RECONNECTION

Fixing Our Broken Relationship

with Nature

MIL ES R ICHAR DS ON

PELAGIC PUBLISHING
 Contents
Preface vii

Part I – The need for reconnection with nature 1

1 A Broken Relationship with Nature 3
2 The Great Theft 17
3 The Technological Ape 33
4 Hidden Connections with Nature 48
5 Nature Connectedness 57
Part II – Benefits of reconnection with nature 75
6 Good for You: Wellbeing Benefits of Reconnection 77
7 How Does Reconnection Bring Wellbeing? 92
8 Good for Nature: Environmental Benefits
of Reconnection 98
9 One Health 106
Part III – Creating a new relationship with nature 117
10 The Good Things in Nature 119
11 Pathways to Reconnection 130
12 Scaling Up: Policies for Connection 144
13 Tools for Change 163
14 Creating a Nature-Connected Society 176
15 Designing a Connected Future 188

Acknowledgements 203
Notes 204
Index 253
About the Author 264
 CHAPTER 2

The Great Theft

A revolution in the way we think

W
hile humans started to let go of their close relationship
with nature as early as the Agricultural Revolution, the
more recent shift to modern ways of thinking can be seen
as a great theft. As humans loosened their bonds, nature’s place in
our lives was eventually snatched away. The shift in thinking in
Western Europe during the seventeenth century, when the mental
and physical were split into two separate concepts, was profound.
Modern self-awareness was born, alongside individual self-interest
and a way of thinking that made animism seem irrational. Nature
became separated; the human relationship with it fractured.
Yet this move to dualistic thinking was also improbable, being
described as ‘a near-­miraculous concatenation of circumstances’.1
Of course, there is a long history of dualism, such as the separation
of mind and body in early Greek philosophy, the traces of which
can still be seen in Western thinking today. Plato saw the mind and
body as made of different substances, with the rational mind being
the source of legitimate knowledge and truth, whereas the body
and senses were not to be trusted.2 As we’ll come to see later in the
book, losing trust in the body and the senses is a poor foundation
for a close relationship with nature.
As it’s such a profound part of the story of the human rela-
tionship with nature, let’s look at dualism a little more closely.
The key transition in dualistic thinking begins in the seventeenth
century with René Descartes, the French philosopher, mathemati-
cian and scientist described as ‘the father of modern philosophy’.3
His mind–body theory included the famous statement translated
2  Reconnection

to, ‘I think, therefore I am’. The irony is that the dualism that
says we exist inside our heads was perhaps based on a halluci-
nation Descartes had when stuck in a steam room!4 The theory,
and statement, suggests that reason and the mind reign supreme
as the core essence of human existence, rigidly distinct from the
body, which is seen as unthinking matter. This change, where the
embedded worldview was replaced with reason and individual-
ism, was dramatic.5 It was a shift in human consciousness – from a
perspective where the person and what they observe are one, and
the rest of the world can be known through that relationship, to one
where the world ‘outside our heads’ is known through knowledge
and thinking ‘inside our heads’, through information delivered
via separate bodily organs used to perceive the world. This way
of thinking swept away the relational worldview that embedded
people within nature.
As reason gradually saw the retreat of religious dogma, this
influential view that mind and body are separate and the mind is
what makes us human underpinned the rise of the modern scientific
worldview and the Age of Enlightenment in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.6 This ‘enlightenment’ provided the basis
for the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, with their material
progress spreading and reinforcing the dualistic worldview that
has since had a massive impact on the natural world. It wasn’t just
primacy of mind and reason; Enlightenment thinkers aimed to
replace religious faith with faith in humanity.7 Humans became
the overlords of nature. The psychological impact of this trans-
formation is arguably at least as important as the Scientific and
Industrial Revolutions themselves. Although fundamentally
changing the way people saw themselves and their place within
the natural world, the transformation can be seen to have liberated
people from magical and irrational beliefs. Although, ancient
people were not simple-minded. Science and mathematics were
in existence and part of Indigenous knowledge centuries earlier
and were likely incorporated into ‘modern’ science.8 Ancestral
ways of knowing can be a source of great wisdom with Indigenous
peoples’ critique of power, money and equality in European society
creating a backlash amongst enlightenment thinkers.9 Still, the
 The Great Theft  3

