Course Corrections

Words have power.Perhaps you're familiar with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? . . .There is a fundamental truth here.The map does become the territory to quote Korzybski-or, to unquote Korzybski because he says the map is not the territory . . .but what the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis points to is that the map really becomes the territory because it is by virtue of linguistic exchange that we coordinate our actions.Whether or not words map the real ity, they become real ity. 1 -A practitioner with one of the Natu ral Capital Proj ect's mainstreaming counter parts Perhaps You're Familiar with the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?By the time I was asked this question by one of my interviewees, it had become fairly clear that prac ti tion ers of ecosystem services were, at the same time that I was studying them, in parallel dedicating increasing attention to studying themselves.Although ecosystem services can still connote narrow (and sometimes wildly simplistic) assumptions about social change-mythic narratives of a planet of rational "decision-makers" in need of better science in order to make the right choices-I noted many proponents of the idea, like the professional quoted above, toying with alternative ways of thinking about their craft.Many prac ti tion ers of ecosystem services, including those I got to know in the Natu ral Capital Proj ect, resisted caricatures of their work as a kind of reductive cost-benefit analy sis for the planet.Instead, they described learning to re spect, and even to appreciate, the many intricacies shaping how their technical expertise implicated them in irreducibly social contexts.They described learning to embrace the situated messiness inherent to those contexts.And they described learning to indulge in some occasionally