This Is No Way to Be Human - msnNOW

Does this faint blob feel like part of nature, part of the same world of Keats and Goethe and Emerson, where “vines that round the thatch-eves run; to bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees”?

That information was then processed in data centers in New Mexico and Maryland and eventually landed on Professor Oesch’s computer screen in Geneva.

With all of its success, our technology has greatly diminished our direct experience with nature.

Read: Nature has lost its meaning.

Habitat selection, foraging for food, reading the signs of upcoming storms all would have favored a deep affinity with nature.

Further psychological and physiological studies have shown that more time spent in nature increases happiness and well-being; less time increases stress and anxiety.

In effect, we live in two worlds: a world in close contact with nature, buried deep in our ancestral brains, and a natureless world of the digital screen and constructed environment, fashioned from our technology and intellectual achievements.

In 2004, the social psychologists Stephan Mayer and Cindy McPherson Frantz, at Oberlin College, developed something called the “connectedness to nature scale” (CNS), a set of statements that could be used to determine a person’s degree of affinity for nature.

The psychologists found a significant association between nature connectedness and life satisfaction and happiness.

Capaldi and his team concluded that “Individuals higher in nature connectedness tend to be more conscientious, extraverted, agreeable, and open … nature connectedness has also been correlated with emotional and psychological well-being.”.

One does not have to look far to find literary expressions of the “well-being” brought about by immersion in nature.

In his famous 1844 essay “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes: “There are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring … We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom.”.

Read: How nature resets our minds and bodies.

My most intense experience with nature occurred a number of years ago on a small island in Maine.

But it was a profound connection to nature.

In a remarkable study several years ago, Selin Kesebir of the London Business School and the psychologist Pelin Kesebir of the University of Wisconsin at Madison found that references to nature in novels, song lyrics, and film story lines began decreasing in the 1950s, while references to the human-made environment did not.

First, the researchers carefully selected a list of 186 words that reflect nature and the human connection to nature, excluding scientific terminology.

Examples of nature words in the general category were animal, snow, soil, autumn, river, sky, star, and season.

Then the researchers used online databases, such as Google Ngram, Songlyrics.com, and IMDb to track the frequency with which nature words, and the comparison “natureless” words, appeared in various cultural products since 1900.

Although that trend is real, the growth rate of urban populations did not suddenly accelerate in the 1950s, in contrast to the deceleration of usage of nature words at that time?

The researchers conclude that the decline of cultural references to nature, and thus the dwindling of nature in the popular imagination, must be associated with technological changes beginning around 1950, especially indoor and virtual activities such as television (1950s), video games (1970s), computers connected to the internet (1980s), and smartphones (1990s–2000s).

In other words, the created world of the screen.

Then there’s the psychological damage to our young people, resulting from disconnection from nature combined with excessive screen time.

In his influential book Last Child in the Woods, the journalist Richard Louv coined the word nature-deficit disorder to describe the increased mental illnesses and depression of children deprived of immersion in nature.

Then there is the artificial world of the screen itself.

Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, and her colleagues, in a survey of more than 44,000 caregivers of children and adolescents in the United States, found that increases in screen time that exceeded one hour a day were accompanied by less and less psychological well-being, including less curiosity, lower self-control, more distractibility, more difficulty making friends, less emotional stability, and less ability to finish tasks.

But I think we have lost something else in our removal from nature, something more subtle and harder to measure: a groundedness, a feeling of connection to things larger than ourselves, a calm against the frenzied pace of our wired world, a source of creativity, and the wholeness I felt in my eye-to-eye communion with the ospreys.

And by that I mean a feeling of being part of things larger than ourselves, a connection to something ancient and true in this fleeting world, an appreciation of beauty, and an awe of this strange and wonderful cosmos we find ourselves in.

Read: Nature isn’t really healing.

I am not so naive as to think that the careening technologization of the modern world will stop or even slow down.

And now I worry about the promise of an all-encompassing virtual world called the “metaverse,” and the Silicon Valley arms race to build it.  Again, it is not the technology itself that should concern us.