Every day, every minute, countless words are now clicked onto the Internet, many intended to make some "sense" of whatever fragments of "reality" their authors have learned to define. I've been writing partly about the use of language in descriptions of natural processes - particularly the widespread effects of euphemism, anthropocentrism, metaphor, over-simplification and so on...

Some people seem to have a tendency to think extreme reform is always required: there should be NO tree cutting, NO euphemism, NO metaphor, NO this-or-that whatsoever. It might be worth thinking about why thought processes gravitate toward extremism, but it generally amounts to over-simplification that is fundamentally unrealistic and counterproductive. I think it is counterproductive because such a position actually diminishes the possibility of engagement with reality. It might be okay, for example, to declare that metaphor is just a kind of "linguistic colonialism", but if such a pejorative label discourages any further examination of the impact of metaphor on conceptualisation, that wouldn't be okay. It seems to me that we would be better off if we learned something from increased attention to language usage, and studied what that reveals about our own thinking and that of others.

For example, the use of euphemism might indicate that someone has something to hide - even from themselves - or that they have been deceived. Why are euphemisms so common and apparently so attractive? One common excuse is that they allow people to talk about "painful" or "impolite" subjects. But just declaring that euphemisms are "bad" would amount to a missed opportunity to learn more. Even the most innocuous euphemisms can reveal something about those who employ them, if only that they are uncomfortable with the essence of a topic. Many euphemisms are more manipulative, as when habitat destruction gets re-labeled as "resource development". (Or when the erroneously fabricated output of an LLM text generator gets called a "hallucination" by the AI companies, which also sneaks in the implication that these computer programs have "human-like" failings. If we called these "hallucinations" what they really are - computational bugs - that might help burst the bubble of the illusion of machine "intelligence" and diminish its promised profitability.)

I once heard a forestry worker tell a group (more than once) that he wanted to "ballpark" a slope after it had been turned into a large clearcut and before it was replanted. What he actually meant was that he wanted to bulldoze smooth what had been an irregular, undulating forest floor - and destroy many creatures and habitats that still remained. Maybe his mind had been colonised by the notion of tidiness associated with a ball field, and that's what he thought an ideal natural forest should look like...but with well-spaced trees of course. It's hard to imagine how little a person must know about natural processes to even consider using a euphemism like that.

In addition to gardening-based euphemisms, there is another euphemism that gets deployed when "things go wrong": Unintended Consequences. Sounds fair enough, right? Sort of the modern version of ...the best laid plans of mice and men... But what is really going on beyond the spin - what sort of a linguistic distortion is this? If someone drives a vehicle while "under the influence", we wouldn't then say a resulting car crash was an "unintended consequence". It was obviously predictable. The term is normally reserved for more complex activities with negative outcomes, where a lack of prior thought, planning, and oversight resulted in an unpleasant - or disastrous - outcome. Even in cases where there has been no conscious profit-seeking attempt to obscure potential problems, the phrase "unintended consequences" obscures the lack of comprehensive planning. Afterward they say, "Who could have known?" It seems to me that everyday social discourse is full of euphemisms; they're very efficient because they nudge people to do all the work of deceiving themselves.

In forest "management", is it "wildfire mitigation", or slash burning? Is it forest floor "fuels", or essential coarse woody debris? Is it "maximum modification", or a forest clearcut? Is it "forest development", or forest extraction. Is it a "visual quality objective", or a fringe of trees along both sides of a highway hiding large clearcuts? Is it an "old growth management area" or just some older stands that are uneconomical to cut? Is it the "Total Harvestable Land Base", or all the trees everywhere that might be profitable to cut? How often do we not actually know what we are talking about?

Of course, forest management is only one small domain where euphemisms are employed. For example, confusion gets a boost when discussions (and internal thought processes) invoke "nature's gifts" when referring to the extraction of "natural resources". "Gifts" are a purely human construct, and this mind-numbing sleight-of-mind escalates euphemism into another dimension. Humans have always exploited features of the environment, but it seems that it would be better all around if they were clear (and honest) about what that really involved.

It doesn't take much effort to question a euphemism. When the timber industry talks about "harvesting" a forest, the familiar-sounding term implies that they planted that forest - or at least that they can replant one in its place. It's being re-branded as just another crop. But forests take many centuries to establish themselves, and cannot be planted. Only plantations of trees can be planted, and they cannot function like forests, for many biological reasons. Euphemisms are effective both for thought control and self-deception. Who could have known?

