Losing Eden summary

Don’t you feel calmer walking beneath majestic trees with large canopies than on an exposed, busy street with no greenery? According to biologist E.O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, this is a preference that’s coded in your DNA. Wilson introduced the term biophilia in his 1984 book of the same name – pioneering the idea that humans have a genetically determined affinity for the natural world.

According to Wilson, even if individuals don’t feel an innate connection with nature, our brains are marked by our past evolutionary responses and behavior. Today, researchers are successfully testing Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis through habitat theory: the idea that we mostly live in park-like grasslands with clusters of trees and water because our ancient ancestors sought out such environments to increase their chances of survival. 

While we all have a lot to lose as we grow more disconnected from nature, our children are perhaps the most vulnerable. Consider this: in the United Kingdom, three out of four children aged five through 12 now spend less time outdoors than prison inmates, who are required by the United Nations to get at least one hour of exercise outside every day.

Technology is perhaps the most obvious culprit preventing children from getting outside. Kids under seven spend more than twice as much time looking at screens as they do being outside. But that’s not the only thing contributing to their disassociation from the natural world. A widespread safety-first mentality has made parents fearful of letting their children roam, and more congested roads mean it’s not as safe for kids to explore the outdoors. 

Jones had been sober for a couple of years, but she still struggled with feelings of doubt, resentment, and frustration. One day, she went for a swim in a cove in Scotland, and these emotions began to recede. She was simultaneously calm and energized; her brain felt “scoured clean.”

It might have been a reaction to the negative ions that are abundant around the ocean and other natural areas where air molecules are broken apart by crashing waves, moving air, or sunlight. Negative ions can help the brain release serotonin and activate the parasympathetic nervous system, calming the body and the mind.

So, if greater access to nature is good for individual mental health, can simple adjustments to landscape design promote happiness in communities? Studies suggest they can. Robert Taylor Homes was a public housing project built on the south side of Chicago in 1962. It was composed of 28 buildings situated between roads and railway tracks, totally isolated from nature. Violent crime and drugs were rampant. A few buildings had trees or grass nearby, while others were barren and paved with concrete.

In the late 1990s, the University of Illinois conducted studies at Robert Taylor Homes to examine the impact of physical environments on well-being. The researchers looked at the effect that trees had on people’s lives – and found that just a few trees and some grass near an apartment could significantly improve the residents’ mental health and cognitive functioning.

Time spent in nature often falls on socioeconomic lines. As we’ve seen in earlier blinks, there are fewer parks in deprived parts of towns and cities than in affluent neighborhoods, which tend to be more verdant. But it goes deeper than that. People in lower socioeconomic groups or from racial and ethnic minorities have less access to natural areas. Vulnerable populations suffer more exposure to pollution and toxic chemicals. And society is only becoming more unbalanced as our alienation from nature is exacerbated.

Many people believe that worrying about the natural world is a privileged concern – something only the wealthy bother themselves with. But when proximity to nature can determine your health outcome, caring about the natural world is not a luxury. Research by Professor Rich Mitchell of Glasgow University posits that greener neighborhoods could reduce the health gap between the rich and poor and thus make our society more equal – a concept known as equigenesis.

Białowieża, a forest on the Polish-Belarusian border, is the largest ancient primeval forest in Europe. Within it, there’s a strictly reserved area that has been mostly left alone for thousands of years. With a plethora of bird, reptile, mammal, lichen, fungi, moss, and liverwort species, Białowieża is an important site for ecological and scientific research; scientists travel from all over the world to discover new interactions between species and to understand biodiversity.

And yet, despite years of protection, it was significantly logged in 2010. Six years later, citing a bark beetle infestation, then-environmental minister Jan Szyszko altered the forest laws and tripled the amount of logging allowed to take place. The minister’s personal priest Tomasz Duszkiewicz cited the Bible’s instruction that man should “subdue” the land, but activists, ecologists, and scientists claim this was merely a ruse to chop down more of the forest.

Although nature’s effect on the psyche is not often spoken about in contemporary psychological discourse, Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, was an early advocate of nature’s mental health benefits.

He believed that we need to acknowledge the primitive layers in our psyche, using the metaphor of a house to illustrate the concept. Imagine two storys: the top floor was added in the nineteenth century, renovated in the twentieth, and given a modern loft extension in the twenty-first. The ground floor was built in the sixteenth century with stonework from the 1100s, and the cellar is Roman, beneath which is a Neolithic cave.

Svalbard is an Arctic archipelago north of Norway. Only a couple thousand people live there, and in winter, it’s dark by noon, so you need to carry a flashlight. Polar bears roam around freely. There is only one settled town, Longyearbyen, which is home to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

This vault protects hundreds of thousands of plant seed species – an agricultural safety net in case of global disaster caused by climate change. It’s one of hundreds around the world, but it houses the greatest diversity. For Jones, it was a chilling reminder of what our future will look like if we don’t alter our course in the wake of ecological collapse.