We are now coming to the time of the year that many of the world’s religions — past and present — celebrate as a time of birth and beginnings.
By Bill Lawyer
We are now coming to the time of the year that many of the world’s religions — past and present — celebrate as a time of birth and beginnings.
We teach our children about the changing seasons, as marked by the passage of our planet around the sun. As we slowly but inexorably approach the shortest days of the year, we intuitively understand why since ancient times people have used lights to brighten their lives in winter. And at this time, we focus on the many blessings we have received from the world around us.
Environmental and social scientists have created the term “biophilia” to describe the sense of attraction that people have toward the other living things with whom we share the planet.
Harvard evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote a book about the subject back in 1984. He argues that biophilia has been bred into our genes since the first humans evolved.
Now of course there are many living things to which we aren’t attracted — poisonous snakes come immediately to mind. But even dangerous creatures have often proved to be useful in helping us to understand how all earth’s creatures fit together in the earth’s biosphere.
Long before the modern term “ecology” was developed, Aristotle wrote about love of life and living things as a sense of reciprocity, getting and giving in return.
Anyone who has had a pet instinctively gets this concept. While most people “adopt” traditional pets, such as dogs or cats or birds, many people are attracted to exotic animals such as reptiles or spiders, and even ants.
Clearly, the primary reason people adopt animals is that their pets pay back the love that their owners bestow them, the ultimate in reciprocity. In fact, much research regarding pet ownership has shown that people with pets are happier and healthier than those without pets.
Going with biophilia beyond pets, however, has been somewhat uncharted territory. That’s what made Professor Wilson’s book so widely read and discussed. Wilson expanded the idea of biophilia to all the world’s ecosystems.
There’s a whole world of nature out there, which attracts us on deeper, emotional levels. This starts on the most obvious level with our yards, flower gardens, and managed parks. Their symmetry and colors are the reward for the gardeners’ stewardship.
But, even deeper, we appreciate the landscape of agriculture — how the crops and orchards are produced through the magic of seeds, soil, sunshine and rainfall.
Successful agriculture in the long run requires all elements of the food chain to work in balance, not killing off the pollinators or overreliance on monoculture to increase crop yields.
Agricultural landscape also provides us with emotional benefits. As a youth I was instinctively attracted to Vincent van Gogh’s vibrantly flourishing landscape scenes of Provence and the rural village of Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris. (Just recently one of van Gogh’s landscapes was sold for over $54 million. That’s some emotional, instinctive attraction.)
And at the deepest level, we have the wholly unmanaged parts of our biosphere, where humans derive benefits from the environment that they had no part in creating.
Inspired by Professor Wilson, Walton County, Florida, conservationist M. C. Davis developed the E. O. Wilson Biophilia Center in 2009 on his 50,000-acre conservation land, Nokuse Plantation.
The core mission of the Center is to educate students and visitors on the importance of biodiversity, to promote sustainability, and to encourage conservation, preservation, and restoration of ecos
ystems.
But we don’t have to go all the way to Florida to learn about biophilia, we can just go outside and look. One scene, which never ceases to inspire me, is the Blind Brook wetlands between the Milton Cemetery footbridge and Playland Parkway, right in our backyards.
