How losing nature from our language shapes our world

By Reynard Loki and Danica Tomber

How often do we talk about oceans, trees, or birds in everyday life? How about glaciers, shrubs, or bugs? Nature-related words like these are easily recognizable now, but researchers have found that they are disappearing from our vocabulary. As natural history writer Patrick Barkham writes in the Guardian, “People’s connection to nature has declined by more than 60 percent since 1800, almost exactly mirroring the disappearance of nature words such as river, moss and blossom from books.” Change is an inevitable process in all languages, so why does this matter?

These words are a sign of our relationship with the natural environment, not only of what we notice as individuals but also of what we value as a culture. A weakening connection to nature reduces our ability to notice, engage with, and respond to urgent environmental issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss.

All living things have a natural, finite evolution: animals eventually go extinct, plants eventually go extinct, and words eventually go extinct. According to Ethnologue, more than 3,000 languages are currently endangered worldwide, many at risk of disappearing within a generation. Just as we are stewards of our natural world, we can also be stewards of language. Keeping the language of our natural environments alive, through naming and description, keeps the working pieces of those environments alive.

To understand our current disconnect from the environment, we explore its linguistic trends, cultural impacts, and ways to reconnect language with nature.

The Evidence: Nature Slipping From Language

Research at the intersection of culture, psychology, and corpus linguistics indicates that nature-related words have been disappearing from English language use. From fiction and nonfiction literature to movies and music, changing patterns in word choice suggest that we are moving away from a society that values a sustainable relationship with nature.

A 2025 study published in Earth found that the use of nature-related words declined by more than 60 percent between 1800 and 2019. The study’s author, Miles Richardson, an ergonomist and psychology professor at the University of Derby in the United Kingdom, analyzed 28 everyday nature terms—such as “bud,” “meadow,” and “beak”—using the Google Books Ngram Viewer to track their frequency in English-language books over time. What’s more, the decline in the Google database showed a striking resemblance to trends in another database, the Hansard corpus, as well as the study’s simulation model.

This long-standing linguistic disconnect from nature is corroborated by a 2022 study that drew on the Corpus of Historical American English, covering the years 1820 to 2019. Analysis of the most frequent adjectives that co-occurred with the nouns “tree/s” and “forest/s” showed that usage has shifted from positive to negative themes. We’ve moved away from words that represent beauty and well-being toward ones that reflect declining health and governmental control.

Our increasing interaction with the virtual world is one reason for a disconnect from nature, according to a 2017 study in Perspectives in Psychological Science, which found that nature-oriented language in songs, movies, and fiction books has trended downward since the 1950s, while linguistic “references to the human-made environment have not.”

More concerning is the possibility that this trend will continue. Richardson’s 2025 simulation model anticipates that our disconnect from nature could continue through 2050, even if robust interventions such as “dramatic urban greening and enhanced nature engagement” are pursued. Recovery beyond this point is possible but not without sustained efforts in policy, education, and urban planning.

While these studies skew toward written and scripted sources of language, leaving a research gap for conversational spoken language, they nonetheless paint a picture of a culture that is not primarily oriented toward nature.

On the surface, these trends indicate that an industrialized, urbanized, and technologized society is straying from connection with the natural world, reprioritizing its attention from nature-made to human-made. This shift parallels broader demographic changes. As Our World in Data reports, more than half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas—more than 4 billion people—and “the number of people in urban areas overtook the number in rural settings” in 2007. However, as with all complex social changes, nuance is key.

Historical Context: Industrialization and Urbanization

The story of the disappearance of nature words is closely tied to the rise of industrialization and urbanization in the 19th century. As factories sprouted and cities expanded, more people moved away from forests, fields, and rivers, reducing direct contact with the natural world. This shift was mirrored in language: words that once described landscapes, flora, and fauna became increasingly rare in literature, newspapers, and likely everyday conversation.

Literary trends offer key insights. Earlier works, particularly in the 18th and early 19th centuries, frequently centered on landscapes, seasons, and rural life—as seen in the work of Romantic poets like William Wordsworth—while later industrial-era writing increasingly foregrounded cities, machinery, and human-made environments, from Charles Dickens’s urban novels to modern dystopian fiction.

