The Natural Linguist

This is a topic I have been thinking about for a long time. It first came to my awareness in a significant way when I read Mark Kurlansky's wonderful book Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World , which I highly recommend. Don't let the idea of a whole book about a fish deter you from reading it. It is both entertaining and instructive. The idea of nature's bounties being inexhaustible is an old one and buried deep in our collective psyche. As a culture, we can observe that many people have ceased to be grateful for nature's bounties. Many have ceased even to be complacent about them. We have, in large part, ceased to be aware of it. We have simply built our way of life around the assumption that no matter what we do, we will always have clean air and clean water; that we will always have in abundance food, electricity, minerals, petroleum, wood, the raw materials to feed our economy, the space to store our garbage, and a million other things. Only recen