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Desert Diary
Biology/Metaphor

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One of the quirks of the human mind is to apply human attributes to other organisms and inanimate objects. At some deep level, we're convinced that the pin that jabs us, or the rock that turns underfoot, act with malicious intent. On another level, we talk about sly Coyotes, majestic eagles, and vicious snakes.

Unfortunately, language used as metaphors often comes back to bite us—to subtly shape our picture of the world differently than if we'd used other words. Floods are ecological disturbances, landslides are catastrophic failures of the mountainside, fire "destroys" the ecology. Such terms tend to imply that these events are somehow "outside of" ecology. Yet floods are as much a part of the ecology as the time between floods, landslides naturally shape our mountain plant diversity, and fires have attacked—ah, there's another loaded word—our montane forests for millennia.

Does "alien invader" for salt cedar form a different picture in your mind than, say, "introduced tree"? Just possibly, we'd be better off backing away from some of our rhetoric and approach nature more rationally.
pen and ink


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Contributor: Arthur H. Harris, Laboratory for Environmental Biology, Centennial Museum, University of Texas at El Paso.

Desert Diary is a joint production of the Centennial Museum and KTEP National Public Radio at the University of Texas at El Paso.

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References

Chew, M. K., and M. D. Laubichler. 2003. Natural enemies—metaphor or misconception? Science 301:52-53.

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