In his Earth study of nontechnical nature terms over the last two centuries, Richardson observed that the decline became particularly pronounced after 1850, coinciding with rapid industrialization and urban growth. Kate Yoder of Grist notes, “When people move closer to cities, where concrete has covered over forests and meadows, it becomes harder to access green spaces.” Together, these findings highlight how the physical and social transformation of the environment influenced the words people use to describe it.

Societal changes inevitably drive shifts in language use. Djodjok Soepardjo, a linguist at Surabaya State University specializing in sociolinguistics and language change, emphasizes that as societies evolve, external factors such as community structure, urbanization, and modes of communication shape how people speak and write. Language adapts to new priorities: when daily experience moves from rural landscapes to industrial cities, terms related to nature gradually recede from common usage. Neglect of words over time leads to their disappearance, reflecting broader societal transformations from natural to urban environments.

The pattern continues into modern cultural products. In their documentationof declining references to nature across fiction, song lyrics, and films from the 1950s onward, researchers Selin Kesebir and Pelin Kesebir suggest that increased virtual and indoor recreation—television, video games, and other media—has contributed to this cultural disconnection from nature, highlighting how language, media, and daily life intersect to shape environmental awareness.

Urban living continues to reinforce this disconnect. With more than half of the world’s population now residing in cities, the opportunity to observe rivers, meadows, or wildlife firsthand has diminished. For many, “nature” has become an abstract concept rather than a lived experience, and language has adapted accordingly. Understanding this historical and cultural context helps explain why reclaiming nature words today is not just linguistic nostalgia—it is a vital step toward reconnecting with the world we live in.

Language, Culture, and Environmental Awareness

Language is a cultural artifact. We use it to think, talk, and write about our perceived world, which is why language analysis, such as that included in Richardson’s 2025 Earth study, mirrors cultural awareness. Richardson looked to language as a way to measure our attunement with nature, finding that nature-related vocabulary in English-language literature has substantially decreased over the last 200 years. What we name, we notice—and this study reflects a culture that has been steadily losing awareness of its natural environment.

When nature-related words fade from our vocabulary, it’s not just the language’s lexicon that is affected. There are psychological and cultural consequences. In the 2025 interview with the Guardian, Richardson explained, “Nature connectedness is now accepted as a key root cause of the environmental crisis. It’s vitally important for our own mental health as well. It unites people and nature’s well-being.” Connection with nature has been shown to reduce depression and anxiety and increase focus and creativity, notes Forest Homes, a company at the intersection of eco-sustainability and biophilic design. As Selin Kesebir observes, “Empirical evidence is in strong agreement with two major points: contact with nature is greatly beneficial to human well-being, and it is associated with environmentally protective attitudes and behaviors.”

Despite its psychological benefits, a connection to nature is difficult to rebuild when dissociation becomes so widespread that we fail to notice the flora in our surrounding environment—a phenomenon that researchers refer to as “plant blindness.” Failure to notice means that we lose the ability to recognize and name plant life, understand and appreciate its health benefits, and engage in conservation efforts.

These losses begin at an early age and have far-reaching consequences. A 2025 study published in the Journal of Cognition and Development tested children’s ability to conceptualize different animal categories. Young children tend toward “narrow, idealized prototypes” when creating semantic categories, making their categorization less accurate because it is less diverse. Far from mere semantics, the study warns that this kind of narrow thinking, if not course-corrected, can have significant consequences later in life—for instance, when it comes to comprehending scientific concepts such as climate change, ecology, and evolution. Parents and caregivers are in a powerful position to teach children about the natural world, to cultivate a strong, foundational understanding and appreciation for the environment that can be carried into adulthood and continually shared between generations. Educational opportunities can also come from classrooms, nature programs, and books.

Changes in children’s daily environments compound these challenges. As architect and sustainability advocate Teresa Coady remarks on the Observatory, “The free-roaming range of a child has been reduced dramatically in only a few generations. … As we reduce the areas of wild nature in our cities because of development pressure, we increase our fear of it and reduce our children’s time in the remaining wilderness areas.” Earlier generations of children regularly explored neighborhoods, fields, and woodlands with little supervision, while many children today spend far more time indoors—often interacting with screens rather than landscapes. As opportunities for unstructured outdoor exploration decline, so too do the everyday encounters that help young people notice, name, and understand the living world around them.

