events as news items is like hearing a violin, then a trombone, then a bass, then a French horn, a viola, a flute. Each instrument plays a different part. The French horn doesn’t even kick in until the violin has played sixteen bars. It’s one thing to hear the instruments separately, but only when you hear them played together do you grasp that they’re not just related: they’re deeply connected. They’re all playing the same score.

How to turn up the music? How do we make it so loud that the money world pauses and looks steadily, urgently, beyond the next quarter, the next year, the next election—and only then focuses on how high global temperatures and sea level will rise by 2100? Yes, young people are becoming strident, our leaders are finally starting to act, some progress is being made; but the 2100 projections are coming at us much, much sooner than expected, and of course the problem doesn’t end when we hit that conveniently distant, arbitrary year.

Lake Mead, which provides water to Nevada, Arizona, California, and parts of Mexico, is being “climatically changed” at an astonishing rate.

Is there still hope? There had better be, since, in the absence of concerted, collective, sustained action, that’s all we have left to us. And where do we find hope? Here, as in many fields, AI may prove timely and helpful. Surely the capacity to review, sift, and connect billions of scientific studies and datasets all over the world will work to impel action. Is this not one of the valuable promises of artificial intelligence?—provided enough voters remain aware that science is a better basis for taking urgent action than plausible misinformation, Biblical quotations, or personal conviction.

WHY ARE POLITICIANS reluctant to say publicly what all but the stupidest among them surely know? For one thing, their first priority always is to get re-elected, and you don’t get re-elected by alarming people. UFOs? Nope, no such thing, folks, don’t worry. The DEA colluding with the cartels? Never happened. Lee Harvey Oswald a lone wolf? Damn right, no conspiracy there, let’s just move on. Jeffrey Epstein hangs himself under maximum supervision while the video cameras aren’t working? Sad, isn’t it.

We mustn’t alarm people, but why not? When a building catches fire, we ring the alarm. Our children’s future is being darkened by our actions and priorities, but we don’t want to alarm them? They’re not dumb: they’re already alarmed. When’s the right time to sound the alarm? When Miami and New York are inundated and hundreds of millions of people in Asia are fighting over higher ground? Will it be OK to choose words that alarm people then?

I’ll close by repeating what I said at the outset. Understanding how—and by whom—important concepts get packaged in words seems to me the duty of an engaged citizen. That’s partly why I post something on the topic of writing and editing each week.

The best reason to pay close attention to language, and how it’s used, is that those who do so shape the beliefs and perceptions of those who don’t.

This just in. . .

In 2016, the Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty, was adopted by 196 signatories. It sought to limit the global average annual temperature to no more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100. Just this week, Berkeley Earth, an independent climate-research institution, announced that in 2023 the planet’s global annual temperature exceeded that 1.5°C benchmark. Yikes.

Meanwhile, the federal government’s Department of Environment and Climate Change website still uses bland, neutral language about climate action, a climate plan, carbon pricing, species at risk, and so on. It’s mostly instructional and aspirational, with no sense of urgency.

But wait! More breaking news. . .

The same week we learned that the 1.5 degree benchmark had been breached, 77 years sooner than hoped, I noticed for the first time a Government of Canada TV spot that uses the phrase “climate crisis.” Hallelujah!

The wheels of government turn slowly, but at long last, as 2024 unfolds, the people in Ottawa who choose the words finally chose a better, more accurate one.

It’s a start.