Lacking roots in either of his ancestral places of origin, a Chinese-French dancer learns to inhabit his own body as a territory of life. Chang Liu I am having an intense “in-of-body” experience. In the forty-degree-Celsius heat, my white shirt is plastered to my skin, and the folds of my johng-graben — the red sarong

A poem by a Palu’e-Malaysian youth speaks to the importance of love for people and nature in times of grief and loss. FAUZ MA . We know the movie of this world We know how to play this act We know how to stop this drama We imagine all things in our minds The actor

By learning how to swim against the current like salmon do, a woman finds her way back to the source of her language and identity. Daniela Boccassini   As our times’ bewildered becoming keeps unfolding, two simple words from a French medieval poem have accompanied me every step of the way: contreval l’iaue. They sank

WORDS AND IMAGES Nejma Belarbi “All things in creation are sacred and have a diversity much beyond our understanding.” ―My grandmother, Fakhita Jazouli “Get on your hands and knees on the side of the dirt road and look down to find medicinal plants. A square foot will do.” I immediately felt that would be all

WORDS Jon Waterhouse IMAGES Mary Marshall We are now living in the digital era, when practically every component of our lives appears to be moving at an ever-increasing, unstoppable pace. In many instances it is clear that we humans are not capable of keeping up with the technology we are creating, even as access to

WORDS AND IMAGES Sonja Swift When it rains in California I rejoice. I see the land drinking. I see grass blades emerging, shining jade green where there was only thatch, brittle and crisp, next to a stone-dry cow patty. I know the dusty taste of summer here, and the dread of summer prolonged. I know

WORDS Olga Mironenko IMAGES David Rapport Our planet is populated by an incredibly wide variety of creatures. Coming in different sizes and with different sets of adaptations to their respective environments, they inhabit the so-called planetary envelopes: hydrosphere, cryosphere, lower layers of the atmosphere, and upper layers of the lithosphere, creating a unique envelope, the

WORDS AND IMAGES K. B. Wilson In his essay “Biocultural Diversity: Reason, Ethics, and Emotion” (this issue of Langscape), David Harmon traces the emergence of the field of biocultural diversity as a call for an engagement with the beautifully rich complexity of life. In my own take on biocultural diversity, I ponder the rise of

David Harmon A few years ago, Luisa Maffi shared an email with me. It was from a writer, well-traveled and worldly, with a background in both anthropology and biology. He had spent considerable time in Mexico walking the countryside, thinking in the open air, trying to unlock aspects of his experience that were eluding his

by Jessica Brown In late 2016, I made my first visit to the sacred forest that belongs to a village in the Togo mountain range of eastern Ghana, hiking up a small mountain to the forest accompanied by a dozen or so people from the community. The sun was beginning to set over the Volta