“In many cities, children cannot name even one local bird,” Coady laments. “We do not protect what we cannot name.” Or, as naturalist Thor Hanson, author of Close to Home: The Wonders of Nature Just Outside Your Door, puts it, “It’s hard to care about things we don’t know about.”

As a reflection of these environmental changes, the 2007 edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary, which is geared toward children aged 6 to 7, removed a multitude of entries representing the natural world—words including “fern,” “ferret,” and “fungus”—and replaced them with technology-related words such as “chatroom,” “database,” and “MP3 player.” But editors soon faced pushback. Eventually, a 2015 open letter by prominent authors and a 2017 petition with more than 200,000 signatures urged the editors to reinstate the nature entries that had been extracted.

Dictionaries play a unique role in documenting language. While they’re consulted as reference instructions on how words should be used, their ultimate goal is to describe how a language’s speakers typically use words. They’re mirrors of a language’s lexicon, not enforcers. Similarly, cultural products such as encyclopedias, film, and other media also reflect what we notice and value.

Case Studies and Modern Examples

Efforts to restore nature language are already taking shape in education, art, and everyday observation. One of the most widely recognized examples emerged from the controversy surrounding the Oxford Junior Dictionary’s removal of nature words.

British illustrator Jackie Morris saw the problem firsthand. Inspired by the dictionary debate, she collaborated with nature writer Robert Macfarlane to create The Lost Words: A Spell Book, a children’s book celebrating plants, birds, and animals that had disappeared from the dictionary’s pages. Illustrated by Morris and published in 2017, the book quickly became a bestseller and a cultural phenomenon.

The project aimed to rekindle children’s familiarity with the natural world; however, Morris soon realized that the challenge extended beyond young readers. When television crews visited schools and asked students to identify plants and animals from pictures, many struggled. Morris believes the problem runs deeper than children’s education. “What I said was, ‘Well, you should have taken them ’round your own office, really,’” she recalled. “‘Because the reason kids don’t know is because the parents don’t know.’”

For Morris, addressing this disconnect begins with “rewilding our imagination.” As a child, she remembers noticing birds for the first time—seeing the brightness in their eyes and feeling an almost physical longing to join them in flight. “Watching birds was just such a joy to me when I was young,” she told Grist. “And it shocks me that there are many people who just don’t see them.” Relearning the names and stories of the living world, Morris suggests, is one way to restore that sense of attention.

Cultural projects like The Lost Words demonstrate how art and storytelling can revive attention to the natural world. Books, films, and digital media that foreground the natural world play a crucial role in preserving and reintroducing rich ecological language into everyday life. But reconnecting language with nature can also happen through recreation and everyday observation.

Researcher Erik Aschenbrand explains that although society at large is losing its economic connection to nature, it is increasing this connection through recreational activity. As populations become more urbanized, interactions with the environment are shifting from agriculture-based economic activity to leisure-based engagement. He suggests that governmental and tourist organizations can cultivate this growing recreational interest to rebuild our relationship with nature.

Hanson emphasizes that meaningful encounters with nature often begin in familiar places: a backyard, neighborhood park, or city sidewalk. Paying attention to local plants and animals—learning their names, noticing their habits—can transform ordinary spaces into sites of discovery.

Citizen science projects have expanded these opportunities. Platforms such as iNaturalist and eBird allow people to photograph plants, birds, insects, and fungi and identify them with the help of global communities of observers and scientists. Participants gradually build a vocabulary for the living world around them, turning curiosity into both knowledge and data that researchers can use to track biodiversity.

Gardening offers another powerful entry point. Native plant and pollinator gardens—featuring species such as milkweed, coneflower, goldenrod, or bee balm—invite butterflies, bees, and birds into everyday spaces while introducing their names into daily conversation. Replacing a generic lawn with diverse native plants not only supports local ecosystems but also encourages people to learn the language of the landscapes they inhabit.

