Victor Frankl said that we can survive anything if we find a pathway to meaning. Nature happens to be one of our most important pathways to meaning. Nature contains deep patterns of order that are necessary for life to make sense. Being connected to nature also gives us a symbolic immortality and is important to our need for transcendence. But the constant barrage of bad news about the environment reminds us that the Nature Pathway is increasingly going to be blocked. This adds to our feelings of eco-anxiety. "Eco-anxiety is a chronic or persistent feeling of anxiety, worry or doom regarding degradation of our natural environment." - Holli-Anne Passmore Eco-anxiety is a healthy human response to what is happening around us. It is natural to feel anxiety whenever our relationships are in need of repair, and what relationship could be more fundamental than our relationship to nature? In fact, those who don't feel eco-anxiety should be the ones whose mental health is questioned. What would it be like if society mandated all CEOs and government leaders to take an eco-anxiety test in order to assess their fitness to lead? Once we acknowlege our grief, what can we do about it? Biophilia is one approach. Naomi Klein has said that we need to prioritize "opportunities to connect with the natural world in ways that are not all about peril." Focusing on our Biophilia instinct is a way of de-intensifying our sense of peril about nature. E.O. Wilson came up with the Biophilia Hypothesis, which suggests that humans have an innate need to affiliate with other living or "life-life" things. Research has shown that just looking at pictures or listening to sounds of nature can boost people's happiness. Feeling connected to nature has social benefits beyond our mental health. It tends to make us care more for the environment and for our fellow human beings, and there is a strong correlation between Biophilia and environmental action. - John Zelenski gave a TED talk which summarised research showing that people are "nice in nature": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tps-u5O0Ws - This article, "The green care code: How nature connectedness and simple activities help explain pro‐nature conservation behaviours" (2020), shows that nature connectedness is the largest contributor to people's pro-nature conservation behaviour: - https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pan3.10117 Some challenges to Biophilia that exist in our modern societies: - Culturally, we are losing touch with nature. The ratio of nature-related words in English fiction has declined over the past century, whereas individualistic words have increased. Researchers such as Selin Kesebir and Patricia Greenfield have been able to use the Google Books Ngram tool to track this. - https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_modern_life_became_disconnected_from_nature - https://archinect.com/news/article/79381636/ucla-s-patricia-greenfield-tracks-urban-psychology-with-words - The British nature writer Robert Macfarlane noted in his book Lost Words that since 2007 the Oxford Junior Dictionary had dropped 30 words describing nature, such as "acorn", "moss", "blackberry", "cauliflower" and "clover", and replaced them with words like "blog", "chatroom", "database", "broadband" and "cut and paste". Children are slowly losing the vocabulary to describe the natural world. - We evolved to be drawn towards novelty. Billions are spent on advertising to capture our attention, and natural life can't compete, because a crow today is pretty much the same as a crow last year, or a crow 10 years ago, or a crow 100 years ago. We have to make the effort to pay attention to a crow before we start noticing the novelty that can interest our brains. To resist the tide of the modern attentional economy, we need to practise the kind of quiet activism which Jenny Odell promotes in her book "How to Do Nothing". This means spending a lot of time in one place, without digital devices, and paying attention to what happens there. - The documentary Rivers and Tides is a beautiful exploration of the life and art of British artist Andy Goldsworthy, who uses time and nature as his materials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT3lveJmjY8 - Another documentary that shows the transformative power of patient observation in nature is the recent Netflix film My Octopus Teacher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s0LTDhqe5A Sadly, a recent survey in the UK revealed that 80% of respondents rarely or never watch wildlife, smell wild flowers or photograph nature. 62% of respondents rarely or never listen to bird song or notice butterflies. Biophilia is a dying art that needs to be resuscitated. We all need to be experimentalists of Biophilia. We need to find ways of noticing nature, and sharing these findings or techniques with others. In 2017, Miles Richardson and David Sheffield published a paper in Plos One that showed 5 major Pathways to Nature Connectedness: - **Senses** - The act of engaging with nature through the senses for pleasure e.g. listening to birdsong, smelling wild flowers, watching the sunset. - **Emotion** - An emotional bond with, and love for nature e.g. talking about, and reflecting on your feelings about nature. - **Beauty** - Engagement with the aesthetic qualities of nature, e.g. appreciating natural scenery or engaging with nature through the arts. - **Meaning** - Using nature or natural symbolism (e.g. language and metaphors) to represent an idea, thinking about the meaning of nature and signs of nature, e.g. the first swallow of summer. - **Compassion** - Extending the self to include nature, leading to a moral and ethical concern for nature e.g. making ethical product choices, being concerned with animal welfare. These pathways suggest ways of creating activities that promote Biophilia. For example, reading or writing nature poetry might tap into the pathways of emotion, beauty and meaning. While technology is often seen as antithetical to Biophilia, there are some ideas for using smartphone apps to help remind us to feel connected to nature: - https://www.derby.ac.uk/news/2019/study-shows-smartphone-app-could-be-a-green-prescription-for-mental-health/ - https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/18/3373/htm In our productivity-obsessed culture, it is important to remember that it is the quality of our relationship to nature, not the quantity, that plays the critical factor. “One of the key findings is that nature connectedness is about moments – not minutes," says Miles Richardson in a recent news article. "Reaping the mental health benefits of the outdoors is unrelated to how much time we spend in nature; it’s about being tuned in and having a close relationship with nature.” Richardson did some research on Forest Schools, and found that they did not have any meaningful impact on children's connectedness to nature. He thinks that perhaps it is counter-productive to focus on the learning aspect too early on, such as getting children to identify trees, etc. Nature connectedness is more about experiencing positive feelings in nature than knowing things about nature. Once the positive feelings have been established, the learning can come later. Here are some ideas for increasing our Biophilia: - A 30-day Biophilia challenge, perhaps one that always takes place in the same month of the year. What form would this challenge take? - Notice 3 things about nature every day and record how that makes us feel. - A buddy system to randomly prompt each other to notice something about nature and to record our observations in a nature happiness journal. - Recovering "lost words" following the example of Robert Macfarlane. What local words are we in danger of losing from lack of use? - Since we have so much rain in Singapore, one exercise could be to close our eyes the next time it rains and listen to the sounds the rain makes. Can we tell the difference between rain falling on nature, and rain falling on human-made structures? Can we sense how nature embraces the rain, and how human-made structures deflect the rain? - If you have no recourse to go out into nature, you can watch a good nature documentary. - Use the Google Books Ngram tool to track the usage of your own favourite nature words. Here's a search I did for us corvid-lovers. The good news? The frequency of the word "crow" hit a low in the 1980s, and has since recovered to its 1900 levels: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=crow&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccrow%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Ccrow%3B%2Cc0 - Take a short online course on Biophilia by Prof. Miles Richardson - https://findingnature.org.uk/