What Should We Be Worried About?

THE HUMAN/NATURE DIVIDE

SCOTT SAMPSON

Dinosaur paleontologist; research curator, Utah Museum of Natural History; author, Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life

We should all be worried about the gaping psychological chasm separating humanity from nature. Indeed, a strong argument can be made that bridging this divide deserves to be ranked among the most urgent 21st-century priorities. Yet so far the human/nature divide hasn’t even made it to our cultural to-do list.

For the past several decades, numerous scientists and environmentalists have been telling us we must change our ways and strike a balance with nature or face catastrophic consequences. I have often participated in this echo chamber, doling out dire statistics in hopes of engaging people in action. The unspoken assumption has been that cold, hard facts are all that’s needed for people (including businesspeople and elected officials) to “get it” and alter their unsustainable ways. To date, however, virtually all the key indicators—from greenhouse-gas emissions to habitat and species losses—are still heading in the wrong direction.

The problem is that humans aren’t rational creatures. At least not when it comes to shifting their behaviors. As marketing executives have long understood, humans are far more susceptible to emotional messages, especially when conveyed through imagery. Want to escalate sales of some new car model? Beautiful people driving through pristine natural settings are far more powerful motivators than statistics on horsepower and fuel efficiency.

But what emotion is missing? What emotion do we need to foster a sustainable shift in human behavior? In a word, love.

As the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once claimed in an uncharacteristic moment of sentimentality, “We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well—for we will not fight to save what we do not love.” The good news is that thanks to a lengthy evolutionary tenure living in intimate contact with the nonhuman world, the capacity for forming an emotional attachment with nature probably lies dormant within all of us, waiting to be reawakened (think E. O. Wilson’s “biophilia”).

The bad news is that as a species, we’ve never been more disconnected from the natural world. Thanks to a variety of factors—among them fear of strangers and an obsession with screens—children’s firsthand encounters with nature in the developed world have dropped precipitously, to less than 10 percent of what they were just one generation ago. The average American youth now spends seven to ten hours per day staring at screens, compared to a mere handful of minutes in any “natural” setting. The result of this indoor migration is a runaway health crisis, both for children (obesity, ADHD, stress, etc.) and the places where they live.

Science has been one of the primary forces driving a wedge between humans and nature, prompting us to see nature as objects rather than subjects, resources to be exploited rather than relatives to be respected. Yet science, particularly over the past few decades, has also empirically demonstrated our complete embeddedness within nature, from the trillions of bacterial cells that far outnumber human cells in our bodies to our role as newbie actors in the 14-billion-year evolutionary epic.

Do we need more science? Of course, and the general public must learn the necessary facts, dire and difficult though they may be. We’re also going to need all the technological help we can get in navigating a sustainable path into the future. Yet knowledge and technology without emotional connection simply won’t cut it. The next generation of humans must learn to see their relationship with the natural world in ways that will seem alien to our current anthropocentric, reductionist, and materialistic perspective.