Some architectural styles seem to almost shout the news of the divorce between city and nature. A good example is the on-again, off-again North American romance with the Georgian style, popular in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and revived during several periods on our continent. Georgian houses possess clean lines separating the enclosing walls of the house from the surrounding grounds, avoiding even the presence of a porch to draw a connection between house and yard. Most modern suburban homes appear to contain similar carefully structured divisions between the outdoors and the indoors. From the double or triple garage doors fronting the street to the imposing foyer that serves as a kind of hermetic airlock between the inner and the outer worlds, such homes make no pretense to be any part of a natural landscape. Even the expansive plots of land surrounding such homes tend to be bordered with high privacy fences, cutting off views and turning back yards into not much more than giant outdoor great rooms with groomed grass carpets and high blue ceilings. It isn’t uncommon for the owners of such homes to spend most of their summer weekends in the sweaty business of ensuring that only those guests—plant or animal—that have been explicitly invited into the yard are able to remain, while all others are killed with chemicals or booted into the compost heap. If this is how we live our lives, then it isn’t very surprising that we have difficulty making connections between our own actions in cities and the devastation of our environment, both urban and rural.
Our daily economic dealings with the world seldom have much to do with place, further breaking down our relationship with geographic space. A walk down the aisles of any grocery store will make this point abundantly clear. Where I live, the produce aisle may have some local fruits and vegetables for a few weeks out of the year, but most of the time the fare comes from farms that are thousands of kilometers away from my home. We joke about the fact that most of our household goods are made in Asia, a state of affairs brought about by a combination of the low cost of fuel to ship products and the low cost of labor to produce them, but this too tends to erase issues of place from our consciousness. In an era when any product or service can be obtained easily from anywhere on the planet, what reason do we have to think about the origins of things?
In 1996, William Rees, a bio-ecologist at the University of British Columbia, published an epoch-making book with Mathis Wackernagel, one of his graduate students. The main idea of Our Ecological Footprint is that it is possible for us to calculate a reasonably accurate average value describing the size of the area of land— our footprint—that each of us is using to take care of all of our earthly needs, such as production of food and goods and disposal of waste.3
The numbers that Rees and Wackernagel generated were shocking. For one thing, there were enormous disparities between the ecological footprints of members of typical Western countries like the United States and Canada and the ecological footprints of developing countries such as Bangladesh and Vietnam. In addition, if one calculated the global average for the human ecological footprint, it was clear that in the long term there was not enough land to go around. As if any other evidence were needed, Rees and Wackernagel’s simple set of numbers suggested with stark immediacy that, as a species, our behavior was not sustainable. Either we would need to find a way to make our average footprint smaller or the population of human beings would have to decrease.
The idea of the ecological footprint has been enormously influential as a shorthand method for calculating the progress of a nation or a community on the path to sustainability, but what is most interesting about it in the context of our discussion of space is the great disparity between one’s ecological footprint and one’s geographical footprint. If we take the latter to mean the location of the mass of land that each of us requires in order to sustain our way of life, then for many modern humans, especially those of us who live in the superdeveloped West, the idea of a geographical footprint is almost nonsensical. As our goods, products, food, and services really come from everywhere, each of our individual footprints is globe sized. And if our lives are situated everywhere, then they are really situated nowhere.
Boosters of globalization have argued that the dissolution of the geographical footprint is a good thing. If different regions are able to specialize in those activities for which they are best equipped, then the overall quality of our lives will increase because redundancy is reduced. This argument can be used to justify a situation in which most manufacturing is situated in areas of the world like Asia, while other areas of the planet, like North America, have tried to specialize in knowledge industries. The difficulty, as Rees has said himself, is that without some form of regulation, the forces of globalization tend to reward those who are able to pay their workers the least and allow factories free rein over the environment, often with high profits but tragic human costs in both the short and the long term.
One of the main arguments of this book is that our tendency to understand how the world is put together by knitting a series of visual glimpses into an extensive palimpsest of space has influenced many of the features of modern life. Rapid transportation, modern architectural forms, methods of building up cities, and the architecture of cyberspaces all reflect the ability of our mind to cope with the spatial fractures that are produced by these things. Then why should we become so hot and bothered by it? If we are lucky enough to have the kind of mind that can make sense of a world filled with the heavy distortions of space and time that have been wrought by modern technology, then why fight it? Why not put it to good use? After all, such technology has its advantages.
This is a powerful argument, and, though it might be an apostatic view for an environmentalist, I think it has some traction. We can’t go back to being wild savages loping across the plains of the savannah. Instead, we need to find the way ahead. But in finding this way, we need to first make sure we understand where we have come from, why so many of us value our natural heritage, and what we stand to gain from its preservation. Leaving aside the apocalyptic visions of seas boiling dry from global warming or untold millions of human beings dying slowly from the cumulative effects of toxins in our water, soil, and air, there is a much simpler rationale for our wanting to find ways to heal the spatial rifts that lie between us and the rest of the natural world: contact with nature is good for our mind.