Enlightenment was a fundamental event providing a new clarity of

understanding that released technological potential and a material
world of production and commerce that has transformed our
world.10
It is no surprise that this profound shift in thinking is still
fundamental to the modern human–nature relationship. When
mind is identity, bodies have no intrinsic value, whether they be
human or animal. Descartes argued that animals were mechanistic
and denied they could feel pain, views that, although not universally
accepted, provided justification for humans to mistreat animals.
Further, without mind, nature has no intrinsic value other than to
be studied by the human mind – studies that centuries later would
show the sentience of many animals and that even plants can learn.11
Hopefully, attitudes are now changing, but when nature became an
assortment of mechanical objects existing outside us and valued
by their potential for exploitation, the essential human–nature re-
lationship was broken.12 No longer were humans and nature one
and the same.
Another influential figure of the Scientific Revolution was
Francis Bacon, who is credited with creating the scientific method.
Descartes wrote of science allowing humans to be masters and
possessors of nature. Francis Bacon set a similar tone for scientific
investigation, asserting that humans have power, command,
dominion and rights over nature by divine request.13 The
foundations of modern dualistic science were formed and soon
advanced by influential scientists such as Isaac Newton.
The Industrial Revolution brought Bacon’s vision to fruition
and changed the human–nature relationship.14 Human ingenuity
exploited natural resources, such as coal, to fuel the Industrial
Revolution and ‘the human urge to break free of the bonds of
nature’.15 Each new technology gave greater control over nature and
allowed greater exploitation.16 The increasing efficiency rewarded
and funded further development, as there was money to be made.
The steam engine’s power only started the Industrial Revolution
because it made a profit.17 As factories allowed massive increases
in productivity, European empires extended as there was a whole
world of natural resources and Indigenous peoples to exploit to
4  Reconnection

accumulate wealth. Commerce would conquer the constraints

of nature.18 Through the Agricultural, Scientific and Industrial
Revolutions the control and use of nature accelerated and a
perceived right to exploit nature took hold.19
Of course, this change in thinking and employment was
accompanied by a change in location. The Industrial Revolution led
to urbanisation. People left their villages and rural agricultural lives
to work in factories – an extinction of experience that intensified
the split from nature. The contrasts between rural and urban living
helped feed the Romantic Movement and its appreciation of nature,
with dark and foreboding wild places increasingly revered by tourists
and the harms of urban living raised.20 Indeed, Romanticism was a
reaction against the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution,
with William Wordsworth being a founding figure. Wordsworth’s
poetry captures many of the themes in this book. He rejected the
human dominance of nature and saw how the relationship between
humans and nature was ruined by the Industrial Revolution,
destroying the natural world.21 Wordsworth saw how the emerging
modern age disconnected people from nature, people who then
became egocentric.22 We celebrate the poets that resisted this vision
of industrialisation, but their defeat is a story not often told.
The scientific and rational dualistic mindset led to remarkable
scientific and technological progress, transforming the lives and
health of hundreds of millions of people for the better. Yet that
mindset placed humans apart from nature, justifying its control
and exploitation. It was felt that science would command the
world and bring happiness by meeting all human needs.23 Material
progress has been closely linked to happiness, and these two
notions dominate the Western worldview, which has increasing
global influence.24 For example, it is suggested that the African
environmental crisis grew from adopting the Western worldview
which was spread through science, technology and industri-
alisation.25 When considering material progress, the world has
done exceptionally well over the past 200 years, with substantial
improvements in living standards and life expectancy. However,
ultimately there’s no human wellbeing without nature’s wellbeing.
Without a healthy planet, those gains will come tumbling down.
 The Great Theft  5

The power of language

Humans being the masters and possessors of nature was a popular
viewpoint and metaphor.26 For instance, Sigmund Freud wrote of
humans coming together and ‘taking up the attack on nature, thus
forcing it to obey human will, under the guidance of science’.27 Such
metaphors and their accompanying scientific conquests justified
and enabled ever-increasing control and exploitation of nature,
and humans inflated themselves to gods.28 These metaphors are
powerful; they seep into everyday discourse, frame our thinking,
forming concepts of truth and reality.29 Control and use of nature
became a mainstream way of thinking, absorbed into society
and creating illusions of separation and supremacy over nature
in everyday discourse, in our leisure, work and disciplines of
knowledge. As just one example, the science of psychology has
been seen as ‘mute’ on the environmental crisis and as normalising
damaging behaviours and lifestyles.30 More recently, as a focus
on human behaviour and its impacts on nature became a more
common though still niche focus, it was noted that, unsurpris-
ingly, psychologists are more interested in people than the state
of those people’s home, the natural world. There was a need for
psychologists to apply the extensive methods and toolkits of
psychological constructs more effectively to nature conservation
issues.31 As we’ll see later, there is still a surprising disinterest in
studying the human–nature relationship, yet it is fundamental to
our future.
The powerful metaphors that spoke of human control over
nature set the context of our worldview. Metaphors produce
mental structures or frames that shape how we see the world. They
have a profound influence on how we think and act. Even a single
word can initiate a metaphor that can change how people think
and gather information, yet many do not recognise the influence
of metaphors in their decisions.32 George Lakoff tells us that strong
metaphors even define what we see as common sense.33 Lakoff says
that our perceived separation from nature is so deep within our
conceptual system that it is difficult to overcome. The separation
of humans and nature in everyday language and discourse creates
real boundaries to a close relationship with nature. In this context,
6  Reconnection

