Los Angeles Review of Books: An Ecotopian Lexicon

Review of An Ecotopian Lexicon edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy

Presents thirty novel terms that do not yet exist in English to envision ways of responding to the environmental challenges of our generation

In his foreword to Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy’s An Ecotopian Lexicon, acclaimed science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson notes, “people playing with language can help bring things and events into sharper cognitive focus.” Indeed, since familiar objects and ideas often disappear to our cognition behind their own ubiquity, playing with language can illuminate the history and meaning of things that have become too everyday to loom in our consciousness. And since unfamiliar concepts struggle to appear in discursive environments that lack sufficient explanatory tools, language play can make visible things that don’t loom because we have yet to speak of them in recognizable ways.

 

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