This is not an attempt to review the 1979 movie "Being There", but that 45-year old film has bubbled up in my memory with regard to contemporary misunderstanding of society's relationship with nature - and with itself. My recollection is that, among other things, the mildly satirical movie featured short attention spans, conditioned thought patterns, consistent ignorance of reality, and a pseudo-metaphorical "gardening" theme that provided the narrative fulcrum. As satire, it necessarily portrayed all of these elements in a simplified, exaggerated way. Things have progressed in all the years since that movie was made, and maybe we are now actually living in a satire.

In the movie, gardening-themed platitudes were ingested by a vacuous, cartoonish North American political class. The satire made it clear that trite "gardening"-based aphorisms were inappropriate for dealing with the reality of complex social systems. In real life, it is not uncommon now to hear people confuse cultivated gardens (or perhaps farms) with nature or natural processes. Plants are natural, aren't they? Some plants grow "wild" (weeds and rainforests), and others are more orderly (hedges and crops). Forest "managers" refer to "harvests" of trees and compare them to crops for the purpose of scheduling extractions. Humans have "managed" forests for centuries and there are...still a lot of trees? How could you question that? Maybe when the technology advances to match the challenge - as it has done in global fisheries "management" - there will be many fewer trees.

Would it be better to just dismiss contemporary forest "management"? Maybe, but that's not what I'm suggesting. It seems to me that strategic euphemisms, misleading terminology, and "spin" perverts the thought processes of both those who deploy such language and those who receive it. In making it appear reasonable to conceptualise and treat natural processes the way someone might conceptualise and treat something highly manipulated like a garden or farm, much is lost or hidden. When the word "management" is used to facilitate the exploitation of natural systems, it is borrowing legitimacy from its acceptance in more artificial contexts.

To some of those who know better, it might seem like no big deal to twist language for material gain. However, there are very many people who don't know better, and disintegration tends to trickle both up and down. It is more than deceptive to compare forests to gardens or farms. To misquote the infamous line from "Animal Farm": everything is natural, but some things are more than more natural than others.

The photo above doesn't show very much - it is only a photo. Framing is important: does an image focus on a detail as an illustration, or is it a wider view offering more visual context? In addition, there are issues related to what each viewer knows and assumes before they view an image. Now, with the rise in artificially manipulated images, there are also serious concerns about whether an image is real or fake. A photographic practice that was apparently straightforward has been made much more complex, and it's not a pretty picture.

The photo above is a close-up of mushrooms growing on a rotting log, surrounded by fallen leaves. A few of the people walking by might notice the mushrooms during their short period of emergence, but possibly none of those people will know that the mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of invisible mycelial networks threaded through the wet, rotting wood and the soil below. Beyond the framing of the photo is the surrounding mixed-species forest, and also the myriad hidden burrowing and microscopic species that enable the rotting of fibre and eventual soil formation.

The photo above doesn't show the important moisture-conserving, soil-creating function of large amounts of rotting woody debris, or the natural "untidiness" of the process. The mushrooms do have a certain aesthetic charm, but their appearance depends on sufficient moisture levels, as do all the other flora and fauna in and beneath the litter in the understory. The mushrooms will disappear in a few weeks, but the underlying mycelial networks and their multitude of interconnections will persist, along with all the other invisible species - unless they are disrupted by counteracting forces.

One counteracting force is humanity, which recently learned how to make fires. Many forest fires are caused naturally by lightning, but many others are caused by people, both intentionally and accidentally, while moving into and through the forests. The presence of more and more people results in more (and sometimes more devastating) fires than would occur naturally. These can be the direct result of arson, or "recreational campfires" carelessly started in dry, windy conditions. Or they can be the more indirect result of human-caused climate change leading to increased forest mortality that leaves many more dead trees than there would be otherwise.

All human-caused fires disrupt the natural ecosystems of the forest floor where they occur. An added element of disruption occurs when people learn to regard forest floor litter solely as potentially threatening "fuel". When that re-definition gets applied, the forest floor can be subjected to "controlled fire mitigation burning", or even some degree of raking. Raking can make things appear more tidy, but they will no longer be natural.

The photo of mushrooms above offers a small hint of the invisible natural processes that exist "outside" the frame - complex processes that are essential for far more than the image itself. There is always much more to a photo than what appears "in" it. It can be an interesting challenge to try to puzzle out what lives behind and beyond the frame.