Urihi

The book opens with a warning. Before the narrative, before even the foreword, a single utterance stands alone as an epigraph: “The forest is alive. It can only die if the Whites persist in destroying it.” The speaker is Davi Kopenawa, shaman and spokesperson of the Yanomami people of northern Amazonia. The Falling Sky is not a written book: it is speech, spoken in Yanomami over more than twenty years, gathered, translated, and arranged in French by the anthropologist Bruce Albert—his longtime friend and ally. And when this speech turns to what we call “nature,” it does something rare: it offers us a word larger than our own.

What they call “nature” is, in our very ancient language, urihi a—the forest-earth, but also its image, visible only to shamans, which we call Urihinari, the spirit of the forest. It is thanks to her that the trees are alive.

French requires two nouns stitched together with a hyphen—forest-earth—to approach what Yanomami expresses in a single word. Urihi is not the forest placed upon the earth like vegetation on a surface: it is the earth and the forest undivided, the soil, the trees, the game, the rivers and those who dwell there, and still their living image, which only shamans see. Where “nature” designates for us, almost by definition, what is not human—what begins where man ends—urihi includes its inhabitants. The Yanomami, in Kopenawa’s words, are not before it: they are within it, dwellers among dwellers.

Alive, the forest is so with a life not immediately visible, and Kopenawa knows precisely how we regard it. Of those who do not know it, he says: “They tell themselves it grew on its own and covers the ground without reason. They likely think it is dead. But that is not true.” If it appears silent and unchanging, it is because it is defended—the xapiri spirits push back the storm winds and the beings of chaos. Then he turns the proof, with the simplicity of a man pointing to what he describes: “The forest is alive, that is where its beauty comes from. Does it not always appear fresh and damp?” The dampness of an underbrush as a sign of life—not metaphor, but observation.

And the word expands, step by step. When Kopenawa recounts how he decided to speak beyond his people, he says he sought to defend the entire forest, “including that which humans do not inhabit, and even, far beyond us, the land of the Whites. All of this is, in our language, urihi a pree—the great forest-earth. I think this is what the Whites call the whole world.” We must weigh what this means: the word his language reserves for the entire world is still a word of the forest. Our cities, our fields, our languages belong to it—not in some abstract globe, but in an enlarged forest-earth.

It is from this vantage that Kopenawa sorts through our own words, and his judgment deserves to be heard word for word. “Nature” is tolerable—the word is too narrow, but it aims at something whole. “Natural environment,” however, he rejects:

For us, what the Whites call by that name is what remains of the earth and the forest wounded by their machines. It is what is left of all they have destroyed so far. I do not like this word “environment.” The earth must not be cut in half. We are inhabitants of the forest, and if it is divided this way, we know we will die with it. I prefer that the Whites speak of “nature” or “whole ecology.” If the forest is defended in its entirety, it will remain alive.

Everything lies in this reversal. Our “environment” is what environs: a surrounding, of which we occupy the center. Seen from urihi, this word reveals what it describes—a remnant. What remains of the forest-earth once it has been breached, the parcels we “protect” because the rest is already lost. Kopenawa hears in “environment” the act of cutting through the middle, and his objection is not wordplay: it is another topology. Urihi cannot be carved up, because one cannot carve up what one is part of without carving oneself.

We must therefore distinguish before drawing near. Urihi is not “nature”: nature is an outside we observe, manage, extract—a subject before an object. Urihi is not “the environment” either: the environment is a residue we preserve around ourselves. Urihi is a living, inhabited whole, of which humans are inhabitants among others, and which only survives intact. The point of convergence exists, but it is narrow, and it is Kopenawa himself who designates it: a “whole ecology,” he says, is a word from the Whites he would accept. The question his word leaves in our language remains: when we say “environment,” what are we still speaking of—a land of which we are inhabitants, or what remains around us?