How Did Modern Life Become So Cut Off From Nature?

It's difficult to overestimate the value of nature to our well-being: Connecting with nature has been shown to have psychological and physical advantages in numerous studies. People who are more linked to environment are happier, more vibrant, and have a greater sense of purpose in their life.

Nature is a potent elixir, even in small doses: Patients used fewer medicines and reported less fatigue when their hospital room included flowers and vegetation. Simply looking at photos of nature boosts cognitive function and speeds up mental healing.

These research, along with hundreds of others, all point to the same conclusion: developing a close connection with nature will benefit us greatly. Yet, at an age when our children can name more Pokémon characters than wildlife species, our connection to nature is more shaky than ever.

It's often assumed that we're more removed from nature now than we were a century ago, but is this really the case? According to a recent study we did, it is, which might be terrible news not only for our health but also for the ecosystem.

Our growing estrangement from the natural world

We asked ourselves, "How can we describe and measure all of the numerous ways in which people connect with nature?" to see how the human relationship to nature has changed over time. How do we keep track of how many times people stop to observe a sunset or listen to birds chirp, or how much time they spend wandering through tree-lined streets? We could surely ask living individuals these questions, but we couldn't ask folks who lived a century ago.

Rather, we focused on the cultural products they produced. We reasoned that works of popular culture should represent the extent to which nature pervades our common consciousness. If authors, composers, or filmmakers have fewer contacts with nature these days than in the past, or if these encounters leave them with less of an effect, or if they do not expect their viewers to respond to it, nature should appear less frequently in their works.

Then we looked at how often these 186 terms featured in works of popular culture over time, including English fiction books published between 1901 and 2000, top 100 songs from 1950 to 2011, and movie plotlines from 1930 to 2014.

Our analysis of millions of fiction books, thousands of songs, and hundreds of thousands of movie and documentary plots revealed a clear and consistent trend: nature appears in popular culture far less today than it did in the first half of the twentieth century, with a steady decline after the 1950s. In popular songs from the 1950s, for example, there are only slightly more than one nature-related term for every three.

Nature frequently serves as a backdrop to and images of love in these songs, like in Billy Ward and His Dominoes' "Star Dust," which begins with:

The source of our deficiency in nature

How can we explain how nature is diminishing in our communal imagination and cultural discourse? A thorough examination of the data reveals an intriguing clue: Nature references decreased from the 1950s, but not earlier.

The trend of urbanisation, which engulfs natural regions and isolates people from their surroundings, is sometimes cited to explain the decreasing human connection to nature, but our data contradict this explanation. In the United States and the United Kingdom, where most of the works we investigated originated, urbanisation rates did not vary from the first to the second half of the twentieth century.

Instead, our findings point to a distinct cause for our lack of connection to nature: technology advancements, particularly the proliferation of indoor and virtual entertainment options. Television quickly became the most popular form of entertainment in the 1950s. Since the late 1990s, the Internet has been demanding more and more leisure time, while video games originally appeared in the 1970s and have since become a popular activity.

These technologies, it comes to reason, have partially replaced nature as a source of recreation and enjoyment. Snap the Whip (1872) by Winslow Homer and Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1886) by Seurat depict a time when children played in vast open green fields and adults spent Sunday afternoons in nature.

Our findings are concerning to the extent that the removal of natural terminology from cultural discourse represents an actual separation from nature. A connection to nature substantially predicts pro-environmental attitudes and activities, in addition to its well-being advantages. Exposure to nature as a child is frequently the source of such a love for nature. This prompted author Richard Louv to write, "As the care of nature increasingly becomes an academic abstraction divorced from the delight of being outside, you have to wonder:

It's important to note that cultural goods like songs and films not only reflect but also shape the culture. As some artists did in the 1960s and 1970s, modern artists have the chance to transmit the message that nature is worth paying attention to and to assist arouse interest, appreciation, and respect for nature. At a time when nature appears to need our attention and care more than ever, artistic endeavours that help us connect with nature are critical.