Ecopsychology

In 2021, we reached Earth Overshoot Day on 29 July. We’re living beyond our means. Ecopsychology seeks to restore the emotional bond between humans and the earth to promote sustainability. It's based on the knowledge that, although our minds are shaped by the modern world, their underlying structures evolved in a much more natural environment.

“If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.”
—Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder

Human-nature connection is studied more broadly outside the field of ecopsychology. It's most commonly associated with social sciences such as psychology and geography. However, many other disciplines contribute, including philosophy, ecology, economics, history, and medicine, plus multidisciplinary fields such as sustainability.

Biophilia

I mention biophilia in Rhapsody for a Rock Wren. Biologist E. O. Wilson popularised the term in the early ‘80s. He theorised that all humans have an innate, genetically determined “urge to affiliate with other forms of life”. Demonstrations of this could include a child’s natural interest in animals, and the higher demand for houses in leafy suburbs.

It's not just one man's supposition though. Hundreds of studies on human-nature connection have been carried out. In 2019, a review concluded that humans “have a basic psychological need to feel a secure and pleasant experiential connection to nature”.

Psychological benefits of nature and wilderness

When I’m feeling run down, I might say I need a dose of Vitamin N – some time in nature. Why is it so restorative? A number of theories have been suggested and explored (see Nature and Health for a good overview). The one that resonates most with me is Attention Restoration Theory (ART), proposed by Stephen Kaplan in 1995.

ART is concerned with directed attention – effortful, sustained voluntary attention that relies on your mind’s inhibitory processes to block out distractions. It can’t be maintained indefinitely. It fatigues, causing a desire to get away, and sometimes irritability and/or impulsivity. Our modern lifestyles commonly demand our directed attention for long periods. We can recharge through sleep, but that might not always be sufficient. Waking restoration, according to ART, requires an environment with the following:

1. Fascination – an effortless attention requiring no voluntary or sustained effort or inhibition processes. Fascination holds on to you, whereas directed attention requires you to hold on to it.

2. Being away from your usual environment and its associated demands.

3. Extent – enough scope available to engage the mind, ie, a ‘whole other world’.

4. Compatibility with purpose – no unwanted obstacles that could force a switch to problem-solving mode.

Unsurprisingly, natural environments tend to meet all of these criteria.

Kaplan, alongside Janet Frey Talbot, also studied participants of long wilderness trips. Around day seven of each trip, they reported, “the harmony among one's perceptions, plans, and what is necessary for one to do is so great that there is now room for internally generated perception and thought – room, in other words, for contemplation”. Comfort, awe and self insight were also commonly reported.

The extinction of experience

“As the care of nature increasingly becomes an intellectual concept severed from the joyful experience of the outdoors, you have to wonder: Where will future environmentalists come from?”
—Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods

You may have heard of nature deficit disorder, a term coined by Richard Louv. It’s the idea that social and technological changes in the past few decades have increased the gap between ourselves (particularly children) and the natural world faster than any earlier developments – and that this negatively affects our personal health and that of the natural world. Louv wasn’t the first to write about this concept, though he succeeded in drawing the media’s spotlight.

I prefer to use Robert Pyle's term: the extinction of experience. Because if human-nature connection were a species, it'd be on the endangered list.

Researchers use scales (eg, Nature-Relatedness Scale, Connectedness to Nature Scale) to measure human-nature connectedness in groups of people. Unsurprisingly, there’s a clear correlation between how connected we are to nature and how likely we are to act in an environmentally responsible manner.

Shifting baseline syndrome

With each generation, the idea of a ‘normal’ environment slips further away from the ones that came before it. Scientist Daniel Pauly labeled this shifting baseline syndrome. It refers to the way we often measure changes in species populations against relatively recent data from within our own lifetime. This can lead to ever-shrinking restoration goals.

With regards to human-nature connections, I think of shifting baselines hastening the extinction of experience through processes like this:

1. Your parents live by an old wood. They go hunting there and forage for mushrooms, reading the subtle signs of nature to find what they need. They’re heartbroken to see the wood felled – most is developed and some is turned into a park, with pretty garden plants and manicured tracks.

2. You never saw the woods, you’ve never hunted, but you like taking relaxing walks in the park and are angry when most of it is cleared for housing. You campaign for more parks in your town, but not for the restoration of woodland, because you don't perceive that as a ‘normal’ state. It’s long gone and you can’t relate to something you’re not familiar with.

3. Your kids grow up and have to travel 20 km to get to a park, so they don’t usually consider it. They stay in and watch Netflix, or maybe go to the gym. For them, nature is something elsewhere, and they assume that's normal. It doesn’t occur to them to actively seek protection for something they have no direct relationship with.

Our separation from nature has created a crisis of perception. It's one of the many complex, interrelated forces fuelling our environmental crises. Ecopsychology isn't a silver bullet, but it can definitely help.

Further reading:

Extinction of experience: the loss of human–nature interactions, Masashi Soga and Kevin Gaston.