It is easy to find photos of slime mold fruiting bodies on the internet. It is also easy to find copies of dramatic western landscape paintings by Albert Bierstadt (and others), from the mid to late 1800s. Those paintings, depicting broad vistas of nature in colour, were done before even monochrome photographs of western landscapes were widely available. Like many other artists, Bierstadt was intensely self-promotional, which widened the appeal of his dramatic landscapes during much of his lifetime. His style of paintings of natural settings did eventually fall out of fashion, long before anyone figured out how to photograph tiny slime mold fruiting bodies. Of course, artists still do other styles of landscape paintings that are much admired.

I don't think either of these two things - overly dramatized landscape paintings or slime mold photographs - should be considered as simple eye candy. They are each representations of elements of natural processes made possible by the technologies of their time. Obviously two vastly different scales are involved. If the slime molds were photographed in a mountain valley, there would be no way to tell that from the photo, and you certainly couldn't see any slime molds in any of Bierstadt's landscapes, or even in any modern landscape photography. Far from simple a diversion, viewing and appreciating images of nature is a social activity, involving the prior knowledge and experience of the viewers and their contemporaries.

With all that is going on in the world at present, it might seem odd to spend time contemplating the varied motivations of those creating images of natural elements, large and small. Hundreds of thousands of landscape photographers have presented impressive works online and elsewhere, and hundreds of millions of people have used their phone cameras to record myriad views of nature that have somehow captured their attention. While each individual will probably have specific personal reasons for taking a particular photograph, the sheer number of images involving some aspect of nature seems remarkable.

It wasn't that long ago that relatively few humans lived in urban settings largely insulated from nature. It wasn't at all long ago that very few humans possessed a camera. Human social evolution now seems to proceed at a breakneck pace, but it is also the case that for many thousands of years humans and their ancestors spent most of their time and energy totally immersed in a natural environment. All that time and experience has not only shaped the human species, but has probably left at least a residue of fascination (and affection) for what is now called nature.

An increasing proportion of our time each day is spent interacting with motor vehicles and computers - including smart phones - as we get from place to place and from thought to thought. It might seem odd that supposed time-saving devices end up taking up so much time, but of course the devices have additional, strongly-attractive functions. Someone might want to drive a motor vehicle up a road to take photos of slime molds with their phone camera, for example. Again, everything is more complicated than might be expected.

Slime molds - or myxomycetes - are fascinating organisms, appreciated and studied by people around the world. Some elementary schools have used them in science lessons. They are usually not easy to see in the wild, because they are mostly to be found blending in among damp, dimly-lit bits of organic litter. Some slime molds produce very colourful, strangely-shaped fruiting bodies filled with spores when they reproduce. These remarkable tiny spore capsules are particularly attractive to photographers who are skilled in extreme macro photography techniques, and many impressive examples can be found on the internet. In fact, the internet might be your only option to really "see" these enchanting shapes - unless you acquire your own specialised equipment.

In their active, foraging stage, slime molds expand and spread out on wet, decaying organic matter to feed on bacteria, algae, and fungi. The small scale, lack of visible movement, and their preference for dimly-lit locations adds to the challenge of finding them, but on the other hand, they are common anywhere conditions are favourable. They can be found on decaying matter in a back garden. Common, and yet rarely seen or even thought about - like many organisms in nature.

Well, that's neat...but what are we supposed to DO with these things, besides look at some pretty photos? Well, maybe the photos offer some hints. What is it about the shapes and colours of the slime mold fruiting bodies that is so appealing? These could be considered rather "alien" organisms, but the look of those tiny structures seems to strike some sort of chord in people - just as do other natural shapes and much larger natural landscapes. Beyond just their appearance, the life cycles of these organisms are more complex and curious than they might seem at first - initially microscopic, some can expand into elaborate, moving forms. Researchers have tested them in mazes, and some wonder if they might somehow be intelligent, even though they have no brains. "Intelligence" is a notoriously ambiguous concept, so any serious consideration of that question would need much more careful definition than it is likely to get, but the presence of rarely-noticed slime molds seems like another invitation to enjoy the amazing intricacies of nature.

