Choosing Biophilia: Wonder and the Natural World
Agnes Denes, Wheatfield—A Confrontation. Manhattan, 1982.
In 1982, the Hungarian-born, New York-based artist Agnes Denes brought into being Wheatfield—A Confrontation. A consciously environmental work, in Wheatfield Denes planted a two-acre sized expanse of amber-hued wheat in Manhattan. Not only was the wheat field in the literal shadow of the Twin Towers—just two blocks away from Wall Street and the ever-expanding urban sprawl—but the wheat was to take root in earth that had itself been excavated in order to accommodate the new skyscrapers. Neither Wheatfield nor the Twin Towers now exist, but Denes’s powerful juxtaposition of opposites was immediately recognised as raising important ecological questions. At the time, Denes wrote of the artwork:
“Planting and harvesting a field of wheat on land worth $4.5 billion created a powerful paradox. Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept; it represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, and economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns. It called attention to our misplaced priorities ”
In a number of reviews we find Denes’s 80s artworks referred to as ‘prescient’ and ‘prophetic’, as if she, simply through good luck or some kind of clairvoyance, possessed a rare insight into the threat that human behaviour posed to the natural world which would only become visible to others some half a century later. Granted, the temptation to think of the vast scale of the planet’s ecological problems as having become unmistakably evident only in the last few decades is beguiling. But, as the previous article’s discussion of Arne Naess’s Deep Ecology makes clear, conversations about the harmful relationship between human beings and nature have been ongoing since—at least—the 1960s (recall Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which was published in 1962). Félix Guattari, the French philosopher, was, in the 1980s, already advocating for the restoration of the “lungs of the Amazon’, that ubiquitous contemporary metaphor.
As Denes herself explains, Wheatfield highlights the nature of our misplaced priorities; its juxtaposition asks disconcerting questions of us. Wheatfield or Wall Street: which environment are you more concerned with the flourishing of? Wheatfield or Wall Street: in which environment do you truly feel more at home, at ease? Some amongst us are unapologetically committed to the superiority of the urban, and feel distinctly uneasy when removed from it: ‘I love nature’, Woody Allen (the great apologist for Manhattan) says, ‘I just don’t want to get any of it on me’. We might term Allen’s attitude towards nature as biophobic. David Orr suggests as such, and writes:
More than ever we dwell in and among our own creations and are increasingly uncomfortable with the nature that lies beyond our direct control. Biophobia ranges from discomfort in “natural” places to active scorn for whatever is not man-made, managed or air-conditioned. Biophobia, in short, is the culturally acquired urge to affiliate with technology, human artefacts, and solely with human interests regarding the natural world. I intend the word broadly to include as well those who regard nature “objectively” as nothing more than “resources” to be used anyway the favoured among the present generation see fit (1993, p.416)
Biophobia’s antipathy towards nature is to be contrasted with an approach at the other end of the spectrum: biophilia. The concept of biophilia was first developed by the Marxist-Freudian thinker Eric Fromm in the 1970s. According to Fromm, all human beings are ‘biologically endowed with the capacity for biophilia’ (1973, p.407); it is the ‘passionate love of life and of all that is alive; it is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, an idea, or a social group’ (p.406). The notion of biophilia was later picked up by the influential biologist E O Wilson. Wilson agreed with Fromm that biophilia possessed a biological basis in human beings but, whilst Fromm had found this basis in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, Wilson proposed an evolutionary explanation of its origin. In his 1984 book Biophilia, which popularised the notion, he defines the concept as the innate human tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes and argues that such a tendency is evolutionarily acquired. That is, the human affinity for other lifeforms is the result of millennia of human evolution in natural, rather than artificial, environments where a propensity for biophilia was adaptive—that is to say, it increased one’s chances of survival and reproduction. Because a couple of hundred years of rapid technological advancement are but nothing next to the millennia over which human beings evolved in close proximity to nature, such an affinity is supposed to still be very much with us today. Despite offering different accounts of the tendency’s biological basis, both Fromm and Wilson were further aligned in seeing biophilia as a normative ideal, as a relationship with one’s environment that ought to be cultivated and encouraged. Wilson suggests that not only can the cultivation of biophilia underpin the kind of conservation ethic required to tackle environmental issues, but nature is instrumental to physical and mental health, to well-being generally.
If, then, as Fromm and Wilson claim, biophilia is an innate human tendency, something which is a inherent part of the human genotype, why do some of us—seemingly more and more of us—develop, like Woody Allen, attitudes of biophobia? And again, if Fromm and Wilson are right that such attitudes are harmful to mental and physical flourishing, then how do we cultivate biophilia and discourage biophobia? The environmentalist David Orr argues that biophilia so often languishes because of the competing human drive towards biophobia (1993, p.416). Whilst biophobia might not have been a live option in the savannah of East Africa where human beings are thought to have lived for the best part of two million years, the increasingly technological nature of contemporary society, the mushrooming of urban sprawl, and the progressively enveloping nature of the digital mean that many of us do not live lives in which we give biophilia the opportunity to develop. In other words, biophilic attitudes, even if Fromm and Wilson are right to say that they have a biological basis, are no longer automatically expressed in human behaviour. Instead, biophilia is an attitude towards the natural world which must be chosen, even if, with only 5% of global land untouched by human activity, the choice is a no longer an easy one.