Like many who have made great contributions to our understanding of the natural world, Edmund Wilson spent his early life mucking about in the woods looking for critters.4 This informal childhood training positioned him well to make a lifelong habit of observing nature closely and eventually helped to propel him to a career as one of the most widely respected entomologists in the world. But what propelled Wilson onto the world’s stage was less his painstaking documentation of the life histories of ants and more his bold claim that the tenets of evolutionary biology could explain many key aspects of human behavior—our social lives, our treatment of members of our family, and especially many aspects of our sexual behavior. Wilson, along with some early proponents of the new discipline that he called sociobiology, bravely argued that many human behaviors, ranging from homicide to altruism to adultery, could be explained at least in part by our genetic complement. In short, sociobiologists (these days more commonly called evolutionary psychologists) seek explanations for the ways in which our behavior might increase the number of our own offspring or the number of children that our relatives produce.
One of Wilson’s more recent arguments, connected with his interest in the evolutionary origins of behavior but also springing from his concern about the accelerating rate of the planet’s loss of biodiversity, is that human beings have a deep genetic connection and attraction to the natural world. This biophilia, as he calls it, transcends the pragmatics of finding ways to preserve enough air, water, and food to sustain life. It is a psychological, moral, and perhaps even a spiritual matter. Wilson suggests that our attachment to nature— the things that we like to look at, the kinds of lan
dscapes that attract our eye, even the natural objects that we fear (snakes, for instance)— is etched into our genetic code. Early humans, he says, were served by this attachment to nature because it brought our forebears to select the kinds of habitats and objects that were conducive to survival.
It is not hard to think of evidence to support the biophilia hypothesis. More of us visit zoos each year than buy tickets to all sporting events combined. Perhaps this attraction to animals occurs because of an inherent understanding that natural areas of plenty will support a variety of animals. Those of us who are rich enough to live wherever we want command vistas at the tops of bluffs or hills, preferably with long horizons over water. These locations, containing plenty of Appleton’s prospect and refuge, would also have been the most advantageous sites for early humans to see great distances without being surprised by predators. Human beings everywhere have a strong attraction to water. This makes perfect adaptive sense, as water not only provides protection from predators but also attracts other animals and plants that could be available as food.5
Even long before Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, substantial numbers of scientific studies had shown that we prefer natural settings over all others and that we prefer even sparse and scrawny-looking natural environments to almost all urban settings. More detailed investigations of the most attractive properties of landscapes have been carried out by showing people pictures of nature and asking them to rank them in order of preference. In virtually all cultures and from a very young age, there are universal preferences for the presence of water, prospect, refuge, complexity, and what has sometimes been called mystery—a more ephemeral property suggesting that exploration would quickly reveal some hidden features in the landscape. Some studies have even shown that we prefer tree shapes that would have most strongly predicted the presence of a thriving ecosystem in the savannah of our early forebears. Though none of these findings prove we are genetically predisposed to like natural settings that are good for us, the universality of these preferences across age, race, and upbringing is compelling in suggesting that we are all drawn to similar elements in nature.6
Mounting evidence suggests that exposure to natural settings can affect our mental and physical well-being. Surgical patients in rooms with windows looking onto natural features recover faster than those without such views. Views of landscapes or even the presence of indoor vegetation improves productivity in office workers. Nature scenes on the ceiling in dentist’s offices lower stress levels and heighten pain tolerance. Psychological studies in which stress levels were measured directly suggest that we are mentally refreshed by a walk in the woods or even a few minutes of observing a John Constable landscape.7
In his popular book Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv argues persuasively that our separation from the natural world behind the walls of our homes and offices is exacting a heavy human toll, especially for our children. Louv has coined the term “nature deficit disorder” to characterize the symptoms that accrue in children isolated from wildness, and he argues that such isolation can produce disorders resembling attention deficit disorder. More important, Louv suggests that finding ways to reimmerse our children in natural settings can actually cure such pathologies, making our children healthier and smarter.8 If there is any merit to such arguments, then even if we don’t believe that we are on the brink of an environmental apocalypse, we have ample reason to be concerned about our lack of connection with nature. Even if one believed, as many in the previous generation seemed to, that technology would eventually find a way to make penance for our polluting sins, perhaps only by erecting giant bubbles filled with a chemical soup that could somehow sustain human life, this life would be a pale reflection of our present circumstances and perhaps not worth living.
