CONTRIBUTION
Mónica Fernández-Aceytuno Sáenz de Santa María (Villa Cisneros, Western Sahara, 1961), an environmental communicator and nature writer in diverse media and formats, has devoted her long career to projecting the environment through the written and spoken word. A labor that has culminated in her Diccionario Aceytuno, a glossary of the natural world with its own segment on national radio, which she has been compiling and defining throughout her working life, and continues to enlarge with new terms. She receives the award in the category of Knowledge Dissemination and Communication in Biodiversity Conservation in Spanish for creating a personal universe of words that connect the reader to the most varied phenomena and processes of nature.
A biologist by training, it was after a stay in Alaska that Aceytuno, who was then working for a Catalan pharmaceutical firm, decided to change her professional direction: “I came out of that trip transformed and determined, after contemplating the sublime landscapes of Alaska, to leave my job, which was a good job, and devote myself to proclaiming the beauty of nature.”
Her first port of call, in 1991, was the Cadena SER radio program Hoy por hoy, then presented by Iñaki Gabilondo, where she produced a daily section, Parte natural, airing just after the 10 o’clock news. “We talk about the weather every single day. We say whether it’s going to rain or not, yet we never announce the arrival of the swifts or the fact that the tuna are passing through the strait of Gibraltar. So I came up with Parte natural, in the style of a weather report.” In it, she explains, she would announce which plants were in bloom or the arrival of the orcas or swallows, give the ozone layer index and fire risk data, and broadcast sounds of nature.
The success of her radio slot led to many invitations from newspapers and magazines to write on the environment. She began at the magazine Cambio 16, where she had a full-page article, and moved from there to Diario 16. “When I began writing, I realized the written word had a different weight than the ephemeral words broadcast on the radio, because it conjured up those first syllabic signs carved into clay,” Aceytuno reflects. In 1997, she took her byline to the newspaper ABC, where she would remain for nineteen years, until 2016. Her first appearance was in the News section with a piece that she recalls fondly, titled “Arrival of the Birds that Sleep in the Air,” but the paper very soon launched a dedicated Ecology section.
Her love of writing got her thinking about a dictionary devoted to nature: “I saw that nature terms in conventional dictionaries were being defined by a group of people in a room. While I felt that nature should be written about from within nature, in the same way that the Impressionists took their brushes and went out into the countryside to paint.” This was the seed that would grow into Diccionario Aceytuno, which she began in 2012, and which now has thousands of terms hosted on its website. Not only that, the glossary has its own “academy”, with members specializing in different species (the brown bear, cork oak or holm oak, among others) who are in charge of compiling the words for that particular entry.
“Diccionario Aceytuno was all about conserving the words used by fishermen or farmers when they told me their stories. I was totally in awe of the richness of their language. We have lost so many words like maresía, the smell of the sea, charabasquear, the sound we make when walking through leaves, or debullar, meaning to peel chestnuts.” Aceytuno is clear that this lexical heritage merits the same duty of care as our artistic heritage. Because, she warns, “when we turn our back on nature’s words, we are also turning our back on nature.”
All animals have a language, the awardee observes, but none of them write, which is a skill unique to humans. This ability to record knowledge in writing has helped us to evolve, but it has also, she believes, put a distance between us and nature. So now is the time to retrace our steps, to return and connect with her through the medium of the word. The writer talks about the power of words to make us aware of the environment around us in all its beauty. “We are losing sight of the wonders of nature here in Spain, the most biodiverse country in Europe, because we don’t know how to name them. There are very few people now that could name the tree growing below their flat, that bird that flies overhead every day, the insects they encounter, or what they feel on contemplating a particular landscape.”
In parallel, Aceytuno has written for specialist magazines like Salvaje, directed the Clips Natura mini documentaries on Spanish wildlife, and published outreach books such as El país de los pájaros que duermen en el aire, La tercera rama or, more recently, Mañana es tarde, where she advocates a model of sustainable development that preserves biodiversity. She currently contributes to the Cadena SER radio program Hoy por hoy Madrid, which features her Diccionario Aceytuno.
The award-winning writer regrets that, when deciding which studies to pursue, she was made to choose between science and literature. Instead, she advocates for a “third branch” that draws knowledge from them both: “I think that all the arts and sciences help towards a better understanding of the environment. Knowledge can also come from poetry and literature. I have spent time transiting this third branch, using words, poetry and writing to talk about science and relay knowledge.” Aceytuno celebrates the fact of sharing the award with journalist Carlos Fresneda: “Although I come from the sciences and he comes from the world of letters, we have received this award together, which locates our work in the third branch.” This interdisciplinarity, she believes, can be a powerful instrument of persuasion: “If we want people to know and defend nature, it has to move them. Poetry and art are what convey the emotion of nature’s beauty, which is what truly touches us.”
Picture: Roberto Seoane