Nature in place AND a place in nature, you can’t have just one without the other.
One, can still encourage a mainly self-centric take, here! We like this bit, let’s isolate it, put it in a pill and call it health.
But health is more complex than that. It’s a system, with multiple components, working together to create a feeling and physical affect of thriving potential.
If the last time you connected to nature was in a building with plants, you need to rethink your connection, your reciprocity.
How can you truly connect with something that you don't know?
How can you protect something that you don't understand?
I get it in a lot of ways. Nature is chaotic, we can't really control it, so it's scary, we don't like scary, only imitations of it.
But that's the thing, most things we can't control.
Most things in life exist alongside acknowledging the beauty we find and the fear simultaneously. (Like parenthood).
Humans, especially children, need to have a sense of place in nature, a feeling that they’re a part of the fabric of the biosphere.
You cannot get that in artificial, priority confused built environments, and although preferable, and at times breathing, you only access the surface in closed biophilicaly designed ones.
How will those environments feel real, if you’ve never stepped foot in a forest, admired a handpicked shell from a coast, understood the difference in soil in a grassland vs. a bog, or closely examined a patch of wildflowers in an untamed growth area across from an abandoned parking lot, or even followed a trail of ants marching on and on…
towards life.
You have to really be able to identify the difference between a place lacking in natural biophilic elements, that remind us of our shared experience on this planet, and a place rich in them.
This knowing, informs every future decision you make about the natural and built environment, including estimations you make about yourself.
Humans are instinctive discoverers, searchers, adventurers. We are drawn to life, movement, we are motivated by complex, layered diverse environments, as we are these things ourselves.
Biophilia does not only exist as it relates to manufactured design, it's an intrinsic part of being alive.
People will always have a strong sense of connection to places; this explains why we get homesick or miss places from our past where we experienced “good”.
Let real nature be one of those places
(We also recoil from places where we experience “bad”.)
This is not something we ever grow out of because this is a part of the essence of being. This is your interconnection with everything else around you. The other non-human organisms, and inert rocks beneath your feet.
- Want to help children, and people to develop a stronger sense of responsibility, ownership, and identity to their hometowns?
- Actively participate in larger civic issues by investing time, care and resources?
Start by going out and finding the “good” raw experience in your local place. If you’re having a hard time with this, let your children lead, the “weed” growing in the crack of the sidewalk, that your child stoops down to look at, the sticks and rocks overlooked by us “civilized” people, picked up and held in treasure by our young ones. The absolute excitement jumping in a pile of leaves brings the fuzzy seeds of a dandelion sticking to a child’s clothes after they blow.
This is where we find the seeds of prosocial behavior, civic duty, biophilic connection, let’s not create a world, or support policies that breed that out.
“Place-based relationships” refers to a linking of culture with ecology, but rather I'd like to amend, acknowledging the link that has always been.
Culture developed alongside and in response to place, varied places, other inhabitants and our feelings, reverence, diets, and safety assessments within and to them, the study of this is ecology.
The different variations in homosapiens features, ideals, responses, reverence is in direct relation to the biotic and abiotic elements of their place.
We are literally born from the different soils of the places we inhabited.
Now that we largely live in a monoculture of concrete, we have to try harder to find place, our place.
We have to intentionally seek that connection in order to understand and care for the wild places still left
and our wild hearts that still long for them.
Here the life design model is certainly our ally, but it shouldn’t be our only one, the way we think about our partner, has to change. We may be biologically inclined to affiliate with nature, but for this contact to be most useful and regenerative, it must be nurtured, by repeated and reinforcing experiences. The benefits of “life loving” design depend on engaging, persistent (not ephemeral) contact with nature, real, humble and brought in.
We must tie those isolates to something, lest we think it’s the whole
When we walk down the street and see it littered with trash, we acknowledge the fracture, but we are a part of it, so we ask whose responsibility it is to clean it up (while we silently answer, not mine).
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We turn on the tap, or throw junk into a local pond, again, disconnect from what this water means, from the life that it contains, our lives and histories.
We swallow more pills, eat dead food and stand in line at doctor after doctor, after having sat for an hour in traffic, working in an office devoid of natural light, descending the steps of our silos of safe silence, and we label the pain we feel fibromyalgia, depression…new words for a similar root cause illness.
A lack of life in, and love in life.
We must tie those isolates to something, lest we think it’s the whole.
A quote by Jan Gehl,
“First we shape our city and then our city shapes us”
No doubt, the built environment significantly shapes human development,(and animal, plant, soil, microsomal development…, the things we build need to be understood by what nature builds, it should deepen and expand that connection.
So on the oversights of the Anthropocene…
First the world brought life, that shaped the resources harnessed by men, from them we shaped the city, safely sterilized and tame, it brought the legacies of isolation, progress and… us? We thought, it brought us…so we looked to the world 🌎 untamed thing, and wondered how do we make it a city?
Always remember the life behind the design.
In the words of Edward O. Wilson
“To the degree that we come to understand other organisms, we will place a greater value on them and on ourselves.”
Pondering the ants, we’ve finally begun to ask, Where are we marching to?
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