Wild Futures: The role of design in our return to nature.
Reflections on our connection to and pursuit of nature, and the role of design in the rewilding of the planet.
This article is the combination of ethnographic research that began in 2019, exploring the pull of nature that was leading to exponential growth in tourism, and thoughts on the ongoing climate emergency that — among many actions — requires the restoration of nature. Our collective pursuit of the natural environment, and the need to leave it alone for our very survival, creates a significant tension. Within this tension, the following article discusses the potential role for design in the rewilding of our planet.
The power of nature
In May 2019, I stood on the cliffs of the Causeway Coast in Northern Ireland with a 57-year-old American tourist retracing her lineage to Ireland. She would soon tell me that it was in this moment, as she closed her eyes and felt the grounding of the emerald green grass beneath her feet, then looked out to the North Atlantic sea, that she felt closest to her ancestral past.
From the more than one hundred people we spoke to during research for a sustainability strategy centred around the Giant’s Causeway, we witnessed the power of nature, not just in its ability to extrude basalt columns in almost perfect hexagonal geometry, but on people’s lived experience. For this American tourist, nature is the one thread that links the world that exists today and the world her ancestors knew when they left Ireland. For her, nature is a deep grounding and connection with self. But for Game of Thrones fans, drawn to the coast for its features in the series, nature is fantasy. Unspoilt and wild compared to our predictable and regular urban landscapes, nature provides the backdrop to mythical stories of dragons and giants. For many of the visitors from the South of France or the Italian coast, nature is solitude. Trading bustling beach towns for down jackets and almost guaranteed rain, the Causeway Coast offered them true escapism — even for the 35% of people visiting the Giant’s Causeway by coach — with gale-force winds at times sweeping away the sense that anybody else was around.
Although all of these people had different reasons for and experiences of travel, from the food they ate to the hotels they stayed in, their desires were mutual — a deeper connection with nature.
This desire is not only felt by tourists, but also the people that live near or within these landscapes. Again, their experience of nature is quite different from a tourist’s: for some, the landmarks fade into the background or, in some cases, are never visited. Yet, these two groups shared a mutual desire to connect with and protect the natural environment. Socio-cultural specialists working on the Causeway Coast sustainability study found that the vast majority of the community that live on or near the World Heritage Site were most concerned with the protection of nature.
Although this might feel painfully obvious, the surface desires and disputes of tourists and communities often distract from this core, shared connection. Well-meaning managers of natural sites often get distracted by trends or demographic assumptions about their visitors, and by the complaints from locals of tourists ruining communities. Instead of allowing growing visitor numbers to lead disconnected experiences and detrimental environmental consequences like in Maya Bay, the setting of the film The Beach, or Iceland’s Fjadrárgljúfur Canyon, which closed after a Justin Bieber music video was filmed there, can visitors and local communities alike both connect with nature and protect it?
Our need for nature
Much of the research that is referenced in this article took place prior to the full effects of Covid-19 took hold of the world. However, the pandemic has heightened and highlighted this acute need for experiences in nature, and the disparity in our access to it. As lockdown was enforced, and time outdoors limited, the ability to gain much-needed respite in nature became a position of privilege. One in eight households in Britain have no access to a garden, and Black people are four times more likely than white people to be within this category.
Providing meaningful access to nature is not just for those holidaying in remote parts of the world, but a priority in and near our cities. However, we are denied access to 92 per cent of England due to law of trespass, creating barriers in both equality and land, as poetically described in Nick Hayes’s The Book of Trespass. Beyond the well-documented health benefits that access to the outdoors and green space provides, we have seen through this research that nature provides both an antidote to the intensity of modern life and a portal to our deeper needs, such as identity, escapism or fantasy.
We have also discovered that the pandemic, like many of the other disasters that have hit communities the world over, is a result of the ever-deepening climate crisis. As written by former Arup Studio lead Dan Hill, “the origins of the virus and the climate crisis are the same: each supports the other, in a symbiotic dance that would almost be admirable were it not so life-threatening.” Although we may be well beyond a complete reversal of the effects of climate change, studies show we can lessen the blow to the most vulnerable communities and habitats in the world by re-establishing wild, unspoilt nature. Our collective need for nature spans from self-fulfilment to our very survival, so how do we manage and design for these needs when they are seemingly in conflict?
The role of design in a wild future
Both the experiences we seek, and the world we need, paradoxically require the absence of human presence. Whilst the most remote areas of the world offer the opportunity for the deepest connection with nature and self, these are also the places which need to be protected from us. So is there really a place for people in the rewilding of the planet?
Whilst rewilding must take place across our human and natural landscapes, the remote communities and natural sites that draw tourism are areas where the presence of humans is most conflicting. Once the pandemic is contained to the extent that holidays and travel return in some form, the wildest reaches of our planet will again be an enticing offer to people from all corners of the world.
Design has an important role to play here — from the transport that takes us to these landscapes to the places we stay in, there is an opportunity to radically reimagine the tourism industry and the systems it impacts. Some retreats are already exploring ways of doing this, challenging the relatively modest world of ‘sustainable tourism’ and aiming for regenerative visits to nature and communities. However, these moments in nature could play an even bigger role in conservation.
Instead of designing for tourists visiting landmarks for a moment, designers could be creating experiences that are catalysts for a deeper connection with nature for a lifetime. The following design strategies are a first attempt at achieving this:
Embed conservation within experience. Many organisations that manage natural sites in the UK have conservation at their core, from local councils to the National Trust. The main priority of these custodians of natural landscapes is to create an environment for nature to thrive. However, the experiences these organisations offer are not centred on this priority. Creating experiences that in themselves contribute to the conservation story creates a mutually beneficial relationship between people and landscape, as seen in Glacier National Park’s Citizen Science project where visitors monitor species and environmental conditions. Here, visitors become agents for change, actively contributing to the protection of nature and therefore understanding their place in these ecological systems.
Less roads, more paths. From the Great Ocean Road in Australia to the North Coast 500 in Scotland, road trips have long been the norm for exploring nature. While experiencing landscapes in this way gives visitors a sense of freedom and exploration, it can also encourage them to travel at pace. In fact, almost every scenic road-trip destination suffers from speeding, traffic and fatalities. Instead of encouraging exploration at pace, designers should be creating moments that pull people into and distribute them throughout landscapes. Longer visits benefit both environment and economy: visitors distributed across landscapes rather than centred at landmarks reduces erosion and can even benefit habitats, while visitors staying and spending money in communities generates far more value than higher spend at a gift shop, as discussed in Carlo Ratti’s ‘Pace Tourism’.
Community-led conservation. Community and conservation do not always go hand in hand — the needs of people and the environment are often at odds. However, unifying custodians of land, as well as local communities, around shared goals that protect nature can drive conservation efforts and community-led innovation. After all, so much of our research with locals pointed to a sense of ownership of the land that surrounds them, with nature and their daily lives entwined to form the living landscape that draws people from all corners of the world. Trusting communities to align conservation plans with priorities such as economic development can lead to more positive environmental outcomes, rather than fewer.
Our relationship with nature has never been so fraught. Yet the Covid-19 pandemic has forced a momentary absence of people from the natural environment, and therefore, the conditions for its recovery. Our inevitable return to nature should therefore be considered and cautious. It is within the tension of our conflicting needs that we can consciously create a world for nature to thrive in, with and without us.
