If the climate emergency has messages to communicate, including implicit messages transmitted through desication of leaves and putrefaction of roots, then the language sciences have much to contribute to environmental research. In particular, the ‘reading’ (in a broad sense) of such messages by humans, and the messages’ subsequent mediation to a network of stakeholders, is ordered by hierarchies of discursive authority linked to language ideologies (Gal & Woolard 2001). Such is the argument of this paper, which examines the discourses of olive cultivators, humanitarians, campaigners and scientists, and politicians, in the cases of Battir and Al-Walaja in a borderzone valley south of Jerusalem, where rainfall patterns and average temperatures are changing. Based on six months (2019/20) of participant observation with six families that grow and process olives, and eleven interviews with institutional actors connected to them, the paper presents discourse as the negotiation of relationships. Specific speech patterns and terms relevant to climate change demonstrate different attitudes to types of discourse: inherited, practical, moral, scientific, and political and gendered discourses. The analysis shows that each actor/speaker attributes superior functions to their own repertoires. In particular, women, who make oil and other products for household consumption, find the discourse that communicates their environmental knowledge low in the hierarchy of social valuation. Overlaps exist between different actors: humanitarians and olive growers are interested in commercial viability, campaigners and politicians are atuned to media coverage, whereas scientists and cultivators value empirical information. The paper is interdisciplinary in essence, drawing on anthropology, politics and political economy. Its theoretical contribution is to bring sociolinguistics, and its methods for analysing the creation of meaning in interactions, into the debate on the political future of the environment. Rather than viewing cultivators as ‘traditional’ sources of discourse data, this method privileges the connection between nature and culture beyond the frame of modernity that is actively damaging the environment (Descola 2013). Communities of cultivators and food producers, who bring olive oil to the tables, are underrecognised experts on this connection. Identifying language ideologies is a step towards such recognition for supporting resilience in communities that are directly exposed to the effects of climate change in a conflict zone.