Actions don't just speak louder than words, in our communication with our environment, they are the words, and yes, they speak very loudly.
When I tell people I study environmental communication, I often get the same question (or at least, variations on it). "You mean, like talking to trees?" they'll ask. In return, I always say yes. I do so partly because I mean it, partly because I do talk to trees, and partly because I love watching the other person's reaction when I give their facetious question a serious answer.
After picking up
How Nature Speaks: The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition, a book edited by Chuck Dyke and Finnish professor Yrjö Haila, I think I'll have to adjust my response. In the introduction to the book, Haila and Dyke make the point that "human relationships with the rest of nature begin with deeds, not words." That struck me as a simultaneously simple and profound statement. It's simple because it gives people a concrete concept (their actions) that they know intimately to understand an idea that can sound as abstract and foreign as talking to trees. Haila and Dyke's idea is profound because it can unlock a series of deep and meaningful interactions that alter how we see and relate to our environment. As it turns out, we all talk to trees and our other fellow inhabitants of the environment all the time, and we can do it without speaking a word.
To take the idea further, Haila and Dyke also explain that the environment and other species speak and respond to us as well. Just like with us, their language comes in the form of actions. My cat says thanks for food by curling up on my lap. On a larger scale, we call the release of methane by thawing permafrost a "feedback loop" to our own release of greenhouse gases and subsequent warming of the atmosphere.
The next time I get asked if I study people talking to trees, I'll probably ask the person what they have said to and heard from trees lately. Maybe then, we'll have a discussion of how actions, particularly in environmental communication, say so much.