finding cultural harmony with nature is exceedingly difficult. If

everyday speech and metaphors suggest that nature is an other,
separate from humans, a resource to be controlled and exploited,
this will inform our viewpoint and actions. Deeply ingrained views
are at the root of climate change and wildlife loss; otherwise, such
global-scale disasters that threaten civilisation would not have
been allowed to happen. Nature is no longer the giving parent;
nature has been more akin to an expendable slave, there only to
serve its human master.
The dualistic metaphors and scientific pattern of Western
thinking promoted abstract reasoning about the natural world.
Nature could be explained by fixed laws and neat mathematics.
Little wonder that Kellert’s scientific dimension of biophilia was
unrelated to a close relationship with nature. Each day we are
bombarded with science, discovery and progress. Each day a little
more of the unknown becomes known. Modern science divides
humans, as observers, from the observed natural world. Nature
becomes the object of analysis, described as abstract matter obeying
laws. Essential knowledge, once passed from parent to child in the
landscape through talk, is replaced by written facts delivered in
the classroom and in scientific communities. Previously, parents’
oral traditions necessarily put nature in the foreground through
close observation of nature, teaching children to notice inter-
relationships. Even in recent decades, when speaking of outdoor
practices, parents in indigenous communities talked of foraging,
forest walks, fishing and medicinal plants. Whereas for European-
American families, outdoor practices were sports, and activities
such as cycling and canoeing that moved through nature as a
background.34
Objective analysis of the outer world and the science of the
rational mind are seen as the source of truth. Our inner subjective
experiences are often dismissed as irrational and inferior. Yet we
strive to satisfy them with ‘truths’ from the outer world, consumer
goods that have become the indicators of success.35 Modern work
is dominated by creating these consumer goods, and forms of
recreation where experiences are created, packaged and served
with, at best, nature as a background.
 The Great Theft  7

Turning inwards: the birth of humanism

The Scientific Revolution was a key chapter in human–animal
relations. A divide was placed between them, the bond to nature
broken. This fracture also raised the status of humanity. The gods
began to be silenced through human understanding of the laws of
nature, and humans became gods instead with their accompanying
angels of new technology. Rather than appeasing the gods, human
needs and desires now mattered most. Humanism was born – a
human-centred approach to life fuelled by science and dualistic
thinking.36
Humanists ‘believe that human experience is the supreme
source of authority and meaning’.37 They trust in reason,
autonomy and science for the purpose of discovering truth and
are committed to the interests of humans.38 Humanism suggests
that human flourishing is maximised through happiness, health,
knowledge and rich experiences.39 It includes the sanctification of
human emotions, desires and lives, leading to a quest for power
and immortality. Humanism comes from within us – our emotions
and feelings, rather than spirits in the forest or angels and demons.
Humans decide what matters and have faith in the human species.
It is humanism itself that brings meaning to our lives and the
cosmos. Add in the separation of humans and nature, and we can
easily see how the meaning and importance of the natural world
became so diminished.
Humanists celebrate the expression of the unique indi-
viduality of each human, their feelings and traits and quirks, be
that of themselves in liberal humanism or of others in socialist
humanism.40 Humanism is a worldview where labels are resisted,
and multiple identities acknowledged.41 While individualism may
be encouraged, however, one is still conforming to humanism.
For humans, our belief in self and individuality defines us as
separate from each other and other life forms. Under humanism,
our values are based on human desires; the rest of nature can have
no value without humans. Confirmed by the daily experience of the
latest technology, humanism is a science-fuelled belief in progress
beyond the limits that restrict other animals. It is a near-universal
but groundless faith in the idea that the human species can control
8  Reconnection

