Biophilia, in the words of the American biologist E. O. Wilson (1929–2021), is “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms”, an inborn pull towards other life, which he believed evolved over the long ages when our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers, and which still shows in the way people seek out gardens, parks, animals and wild places. Some research supports a modest link between feeling connected to nature and wellbeing, some philosophers question whether the idea holds together, and Therapeutic Shamanism, which teaches that disconnection from the natural world drains our life-force, starts elsewhere, from relationship with other beings who are alive and conscious.
Who was E. O. Wilson? #
An American biologist, born in Birmingham, Alabama, on 10 June 1929, who spent his working life at Harvard University and became the world’s leading expert on ants, describing more than four hundred species. His Sociobiology (1975) applied the study of social behaviour in insects and other animals to humans in its final chapter, and set off a long and bitter debate, with his Harvard colleagues Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould amongst its strongest critics. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for On Human Nature (1979) and for The Ants (1991, with Bert Hölldobler), and wrote Biophilia (1984), Consilience (1998) and Half-Earth (2016), which proposed setting aside half the planet’s surface for other species. He died on 26 December 2021.1
What is biophilia? #
A love of life, as the word says. It was first used by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, in The Heart of Man (1964), for an orientation of being drawn to all that is alive. Wilson gave it a biological meaning in Biophilia (1984), as the connections that human beings seek, without knowing it, with the rest of life.2 In a later essay he defined it as “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms”. He did not see it as a single instinct but as a bundle of learning rules, tendencies to learn some things more readily than others, and the feelings they shape run along several scales, from attraction to aversion, awe to indifference, and peace to fear-driven anxiety.3
His clearest example was snakes. Poisonous snakes have killed primates throughout their history, and people everywhere learn fear of snakes quickly and easily, yet are also fascinated by them, so that snakes appear in dreams, myths and religious symbols all over the world. Biophilia, for Wilson, includes the fear and the fascination together.3
Why did he think it was inborn? #
Because of how long humans lived close to other life. Human history did not begin with farming and villages some ten thousand years ago. For more than ninety-nine per cent of it, people lived in hunter-gatherer bands intimately involved with other living things, depending on an exact knowledge of plants and animals. In his words, “the brain evolved in a biocentric world, not a machine-regulated one.”4 It would be extraordinary, in his view, if all the learning rules from that world had been erased in a few thousand years. When people leave the natural world, those rules are not replaced but persist, “atrophied and fitfully manifested”, which is why more people in the United States and Canada visit zoos than attend professional sports, why the wealthy build their homes above water amidst parkland, and why city dwellers still dream of snakes.4
He held the idea with care (“Biophilia, if it exists, and I believe it exists”), and thought its importance could be profound even if it existed only as weak learning rules.4 He proposed ways to test it, by comparing what peoples in many cultures know and feel about nature, and by measuring people’s bodily responses to natural scenes.4
Is there evidence for it? #
Some, and it is modest. In a well-known study of 1984, the researcher Roger Ulrich compared patients recovering from gall-bladder surgery in rooms that looked out on a small stand of trees with matched patients whose window faced a brick wall. Those with the view of trees went home a little sooner, needed fewer strong painkillers and drew fewer negative comments in the nurses’ notes, though Ulrich noted that the wall was an especially dull view.5 A larger review in 2014 pooled thirty samples, about 8,500 people in all, and found that people who feel more connected to nature tend to be happier, with a small effect, and that the strongest link was with vitality, the feeling of being alive, alert and energetic.6
Is the idea disputed? #
Yes. The philosophers Yannick Joye and Andreas De Block, in a critical examination of 2011, argued that the idea can be read in several different and sometimes conflicting ways, that the findings that partly support a narrower version of it can be explained by other theories, and that the evolutionary reasoning behind it is often unclear and sometimes inaccurate, so that environmental ethics has little to gain from it.7 Wilson, who died in 2021, left no direct reply to them that is known. He had already called the evidence scant, and offered ‘biophilia’ as a broad name for ways of feeling about nature that rose from deep human history and that he thought quite likely to be in the genes.8 Others have since answered the critics. A review of forty-nine studies in 2022, by the researchers Jason Gaekwad, Anahita Sal Moslehian, Phillip Roös and Arlene Walker, accepted that the idea is broad and hard to refute, suggested that it may need to be broad to match the many ways people relate to nature, and found that time in natural surroundings had a medium to large effect on people’s moods.9 The idea has also been taken up in the collection The Biophilia Hypothesis (1993), which Wilson edited with Stephen Kellert, and in the movement in architecture known as biophilic design.10
How does biophilia sit with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
It meets the teaching on power lossPower-loss. Disconnection from nature, the web of life and our place in it: like being unplugged from the national grid. One of the two root causes of shamanic illness, healed by reconnection (not by soul retrieval), beginning with the Power Animal bond. Read the full answer, and on how long we have been cut off. In Therapeutic Shamanism, power means life-force, and power loss, caused by disconnecting from the natural world and from Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this, is one of the major ways we get ill. Most people these days live in towns and cities with little contact with nature, and even people in the countryside usually still suffer from it. Since the coming of agriculture, around 11,000 BC, we have been disconnected from the consciousness and intelligence in nature. To our hunter-gatherer ancestors, everything was alive and conscious and to be treated with respect, and humans were part of an interconnected web of life, which was Mother Earth. Life-force and health come from being connected to that web.11 See What is power loss?
Set side by side, the two accounts both look back to the long hunter-gatherer past, and the nature research finds its strongest link with vitality, a word close to life-force. They start from different places. For Wilson, biophilia is a feeling in us, shaped by evolution, and he built his case for conservation on human needs without trying to settle whether other species have rights of their own. He also wrote that other species are our kin, literally true in evolutionary time, through a shared ancestry stretching back nearly two billion years.12 In animism the kinship is more than genetic. The other beings are the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer, alive and conscious, and humans are in no way special or better than any of them. In Therapeutic Shamanism a person’s Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer is the primary and most powerful means of connecting back to the web of life.11 See How do we reconnect with the other-than-human world and heal cultural power loss? and What is the myth of human supremacy?
