The language of our natural environment is being culled.

Nature is under attack on many levels.

To destroy a culture one needs to destroy its language. The language of our natural environment is being culled.

Shame on the  Oxford Junior Dictionary . In a new edition of the junior dictionary. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, 

fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow.

The words taking their places in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail.

The words taking their places in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail.

In many older cultures around the world there or was an incredibly rich & deep use of language that describes the nuances in natural landscape (nuancea subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression) from the many types of streams in a peat bog to the hundereds of words to descibe types of rain and myst and every thing between the two.

Why does it matter. It matters because language deficit leads to attention deficit. As we deplete our ability to denote and figure particular aspects of our places, so our competence for understanding and imagining possible relationships with non-human nature is correspondingly depleted. Shamanic tradiotns had the richest descriptions and lanugage around nature  read more here