I've been practicing shifting my language away from human exceptionalist terminology and I've found that it really does help shift your mindset as well
for example, saying 'non-human animals' and 'non-human primates' instead of just animals or primates; referring to individuals of different species as 'people'; and assigning agency & decision-making to their actions rather than instinct or 'nature'; plus avoiding any language that implies humans to be apart from or outside of nature
even starting from a place that recognizes the sentience, internality, and interconnectedness of all life, it truly makes a difference to articulate the personhood of other beings out loud imo, and I've definitely noticed it affecting the way I view my local neighbours, spirits, and kin for the better
this is something I also practice and have for a long time and am a HUGE advocate of!! for those who aren't already familiar with this principle I also highly recommend trying to talk about the land/features of it as a relative and living being rather than something lifeless or inactive, or just the backdrop of your life. the colonization of land came long before the colonization of people, and part of decolonizing is seeing it as a living being who needs liberation, even as a piece of groundwork (lol) for the liberation of people. we don't talk about land very much when we talk about environmentalism, it's mostly for animals and individual species or their diversity that we fear. land isn't often talked about or brought into the discussion of making your language more ecological, but it should be, as more than just the medium from which life springs. instead of talking about land as a commodity, talk about it as a being. this will sound ridiculous when actually applied in the conversations we have about land as a culture, which is a testament to how far we've strayed from seeing it as the autonomous organism it is.
acknowledge that land ownership is morally wrong, and avoid referring to it as belonging to anyone. acknowledge that the land can want things and that it does things with agency rather than like things are only happening to it. speak of the land in a way that affirms its rights, the fact that it is deserving of empathy and care. a great way to start with that is to talk about land in an active voice. talk about harm being done to it like you would talk about harm being done to another living being.
don't say '[company] is dumping chemicals on [land]', but instead '[land] is being polluted by [company]'. talk about environmental damage like you would a person being abused, because that level of empathy should be your reference for how much empathy you should train yourself to extend to land as a whole.
rather than saying you live on [land], say you are living with it, or otherwise frame it as an active participant in your life. your existence somewhere is being supported by the land there, no matter how connected you personally think you are to it. you exist through, alongside, land.
acknowledge that land is an active participant in its own life and can have goals and make choices. instead of saying woods are 'overtaking' the land, say the land is creating, growing, pushing woodland. but also acknowledge land features as individuals with behaviors, like floods and bloom patterns and migration timings and services that individual species on the land provide for one another. maybe the ferns aren't covering the moss, maybe they're protecting it from the sun. maybe a bluff collapsing into the water isn't an anomaly but a collaborative decision between land and sea.
and to expand on that, take away the blame we ascribe to the land when we talk about it. natural disasters are only disasters to us, but they are decisions made by the land with its own wellbeing in mind. wildfires are not strictly a tragedy, but also a normal and ecologically necessary process that need to happen and be let run its course.
the land does not exist in servitude to our convenience. respect how it chooses to conduct itself like you would anyone who is much more experienced at a given thing than you are.