But how to accomplish such a daunting task? One place to begin, I want to suggest, is with a more careful attention to our emotions. Much of the structure and surroundings of modern life jeopardise the development of biophilia by creating an emotional distance between human beings and nature. Both Fromm and Wilson, our major proponents of biophilia, suggest that the way in which we engage emotionally with nature is a crucial part of our relationship with it. Allen’s concern about not getting any of nature “on him” reveals, amongst other things, a relationship with nature characterised by negative emotions like disgust, fear, and hatred. An evolutionary perspective must emphasise, of course, that such negative emotions have their place: emotions are (mainly) useful states which, like other human traits, have evolved through natural selection. Fear of the lion is well-placed and appropriate; disgust at rotting plants or meat dissuades us from eating it. But such negative emotions have their bounds, and positive emotions towards nature are surely crucial for the development of biophilia. As Fromm writes:
[The biophilic attitude] is manifested in a person’s bodily processes, in his emotions, in his thoughts, in his gestures, the biophilic orientation expresses itself in the whole of man (1964, p.45)
In last month’s article, I spoke of Arne Naess’s admiration for the environmentalist Rachel Carson; Carson is most famous for Silent Spring (1962), her watershed work on the environmental consequences of the use of pesticides. In a lesser known work entitled The Sense of Wonder (1965), Carson shared her thoughts on how to nurture a sense of wonder at the natural world. Like theorists of biophilia, Carson was aware of the tendency of the increasingly artificial human world to produce negative attitudes towards nature which threatened both human beings and the environment. In a speech in 1952, she said:
Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, in his cities of steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water and the growing seed. Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world
Rachel Carson
In her response to this threat of the artificial, Carson emphasised the role that emotions must play. ‘The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realties of the Universe about us’, she writes, ‘the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction’ (Lear 1999, p.94, my emphasis).
Whilst wonder can be a wholesome and positive emotion, many would disagree that it is always so. Indeed, as the 17th century philosophers René Descartes and Nicholas Malebranche were well aware, wonder can prove to be a troublesome emotion when directed at the wrong objects: we often, Malebranche complains, wonder at all things “new and extraordinary” without further discrimination. Such objects of wonder might themselves be man-made (the 17th century was an age of fascination with automata, for instance, just as today we are captivated by minute by minute changes on social media) or they might be natural objects, but removed from their environment and repurposed as mere ‘curiosities’. The fascination with such curiosities was rarely derived simply from their unusual nature, but from the possibility of enhancing the most wonder-worthy object of all: the self. The possession of curiosities served, Malebranche warned, to enhance the rare and extraordinary nature of the self so that one could turn wonder back in on it, making its focus myopically solipsistic. Such a focus on the self as an object of wonder is hardly unfamiliar in social media-dominated technological societies.
And so we might take up Carson’s call to wonder at the natural world, but with these cautions in mind: we need to be conscious of where our wonder is directed, for indiscriminate wonder can undermine an aim to cultivate biophilia, a love of the living world. A sense of wonder at the natural world in particular, Carson plausibly suggests, comes most easily to children:
Ansel Adams. Sierra Meadow. 1930
A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength (Carson 1965, p.46)
Carson’s advice might be just as applicable to adults—perhaps we can cultivate biophilia by re-cultivating wonder, by trying to resurrect this lost true instinct for the beautiful and the awe-inspiring. Directed at the right objects, wonder can become a force for moral good, steeling us against the all-encompassing ‘artificial’ world, leaving space for the love necessary for biophilia. Carson is right to hope, I think, that this type of wonder cannot exist side by side with a lust for destruction.
References
Carson, R., Kelsh, N. and Lear, L.J. (2017). The sense of wonder : a celebration of nature for parents and children. New York, Ny: Harper Perennial.
Carson, R. and Lear, L.J. (1998). Lost woods : the discovered writing of Rachel Carson. Boston: Beacon Press. Denes, A. (2019). Agnes Denes. [online] Agnesdenesstudio.com. Available at: http://www.agnesdenesstudio.com/
works7.html.
Fromm, E. (1965). The heart of man : its genius for good and evil. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Fromm, E. (1973). The anatomy of human destructiveness : Erich Fromm. New York: Fawcett.
Orr, D. (1993). Love it or Lose It: The Coming Biophilia Revolution. In: St.R. Kellert and E.O. Wilson, eds., The Biophilia Hypothesis. Washington: Island Press, pp.415–440.
Wilson, E.O. (1984). Biophilia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.
Notes
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/just-five-percent-of-the-world-s-land-mass-is-untouched-by-humans- a4035621.html
Instances of the word ‘man’ should be read as ‘human beings’, and ‘he’ should be read as referring to all genders equally. Such gendered language is a product of its time and I have, for simplicity, made the decision not to edit these quotes.