Week 17: Echoes of Silence, The Devaluation of Words in Modern Discourse

Dear all,

What is the value of words? They are like a room without a roof. In the times we live in, it seems as though they have no value at all. They are treated like trash, lying around the world, hollow-eyed, abandoned. Words were once respected, especially when they conveyed deep human commitments. Carrying values was, in many ways, their most central function. Their reign over the description of beauty, horror, pain, and love is legendary.

Words could—and still can—change realities, by the very force they harbor. They connect, unite, and sometimes even spark conflicts between people and nations. As messengers, they travel through space and time, in both spoken and written forms. The world we live in today is not a wordless world. On the contrary, our world is stuffed with words; unfortunately, the majority of them are cheap and meaningless, like ghost ships floating on an endless sea of void.

It was Earth Day on Monday, an annual reminder of our duty to look after the climate and environment for future generations. By any measure, we are failing. The latest European State of the Climate report, published this week, painted a picture of a continent alternately soaked by floods and baked by heatwaves. Depending on the dataset, 2023 was either the hottest or the second hottest year on European record. The rivers ran exceptionally high; a marine heatwave that struck the UK and Ireland was classified as “beyond extreme.” Heat-related deaths rose. It follows a separate analysis released last week, which calculated how climate change is shrinking the world economy.

By 2050, according to researchers in Germany, global income is projected to fall by about a fifth, equivalent to $38 trillion a year, compared to what it would have been without global warming. These damages, now locked in and compounding due to historical emissions, stem from the effect of rising temperatures on factors relevant to economic growth, such as infrastructure, crop yields, and labor productivity. This figure excludes losses from extreme weather events, such as storms and wildfires. Yet, even though the annual average global temperature in 2023 hit 1.45°C above the pre-industrial average, just a shade below the 1.5°C limit recommended in the Paris Climate Agreement, support for net zero seems to be wavering. Politicians and investors are softening their opposition to fossil fuels, an approach that has been labeled as “energy pragmatism.”