How has this state of detachment come about? It is easy to point the finger of blame: at cheap energy (which has made it easy for us to distort space), at the romanticization of nature at the hands of poets (because their work, placing nature on a pedestal, has helped to polarize the differences between the urban and the natural), at the greed of those who can’t understand that wealth is not always measured in dollars, and at our slowly evolving tendency to objectify the rest of nature perhaps set into motion by early scientific thinkers such as Descartes and Galileo. But though all these must have played a role in bringing us to our present plight, our unfortunate path was made possible only by the existence of a mind that was predisposed to see the world as a series of disconnected visual images, detached from one another and from their leafy anchors on the planet.
Early in my scientific training, I had a mentor who reminded me that there were limits to human understanding. What he meant was that simply by virtue of the way our brain is put together, certain facts of existence might be forever beyond our grasp, just as we are unable to detect the ultraviolet signatures of flowers that are so easily seen by bees. In the same way, I think it is possible that because of the organization of our mind and brain we can never experience the true oneness with nature craved by luminaries like Wilson and Louv. When we blink or move our eyes from one fixated object to another, our visual system shuts down for a moment so as to conceal the lurching, interrupted nature of the perceptual act from us, making the world we see hide its seams. We can no more completely understand the scope and shape of the space we inhabit than we can force our eyes to see during a blink. Not being able to make those connections, we can perhaps only dream of them.
Does this fact of physiology doom us to continue our spiraling course to a paved, sterile planet filled with dirty air, toxic water, and endless cycles of extinction? Not if, having understood the kind of creature that we are, we take what measures we can to bring true nature back into our lives, starting with an appreciation for our spatial connection to the planet. We may not be able to share the mute awe of a soaring hawk calibrating time and space as it closes in for a kill, but we can use our intellect, our wit, and perhaps even our penchant for technology to turn some of our weaknesses to strengths.
HOW WE CAN RECONNECT WITH SPACE
How do we begin to ratchet our soaring minds back down to a planet in peril? How do we re-anchor ourselves to the earth’s surface in full knowledge that we have it within ourselves to take flight like Icarus on waxen wings and look down on our tired blue planet from the freedom afforded by the light air of high altitude? As with so many things, our best hopes for the future must be invested in the young.
We cannot turn our children into desert ants. No matter what tricks of technology or educational practices we bring to bear, there are finite limits on the accuracy with which we will be able to find our way through the world. However, we also know that children alive today, more than half of them born in intensified urban settings, have little knowledge of trees and birds, let alone the lengths and widths of wild places. Erik Jonsson, a retired engineer who has spent many years thinking and writing about human navigation, has pointed out that most formal psychological studies of navigating human beings have taken place in university laboratories using student volunteers. The typical profile of these volunteers is that of a man or woman in their late teens, from a fairly affluent and probably urban background.9 One recent report found that fewer than half of students majoring in biology at a large Canadian university had even been on a camping trip.10 Given this, Jonsson argues, we can only guess at the human potential for wayfinding. Methods of navigation used by traditional peoples, such as the Inuit eking out a living from the land or the intensively trained Puluwatese marine navigators, may differ markedly from those used by ants, bees, or homing pigeons, but there can be little argument that the ancient skills of these human wayfinders far exceed most of those used by modern urban human beings. Surely it is not a coincidence that such wayfinders also possess a remarkably strong bond with the natural world. As we’ve seen, geographical space, natural habitat, flora, and fauna are embedded deeply in the oral traditions, culture, and way of life of these remarkable groups.
Withou
t parachuting our children into tracts of Arctic tundra or dropping them into oceangoing rafts, how do we begin to cultivate the same kinds of understanding of space and the same attachments to nature as seen in indigenous peoples? As Richard Louv points out, an important first step in getting our kids into natural settings to explore space is to get them out the front door. Once children are out of doors, they need places to explore, and this is where modern city planning principles fail them badly. In suburban settings, the greenspace that exists is most likely to be unattractive, barren, and filled with the noise of traffic. When green space allotments have been mandated by law for sprawling suburban developments, they have often been managed with a sad disregard for the facts of human psychology. Narrow strips of grass that meander behind suburban back yards may satisfy certain bylaws, but they do nothing to nourish our minds. These parched tongues of grass and little concrete playgrounds containing a few swings, a plastic slide, and perhaps one or two ride-on characters modeled after TV cartoon characters most often sit empty and unused. In urban centers, parks are typically small, rectilinear, and flat. Though children may be found in such spaces on occasion, the parks must be exceptionally well designed if they are not to become refuse dumps and havens for the homeless. The sad truth is that urban planning has taken too little heed of the needs of children, because those needs are not well understood. We don’t know enough about how to win the battle to draw children away from television and computer screens and into the great outdoors. But what is certain is that such battles cannot be won simply by the artful design of spaces. In order to wean children from the strong enticements of the wired indoors, there must be a cooperative effort involving parents, city planners, and educators.