There is another way to think about ambiguity in the ways we commonly use language. In many cases where people talk about interactions with nature and natural processes, ambiguous terms like "natural resources", "sustainability", and "management" all seem to lead in one broad direction: some attempt to control. Usually this "control" seems directed at the goal of some form of future profit. The interactions of our ideas about things like control, nature, and profit lead to feedback loops that amplify ambiguities.

It is one thing to try to control your home's surrounding landscaping, but the same impulses make no sense when directed at trying to "control" an entire planet teeming with complex ecosystems - or even one ecosystem, really. Not only are those natural processes barely dimly understood, but there are billions of humans with conflicting definitions of "control" striving to control conflicting definitions of things. Cultivating profound ignorance of planetary ecological complexities may have seemed expedient and efficient heretofore, but only on the fleeting time spans that humans experience. Curiously, as we have more recently slowly begun to understand the vast temporal extent of nature's evolutionary changes, we have not really begun to appreciate the transience of humanity's existence on geological time scales.

In often-quoted lines in Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll had an exchange between Alice and Humpty Dumpty regarding language (mis)use:

"The question is" said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."

Language as "control". The human desire to "control" the environment, or some portion of some popular conception of it, is only one aspect of the rational/irrational manifestation of human psychology. For some people, small topiary displays can feel satisfying, and for some it can seem satisfying to follow the leaders who proclaim that "development" can "grow" forever. Widespread pursuit of the illusion of "control" runs deep and broad in human cultures, and does not seem to have attracted enough serious examination. The role of the use of ambiguous language in local and global efforts to "control" other people and the environment may never get the scrutiny it deserves. If humans could somehow learn that the idea of "controlling" nature is delusional, the future could be significantly better for all. 

I've been musing about some of the problems I think our misuse of language is causing, particularly as that facilitates the degradation of natural spaces and processes. Some other people seem to think that the ambiguity inherent in our language is actually beneficial, as in poetry, and theatre. Some even think that the use of jargon in specialised fields of research is good and necessary to counteract that ambiguity. Looking around very broadly at the current state of the world, I think it is hard to justify positive claims about ambiguity. Linguistic ambiguity seem to create an environment that facilitates the proliferation of plain old lies.

Now we have the Large Language Model (LLM) so-called "AIs" trained to match word patterns based on all the "ambiguity" - the misinformation, disinformation, and blatant lies - embedded in their training text. Unsuspecting, uninformed people are being told that these "AI" programs are now "intelligent" (the bit that comes after the Artificial...and "Oh, hey, you can't stop progress", you Luddite.) Without the pervasive ambiguity, it would be much harder to pull off that sort of bait-and-switch (the many contentious definitions of "intelligence" have long been debated). Fans of the "AI" technology insist that it should be accepted because it can accomplish useful tasks "efficiently". That depends on how you define "useful" and "efficient" - and who benefits. Many technologies provide a few benefits that are outnumbered and/or overshadowed by negative uses. And maybe it is best not to look too closely at the environmental costs of all the massive amounts of energy, water, and material required to train the "AI" software. The same sorts of ambiguity that confuse us with the concepts of "economy" and "nature" also confuse us when we think about "intelligence".

Context, including what we know about a speaker or author, their sponsors, and the time and place of their pronouncements, plays a big part in how we interpret and understand the words of other people. That context, combined with its relation to our prior experience and understanding of reality, is one small part of human intelligence. If we know someone tends to lie, or has a bias or agenda, we may parse their words accordingly. These sorts of trust-measuring assessments are often continually updated over time. Misplaced trust in poor or malignant sources of information causes many people to be deceived, and that might be best described as an issue of impoverished context. Context generated by actual human interactions is completely lacking in the training of LLM "AI" programs, which focuses on existing text. There is far more to people than the words they produce.

Whether all this is seen to make any "economic" sense seems to depend on how the many inherent ambiguities are perceived - or not perceived. Various "natural resources" (forests, fisheries, water sources, etc.) have been severely depleted by the use of evolving technologies that promised ever greater "economic" advantages. Can people who have been trained to think with impoverished context make an accurate "cost/benefit" assessment?  We now live in a world of "economics" where environmentally-expensive on-line "AI" bots can try to influence other on-line "AI" bots to buy more stuff, so maybe not.