Greetings, happy Earth Day. Another year, another day, April 22nd, where we kind of can tell the truth about the planetary situation without fear of social reprisal. It's kind of shocking to me that every day isn't Earth Day, but that is our education

and our cultural situation.

I have a podcast.

One of my upcoming guests is a Native American of the Muskogee tribe, Marcus Cloud Breaks.

I was talking with him and he said there's like 22 people in the world that speak this

Muskogee dialect and he's teaching his two children and I asked him why and he's

like because our cultural concepts our values can't be translated in the English

language that got me to thinking what is the semantic influence of our words on our behavior,

on our values, on our cultural permission for different things?

So what I'd like to do here is kind of a whirlwind list of common cultural terms and their

biophysical equivalents from my Earth Day perspective.

Here we go.

So first, economy, very common word.

The biophysical equivalent would be the human ecosystem.

The economy takes money and technology and tells a story about distributing

the largesse of that system to all the humans. A human ecosystem not only includes money

and technology, but energy, materials, pollution, externalities, why we pursue these things to get the same

emotional states of our ancestors.

It looks in the parts and the processes, how the parts and processes fit together in a system.

So that's quite a big disparity between the two terms.

Progress.

We hear about progress all the time.

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