La Fuerza • noun• (lahh fwerrt-za)
Definition: force, strength; especially the strength of the earth
Origin: Spanish
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This week I wrote an op-ed for The Daily Beast discussing the importance of Juneteenth. You can read it here.
Recently, I came across a paper about rural Colombian cultures, and one of the subtle yet significant takeaways from this paper is the transformational impact of attaching language to existence and not essence.
At SCL, we spend a lot of time distinguishing between essence- and existence-centric language and culture as we describe the attributes of America’s ethnocidal society. What this often means is that the same word will have more than one meaning: an ethnocidal meaning based on essence and another based on existence.
Essence basically consists of ideas that can provide people with meaning, but have no necessary attachment to reality. Sometimes essence can be harmless, and other times essence can incline people to destroy existence, distort reality, and corrupt the truth in order to sustain one’s delusions. An example of essence could be believing that the value or meaning of life depends on the color of your skin or your religion, and now you feel justified in destroying the existence of people with a different skin color or religion to protect your essence.
Each week, The Word seeks to introduce new and enlightening language, which can sometimes include words we may already understand broadly but whose meaning has a different nuance according to other peoples and cultures.
The term Fuerza in Spanish is one such word. Translated literally, fuerza merely means “force” or “strength,” but within Colombian culture and other parts of Latin America la fuerza describes the deeply rooted relationship human beings have with the earth. The understanding of strength takes a completely different meaning when it is grounded in existence and not in ideas or essence.
La Fuerza and Language
For many rural Colombian agricultural communities, la fuerza comes from the earth, and human beings become strong by accepting the gifts—i.e., the food and animals—that the earth produces. Existence and strength is a gift from the earth, so the primary goal of existence is to ensure that the earth continues to be able to give strength. If we diminish la fuerza of the earth, we destroy our gifts and diminish our own fuerza too.
Their use of fuerza exists to cultivate a sustainable, nurturing existence. At SCL, we would call this Eǔtopian (pronounced “ev-topian”).
Because these communities in Colombia use existence-focused language, they understand that the earth comes first. This practice of centering earth’s existence flies in the face of much of western philosophy, which has proclaimed that human beings—Europeans in particular—have been destined to dominate the earth. If you know that your strength comes from the earth, it would be nonsensical for you to believe in good faith that you could dominate the very thing that gives you strength.
However, if your concept of strength has no connection to the earth and instead relies on an irrational bad faith belief in the supremacy of a European or white essence, then destroying, consuming, and dominating the earth will be perceived as strength.
An essence-based interpretation of strength could absurdly lead human beings to believe that they are growing stronger as the earth becomes weaker.
A subtle shift in our understanding of the words “strength” and “force” can completely recalibrate our understanding of our place in the world and our relationship with everything that surrounds us. This shift will impact our subsequent language as we create words and phrases to describe these diametrically opposed perspectives. Ironically, and frustratingly, this can result in words such as fuerza that can appear to be easily translatable despite having completely different meanings.
For example, when your language acknowledges both that the earth possesses a power that extends beyond human domination and that humans must exert effort to sustain that power/strength/force, the earth now takes on spiritual and sacred significance and people become less reliant on defining the earth as a series of predictable commodities.
In many rural Colombian communities, agricultural activities are described with language that speaks to this lack of control or certainty. Such activities are often described as “a luck” (una suerta), “a gamble” (un juego de azar), or “a lottery” (una loteria). Additionally, one’s harvest is part of one’s “destiny” (el destino). There is a magic realism that impacts language and culture due to acknowledging that the earth contains a force that humans cannot control, but need in order to survive.
This earthly mysticism can seem impractical, but acknowledging the lack of human control actually empowers people to diversify their harvests, so that they have contingency plans. The existence vs. essence interpretation of the potato speaks to the necessity of understanding that the power resides with the earth.
In Colombia, potatoes are described as una loteria and from this perspective, it makes sense to grow and cultivate a diversity of potatoes. You never know when a bad harvest might occur, so people must cultivate la fuerza of the earth and grow many different types of potatoes.
When Europeans encountered potatoes, they had virtually no interest in crop biodiversity, and instead wanted to find an optimally productive variety of potato. The potato that Americans refer to as the baked potato was the “perfect” potato because it was the size of an entire meal. Europeans then took this one type of potato back to Europe, where the inevitable results of monocultural farming and the unpredictability of Mother Nature resulted in the crop blight which caused the Irish Potato Famine, resulting in the deaths of more than 1 million people from starvation and causing over 1 million people to flee the country. A diversity of potatoes could have saved millions of lives and prevented the displacement of millions more.
Climate Change and La Fuerza
Climate change is occurring due to an obvious misuse of the earth stemming from an essence-based belief in the need for humans to dominate the earth. The irrational belief that strength derives from dominance and not from the earth has inclined human beings to manipulate the earth in disastrous, unsustainable ways while believing that we are in control.
The Irish Potato Famine is one of countless historical examples of the outcomes caused by this dangerous ethnocidal philosophy. Today, people recklessly pollute waterways, destroy the Amazon, hunt animals to extinction, pollute the air, and use pesticides as an extension of this destructive ideology. Due to our misuse of the land, California is experiencing record droughts and wildfires, and the state is becoming less and less inhabitable.
Climate change equates to a reality that these Colombian’s existence-based linguistic philosophy could not produce because the words they use discourage the misuse of the land. Yet now they have to suffer the impacts of climate change due to the irrational philosophy of ethnocidal cultures that encourage the destruction of the earth. When people believe that human beings are more important than the earth, they allow people to believe that it is possible to save humanity by destroying the earth.
Colombian people describe chemical fertilizers as “burning the earth” and “taking away” the earth’s fuerza. This destruction means that they now have to exert more effort to help the earth cultivate its gifts. Eventually, the earth may not be able to produce the fuerza human beings need to survive.
As humanity works to combat the devastating impacts of climate change, we need to modify our language and understand the origins of our fuerza. We all have the strength and force to control our own actions, yet the most powerful thing we can do is recognize that our true power comes from the earth and the sustainable, nurturing environments that we cultivate.