Words and Worlds: Language and the Perceived Separation of Humans from Nature

Cultural representations· of the world permeate much of human experience of that world. In this society, it seems increasingly unlikely that there can be experience that is not somehow overlaid by representation. Under such circumstances, it is our forms of representation that have the greatest impact on how we understand, give meaning to, and value this place in which we live. Perhaps the most significant of those forms is language1 for it is both · the most pervasive and the one through which the others are most often interpreted