How Losing Nature From Our Language Reshapes Our World

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Photograph Source: Thomas Fuhrmann – CC BY-SA 4.0

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.

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