Professor David Farrier

Well, it was more to do with the whole question of how does the language we speak shape our reality?

And, you know, it's the idea of weak linguistic determinism.

So that's the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

It suggests that the language we speak fundamentally determines our sense of the world, and this is a kind of qualified version of that.

Well, I would like to say something a little bit, though, about what ought to be.

Go on.

That whole notion of what ought to be.

So, yeah, in terms of what an expression of kinship time for those of us who aren't Potawatomi or an indigenous citizen of any kind might look like,

Because, of course, we have to be really careful not to simply appropriate these terms, to detach them from... From the cultures in which they arose.

Yeah, these concepts, because they're deeply lived, deeply embodied and deeply emplaced, and appropriate them as we might take a statue and put it in the British Museum.

Yes.

But they are ideas that have such resonance for now and...

So when I was working on this chapter about kinship time and wild clocks, I came across a line in a book by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam.

It was a journal he wrote of travels in Armenia, as it happens.

But he wrote this astonishing reflection, just a couple of lines in this journal.

He said, what tents would you choose to live in?

I choose to live in the what ought to be.

And that really hit home with me because what ought to be expresses the fullness of our time of grief and hope.

I think it carries that sense of ache, that temporal ache of what ought to be here, but is no longer.

The species we've lost, the richness and the biodiversity and the colour that we've lost.