“Worth more than words” was a catalogue essay written for Calls from Blethenal Green (2013), a collaboration by artists Catherine Clover and Johanna Hällsten. A site-specific installation in St. John on Bethnal Green, Clover and Hällsten’s work engaged with questions of migration, translation, and cross-species communication in a diverse London community. My essay addressed their prompt about the role language has played in distancing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, contributing in turn to the greatest environmental challenges we face today.​