Introduction

Interaction with nature is critically important to human well-being and development, but sadly has become compromised and diminished in modern times. Through deliberate design, this connection can be repaired and restored. Unfortunately, contemporary society has become confused about the role of the natural environment in people's physical and mental lives. Many believe that the progress of civilization depends on subjugating and converting, if not conquering, the natural world. Indeed, many see this progression as the essence of civilization.

Why should they presume this to be so? First, most people recognize that the production of huge food surpluses by a tiny fraction of the population permits others to obtain their basic needs at relatively low cost and to exercise an extraordinary degree of mobility. Producing such surpluses has until now relied on the wholesale conversion of natural habitats into vast monocultures used to grow a small number of crops or raise a few species of livestock at massive industrial scales. Second, modern society has made a range of manufactured products available far beyond what even the richest would have thought possible a millennium ago. The variety of goods available at a typical mall today dwarfs what the most privileged nobility would have experienced in the past. This contemporary level of consumption has depended until now on massively extracting, fabricating from, and then disposing of huge quantities of natural resources. Third, most people today anticipate relatively good health and long lives, which they attribute primarily to the miracles of modern medicine, whose "conquest of disease" has largely relied on suppressing other life forms through championing antiseptic conditions.

All these trends of subjugating and eliminating wild nature have, at least until recently, been supported by the conventional design and development of the human-built, principally urban environment. It is sobering to realize that only two centuries ago, Great Britain was the first nation to have a majority of its population residing in an urban area, now arguably the most common feature of modern life. Today, some two-thirds of the developed world lives within the shadow of a metropolitan area. And the greatest migration in human history is happening now, as hundreds of millions of people migrate from the countryside to the cities in China, India, and elsewhere.

Urbanization has historically relied on converting natural diversity into largely homogenous landscapes of impervious surface, consuming enormous amounts of resources and materials, and generating huge quantities of waste and pollutants. Consequently, the modern urban environment now consumes some 40 percent of energy resources, 30 percent of natural resources, and 25 percent of freshwater resources while generating one-third of air and water pollutants and 25 percent of solid wastes. This prevailing paradigm of urban development is neither necessary nor sustainable and constitutes more a design deficiency than an intrinsic and inevitable flaw of modern life. Still, these tendencies have collectively encouraged many to believe that the benefits of contemporary society depend on massively exploiting, if not conquering, the natural world. For many, progress and civilization have been equated with humanity's distance from and subjugation of nature.

Nonetheless, most people continue to intuit that the health and diversity of the environment are fundamentally related to their own physical, mental, and even spiritual wellbeing. Most sense that the natural world is far more connected to the quality of their lives than is revealed through the narrow metrics of material production and modern economics. In poll after poll in the United States and in other countries, the majority of respondents cite the environment as important. The stubborn belief persists that the natural environment is profoundly related to people's physical, psychological, and moral well-being, an assumption that is reflected in many of our preferences, cultural creations, and constructions. Our connection to nature figures into the materials we choose, the decorations we employ, the recreational choices we make, the places we live, and the stories we tell. Nature continues to dominate the forms, patterns, and language of everyday life, despite the impression that, in a narrow technical sense, the natural world often seems neither necessary nor germane to the functioning of a modern urban society.

Despite the evident connections, contemporary society still fails to recognize and defend the importance of healthy and diverse natural systems to sustaining the quality of people's lives, especially in urban areas. Perhaps we have taken for granted what has always been readily available, like a fish failing to recognize the virtues of its water realm. The presence of the natural world has been an unquestioned constant for much of human history, generally noticed only as an adversary or appreciated only when no longer accessible. We have only recently encountered nearly ubiquitous environmental damage and a feeling of alienation from nature produced by huge human populations, consumption, urbanization, resource depletion, waste generation, pollution, and chemical contamination. Only during the past fifty years has the scale of our excesses fundamentally altered the earth's atmospheric chemistry, causing the widespread loss of biological diversity and even threatening the future of human existence.

Thus, we confront two warring premises in contemporary society regarding our relationship with the natural world. On the one hand is the widespread belief that the successes of the modern world depend on controlling and converting nature. On the other hand rests the persistent impression that human physical, mental, and even spiritual well-being relies on experiencing healthy and diverse natural systems. This book explores and defends the latter view, that nature—even in our modern urban society—remains an indispensable, irreplaceable basis for human fulfillment. It examines how degrading healthy connections to the natural world impoverishes our material and moral capacity. Finally, it addresses how through deliberate design we may restore the basis for a more compatible and even harmonious relationship with nature.

The focus is thus on three major issues. First, empirical evidence from diverse sources is marshaled to support the contention that experiencing natural process and diversity is critical to human material and mental well-being. Second, childhood is considered as the time when experiencing nature is most essential to human physical and mental maturation, even for a species capable of lifelong learning. Unfortunately, for both children and adults an impoverished natural environment has become widely common, especially in urban areas. Thus, the book's final section considers how a new paradigm of...