Trees are named for the sound the autumn wind makes when it blows through the branches

Via BLDGBlog comes to us the budding scientific discipline of soundscape ecology: "A new scientific field that will use sound as a way to understand the ecological characteristics of a landscape and to reconnect people with the importance of natural sounds."

The notion will have hordes of Deleuzian DJ's drooling all over their rare Mille Plateaux glitch 12"s but I am not convinced. In comparison to most other mammals the human species has as much talent for hearing as the ostrich has for flying. But sound is a way to know about things. Consider Micmac (Míkmaq) tree names. 

In the Native American language Micmac, trees are named for the sound the autumn wind makes when it blows through the branches about an hour after sunset when the wind always comes from a certain direction.

Moreover, these names are not fixed but change as the sound changes. If an elder remembers, for example, that a stand of trees over there used to be called by a particular name 75 years ago but is now called by another, both names can be seen as scientific markers for the effects of acid rain over that time period.

Can you even imagine distinguishing a tree by the sound it makes? The detailed knowledge that goes into it (an hour after sunset, in autumn, when the wind comes from a certain direction) makes it even more esoteric and you would suspect a lively fantasy rather than an actual language but, even though I have not found a academic paper, this quote has appeared in a book published by Oxford University Press. That makes me trust it.

This segment is directly followed by the following quote that shows that in some languages edibility is embedded linguistic form, the source is the same interview with Susanna Romaine.

During World War II an American fighter plane returned from New Guinea into northern Australia, where it crashed. The four survivors had no compasses or navigational equipment but proceeded to set out to try to find help. Three starved to death with food  all around them. Unlike the Aborigines, the Americans had no idea what was edible and inedible. Many of the trees and vines have parts that can be made edible if treated in certain ways. None of this knowledge is written down but is passed on orally from generation to generation, much of it encoded in the classification systems of Aboriginal languages, which group all edible fruits and the plants that bear them into one category. This knowledge is always only one generation away from extinction.

The loss of diversity is the long tail of the agricultural revolution

Diversity is in an undisputed worldwide crisis. In Europe, where we have long ago eradicated a staggering amount of it, we take biological and cultural poverty for granted, as a normal, even desirable, fact. We are conditioned to think of our mind as a single-language engine, learning another language is difficult and always far from perfect. Anthropological evidence however suggests that in a language-diverse social environment a good working knowledge (even if only passively) of 5, 6, 7 languages (and not just dialects) is routine. Scarcity of diversity, in our social and economic climate, is a downhill process of shifting baselines; quoting John Waldman:

Every generation takes the natural environment it encounters during childhood as the norm against which it measures environmental decline later in life. With each ensuing generation, environmental degradation generally increases, but each generation takes that degraded condition as the new normal. Scientists call this phenomenon “shifting baselines” or “inter-generational amnesia,” and it is part of a larger and more nebulous reality — the insidious ebbing of the ecological and social relevancy of declining and disappearing species.

The above Ethnologue statistics put a number on the linguistic impoverishment of Europe. In 'Farmers and Their Languages: The First Expansions' (2003) Jared Diamond and Peter Bellwood add many complicating factors obscuring the picture, but the general trend is clear: by exploiting a few selected types of plants and animals agriculture created power and this power translated into linguistic monocultures.

Until the end of the Pleistocene, all people on all continents lived as hunter-gatherers. Then, at different subsequent times between about 8500 and 2500 B.C., food production based on domestication of relatively few wild plant and animal species arose independently in at most nine homelands of agriculture and herding, scattered over all inhabited continents except Australia. Because food production conferred enormous advantages to farmers compared with hunter-gatherers living outside those homelands, it triggered outward dispersals of farming populations, bearing their languages and lifestyles. Those dispersals constitute collectively the most important process in Holocene human history.

The agricultural expansions ultimately resulted from three advantages that farmers gained over hunter-gatherers. First, because of far higher food yields per area of productive land, food production can support far higher population densities than can the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Second, whereas most hunter-gatherer societies are mobile, most food-producing societies are sedentary and can thus accumulate stored food surpluses, which were a prerequisite for the development of complex technology, social stratification, centralized states, and professional armies. Third, epidemic infectious diseases of social domestic animals evolved into epidemic infectious diseases of crowded farming populations, such as smallpox and measles— diseases to which the farmers evolved or acquired some resistance, but to which unexposed hunter-gatherers had none. These advantages enabled early farmers to replace languages and societies of hunter-gatherers living in their main paths of expansion.