We have always been concerned about words. Words are powerful. They help us communicate events that unfold around us. They are building blocks for action. They aid mobilisation. They can be tools for organising, control, or even of colonisation and exploitation. Negotiations at local, national and global levels often enter quagmires due to disputes over words and their meanings. A word can have multiple meanings and with a little inflection a benign word can turn into an insult and ignite a wildfire.
Global actions can be forever delayed due to manipulation of perceptions that make emergencies appear to be less so. An example is the framing of the climate crisis as global warming. If the crisis had been labelled global heating or climate chaos, it would probably have garnered serious attention. Warming can be a nice thing because most people love keeping warm. For years, climate campaigners have demanded a fossil fuels phase out. Rather than do that, COP26 came up with the idea of a phase down of unabated coal power and phasing out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, not phasing out of fossil fuels.
A phase down should have pulled someone's face down in shame. After kicking and screaming, COP28 in the United Arab Emirates ended up with an agreement to move away from fossil fuels in energy systems with the objective of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. This was the agreement that the UNFCCC characterised as a pointer to the "Beginning of the End" of the Fossil Fuel Era.
With that sort of word smithing negotiators and some campaigners came off celebrating that the word 'fossil' was mentioned, not caring whether it would be phased down or phase out. To avoid dumping coal, we were told we can have clean coal. Cutting carbon emission at source was suddenly considered an uneconomic way of thinking and the preferred path became carbon offsetting. So, polluters are permitted to carry on polluting provided they can show that an equivalent of their emissions is compensated for by those who pollute less or by mechanisms that can capture or bury such pollutions. Another sleight of hand was played by pushing a concept of net zero down gullible throats even though everyone knows that net zero is not zero.
At another level we have seen how colours have been used to lull the world to sleep while escalating the exploitation and marketisation of Nature. The green economy was quickly followed by the blue economy. There are blue, green, grey, turquoise, and other colours of hydrogen. All these are plied to show that a choice of colour can clear your conscience and allow a particular action to be acceptable or to attain certain degrees of acceptability.
It was in recognition of the potency of words that oil companies turned to calling themselves Energy Companies. If oil tends to soil anyone's hand, certainly what energy does is to strengthen you. So, Energy Corporations swagger into the communities and continue their polluting activities with reckless abandon.
Polluters have not only adopted colours and words to hide their crimes, sometimes they simply subvert the meaning of words that previously provided moorings for a drifting world. A key word in this bracket is sustainability. Truth be told, the meaning of the word is now thrown into the air. The United Nations Brundtland Commission in 1987 defined sustainability as "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
That original definition ought to stick to our memories and keep us on guard so that subverted definitions do not become acceptable and thus aid dysfunctions to become normalised. An example is when an oil company issues an annual "sustainability report" while mindlessly engaging in persistent ecological destruction or ecocide. This led Health of Mother Earth Foundation to adopt a hyphenated Sustain-Ability so that we emphasise that anything that does not sustain the ability cannot be termed sustainability. Another hyphenated word is re-source which eliminates the consideration of the gifts of nature as mere commodities but require that we recognise the sources, return to the sources and see them as what they are both tangibly or otherwise.
How about when a military establishment announces that they would carry out an environment-friendly warfare?
The climate arena births many words, besides the ones already mentioned, that we must be wary of. Such words include decarbonisation as a process of moving in a low carbon economy. The wedlock to carbon is so strongly welded by capital that there appears to be no life beyond carbon. This is why the possibility of defossilisation appears anathema to carbon moguls.
Most people agree that an energy transition is vitally essential if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change. That transition basically refers to a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. There is however plenty of acrobatics over what constitutes green or renewable energy resources. There are pundits who argue that nuclear power is renewable, ignoring its hazardous life cycle -- from cradle to its dubious grave. Someone may even argue that hydroelectric energy, hydrogen, nuclear or thermonuclear energy are clean energy modes.
The necessity of a shift from dirty to renewable energy has triggered a rush for the minerals required for the process. The extractivist mindset that drives capitalism, and violence threw up a powerful word to numb the sensibilities and permit destructive mining of the minerals. That word is "critical". The key resources needed for renewable energy components are thus termed critical minerals. The connotation is that if you stop or slow down the extraction of these minerals you can be accused of being against the transition to renewable energy. This subtle label permits violence, displacement and environmental genocide in many nations and territories, but especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nothing is clean or "renewable" if it reproduces patterns of territorial exploitation and degradation epitomised by fossil fuels extraction.
The power in the use of words and the subversive twist of meanings requires epistemic challenges, including the creation of new words and phrases. New words are birthed so regularly that older people sometimes have difficulties understanding the language of youths. In Nigeria words creep into common vocabulary through music, movies and street yarns. Such new words include japa and kpai. To japa means to emigrate out of one's country, while kpai means to die, and to kpai something means to kill that thing.
The call for epistemic reclamation of the true meaning of certain words is an anti-colonial enterprise. We also see this in the concept of thingification as espoused by Aimé Césaire in his "Discourse on Colonialism," where he characterised thingification as a situation where a colonised subject is reduced to a thing, objectified along with the land and resources, and used as a commodity. Our reading here is that we can forfeit our very being when words are used to invisibilise us or our territories.
In our struggle to have community-centered just energy transition we believe that the primary focus must be to keep fossils in the ground. To do this requires bold actions and a robust challenge on our imaginaries. One approach is to learn from the David and Goliath battles that communities and territories have successfully waged against corporate giants and their allied political structures.
We propose a learning from the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta, Nigeria and the Waraoni people in the Yasuni territory of Ecuador. With due deference to their rugged resistance to the claws of fossil fuel extraction machines we call this resistance Ogonising and Yasunising. The clarion call is for the world to Ogonise and Yasunise.
As a working definition we see Ogonise and Yasunise to mean "a call for the protection of territories with natural or cultural diversity threatened by serious environmental impacts such as from oil and gas extraction, open cast mining, and other mega-projects.'
This article provided the talking points used by Nnimmo Bassey at the Wisdom Gathering hosted by Health of Mother Earth Foundation at the OND Conference Hall, Benin City, Nigeria on October 8, 2025.