Even in dense cities, practices such as urban birdwatching or neighborhood tree mapping are helping residents rediscover the living systems around them. Each observation—naming a sparrow, identifying a maple, recognizing a monarch butterfly—strengthens the connection between language and environment. Through these small acts of attention, people begin to rebuild the vocabulary of nature, one encounter and one word at a time.

Reversing the Trend: Strategies for Individuals and Communities 

If language both reflects and shapes our relationship with the natural world, then revitalizing nature-oriented vocabulary requires intention. The good news is that small shifts—repeated widely and consistently—can influence cultural norms.

Education is a powerful starting point. Encouraging children to use descriptive language for flora, fauna, weather patterns, and landscapes builds ecological literacy alongside verbal skills. Instead of simply seeing a “bird,” students can learn “cardinal,” “warbler,” or “hawk.” Instead of “tree,” they can identify “sycamore,” “elm,” or “pine.” These distinctions cultivate curiosity and strengthen memory. What we can name, we are more likely to notice again. As botanist and Citizen Potawatomi Nation member Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass, “Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world.” Learning the names of plants, animals, climates, and landscapes can transform them from background scenery into meaningful presences in our daily lives. Language becomes a bridge between observation and care, helping people see their surroundings not as an abstract “environment,” but as a community of living things.

Technology, often blamed for distancing us from nature, can also be part of the solution. Field-guide apps, digital mapping tools, and online biodiversity databases make identification accessible to anyone with a smartphone. If humanity is indeed in the midst of an information revolution, conservation must engage with it. As conservation scholars Paul Jepson and Richard J. Ladle observe, “The rise of nature conservation as a cultural, scientific, and policy imperative was one of the defining features of the twentieth century… If humanity is embarking on an ‘information revolution,’ then it is vital for nature conservation to engage with new technologies in progressive and experimental ways.” Digital tools can help reintroduce precise, place-based language into daily life.

Communities can also foster linguistic reconnection through storytelling. Local newspapers, neighborhood newsletters, podcasts, and community science projects can spotlight seasonal changes, migration patterns, or restoration efforts. When residents describe the return of fireflies, the blooming of dogwoods, or the nesting of swallows, they normalize the use of attentive language. Over time, such descriptions shape shared expectations about what matters.

Individual actions may seem small: planting native species, learning five new bird names, teaching a child the difference between a moth and a butterfly. But cultural change is cumulative. Taken together, these small actions accumulate into broader cultural shifts, gradually reshaping how societies perceive and value the natural world. As Hanson emphasizes, shifts in norms begin with a personal belief that individual actions add up. Language follows the same principle. Each time a specific, nature-related word is spoken, written, or taught, it reinforces the presence of the living world in collective consciousness.

Reversing the trend does not require a return to a preindustrial past. It requires noticing where we are—and choosing to describe it fully.

Reclaiming the Language of Nature

Surprised about the recent upturn in nature words after such a consistent decline, Richardson, in his interview with the Guardian, contemplated, “Is it a genuine eco-awareness? Is it the British trend for nature writing? Is it ‘real’ or is it an artifact of the data? I don’t know.” Changes in language use are complex; they are influenced by a myriad of factors, from cultural and historical to economic and technological. Richardson’s questions highlight the difficulty of explaining the shift from the historical decline in the use of nature words to the recent increase. There simply isn’t enough data to pinpoint the exact causes.

What is clearer is that we are stewards of our natural environments. We are responsible for taking care of our surroundings and passing this knowledge along to the next generations—a value system that is enacted through storytelling, urban green space planning, citizen science programs, technology use, and evidence-based reporting to drive policy decisions.

More importantly, rebuilding this connection does not require sweeping systemic change at the outset. It can begin with simple acts: learning the names of local species, spending time observing nearby ecosystems, and incorporating the language of nature into everyday conversation. Environmental stewardship can be compared with and achieved through language stewardship. Just as we work to protect endangered species and ecosystems, we can also protect the words that help us recognize them.

Reynard Loki is a co-founder of the Observatory. He is also a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, where he serves as the editor of Earth | Food | Life.

Danica Tomber is an applied linguist with a master of arts in teaching English to speakers of other languages from Portland State University. She is an editor of the Observatory’s Guide to Linguistics and Guide to Language Arts & Writing. Her interests span science communication, discourse analysis, pragmatics, and literacy.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.