Hi everyone!
I hope you are coping well with your studies as we rock on Week 5. As a dose of mind-medicine, here’s a motivational quote!
“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time” -Thomas Edison.
Now, here’s something to think about. Think of the nearest park in your neighbourhood. As you walk a trail, you began to sense your surroundings. From the leaves of a tree to the chirping of birds. Do you realise that when you start to connect with Nature, it gives you this healing effect? The moments when you feel that everything slows down, and you began to let go of your worries? If you understand what I meant, then have you wondered how we crate these connections with Nature? Let’s talk about that.
Reading was one of my pastimes, and I was intrigued by “The Nature Fix” (by Florence Williams), especially the use of the word “Biophilia”. Williams didn’t coin this term. It was actually another scientist, Erich Fromm, in his 1973 book titled The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Rogers, 2019)[1]. Biophilia is defined as the “love of life and the living world”, which means that whether we like Nature or not, we somehow have an appreciation for other lifeforms and Mother Nature (Dictionary.com, 2020)[2]. This is where we form emotional connections with Mother Nature, and we become interconnected such that no matter what species we are, we belong here on Earth.
This book is definitely recommended if you want to know more about biophilia! (Source: Lee Wee Meng)
In the past, we were connected to Nature wholeheartedly. Gradually, we come to lose that connection. Why?
An article by two psychologists supports this disconnection. Selin and Pelin (2017) performed an experiment that associated words with pop culture. They took those words and categorised them into four broad, Nature-related categories, including names of organisms. After trying to match the frequency of each word in different media, they found a trend – specifically a declining frequency of Nature-related words in the 50 years up to 2010 (Selin & Pelin, 2017)[3]. What I found novel was the idea of using this type of method to represent our disconnection with Nature.
Next week, we will venture into how speciesm can create different perceptions of animals.
In the next mind,
Wee Meng