its destiny and be free.42 The accompanying surety in and focus on

our individual selves keeps us apart from nature.
That covers the birth and core aspects of humanism, but you
may be wondering about recent evidence for this belief in self
and the spread of individuality. The rise of individualism has
been studied by Jean Twenge and colleagues. They found a 42%
increase in personal pronoun use between 1960 and 2008, with
individualistic phrases also increasing.43 Similarly, in the 1980s,
songs switched to using ‘I’ more than ‘you’.44 Where people used
to be more inclined to think and sing about others, they started to
sing about themselves. Nowadays, Western culture favours an in-
dividualistic identity and there is an emphasis on the expression of
individualism and independence in the pursuit of self-fulfilment.
This is accompanied by a universal assumption that Western values
apply across the whole world.45 Modern life and mass consumption
is creating an epidemic of narcissism that is making us more self-
centred with an excessive interest in our own needs.46 Researchers
are now exploring ‘collective narcissism’ where whole in-groups
of people believe they are not receiving sufficient recognition and
deserve special treatment and validation. This is associated with
superficial virtue and hostility towards those outside the group.47
Perhaps ‘I think, therefore I am’ is truer now than it has ever been,
and that could be bad news for nature. The modern conception of
self, an epidemic of narcissism and people viewing themselves as
superior and separate from the natural world are major barriers to
solving environmental problems.48
With such a powerful belief in the self and individuality
throughout Western culture, it’s no wonder it feels so real and can
become addictive. William Van Gordon and colleagues provide
an enlightening account of ‘ontological addiction theory’ and
‘emptiness’. These ideas stand at odds with the dominant Western
worldview, so can be tricky to grasp and explain. I’ve tried to keep
it simple, and I hope by the end of this paragraph you will see the
value of it. Ontological addiction theory suggests that ‘human
beings are prone to forming implausible beliefs concerning the
way they think they exist, and that these beliefs can become
addictive leading to functional impairments and mental illness’.49
 The Great Theft  9

Ontological addiction is the unwillingness to abandon the belief

in the ‘self ’ or ‘I’. It is a Buddhist perspective where things do not
exist independently, which includes the self, the ‘me’ inside our
heads.50 Rather than existing independently, everything, including
humans, exists in a relative sense and is dependent on all other
phenomena. The Buddhist term for this perspective where things
are ‘empty’ and dependent on interconnectedness with others, is
‘emptiness’.51 Within this philosophy, a tree exists in reliance upon
an ecology of many things such as water, which in turn is reliant
on rain, such that if one component were absent, the tree would
not exist. Likewise, the tree is essential to the existence of other
phenomena. The tree is inherently ‘empty’ of a self but ‘full’ of the
natural world.
The view that the independent self does not exist challenges
Western psychological theories that suggest the self exists and is
important for our self-image, self-worth and wellbeing.52 At the
centre of our existence, this powerful sense of self creates a world
where the rest of life is peripheral.53 When nature is peripheral,
interactions with it can reaffirm selfhood and further secure the
sense of self, creating a feedback loop. This leads to the existence of
the self becoming a firm belief, silencing the idea that we are one
integral part of the wider natural world. With a firm belief in the
self, the aim of an activity is likely to be to satisfy oneself, when in
actual fact we are ‘empty’ without the rest of nature. The self con-
sequently becomes a ‘thirst that can never be quenched’, and there
can be no lasting happiness, just pursuit of things. This focus on
‘me, mine and I’ eventually restricts the awareness of the present
moment, which, as we’ll see later, can help build a close relation-
ship with nature. Understanding and cultivating ‘emptiness’ helps
form a more accurate view of reality where the self is inseparable
from the natural environment – when all things are empty, the
world becomes full.54
To help explain a little more, Charles Eisenstein provides a
useful account in his book The Ascent of Humanity.55 Propelled by
science, the spread of the ‘I think, therefore I am’ philosophy of
René Descartes created the independent ‘Cartesian self ’: the ‘me’
that is fundamental to modern life. Yet evidence from Buddhism,
10  Reconnection

but also neuroscience, suggests it is an illusion and does not exist

inside us. Just as we are biological creatures within a wider natural
world, our feelings of mind and meaning come via our actions in
the wider world. So, me-ness, if there is such a word, emerges from
relationships with others; the key point being that none of us are
separate individuals, and we all depend upon each other – without
you, there is no me. Eisenstein suggests that rather than life being
about ‘survival of the fittest’, where one species or individual is
set against another, it is more cooperative. What matters more,
as we will see in Chapter 4, is relationships. The relationships
within nature are a wonderful thing. It is interesting to note that
in The Descent of Man, Darwin regularly used the word ‘love’ and
explained that he had previously attributed too much to the term
‘survival of the fittest’ and he was not referring to the victory of one
over another.56 Cooperative and close relationships fit well with the
earlier accounts of nature as provider. The Industrial Revolution
introduced a race to consume natural resources – such that modern
life can feel like a competition to know more, to walk further, run
faster, climb, cross, conquer and consume. Hence, the misuse of
the term ‘survival of the fittest’. The different perspectives on the
self, introduced above, can highlight alternatives to the dualistic
model of a mechanistic world.

Alternative philosophies
While Western thinking was driven by a dualistic outlook and the
search for laws that govern nature, Eastern philosophies focused
on harmonious principles based on the natural world being one
entity. A world in which humans were more embedded rather than
separated – thinking that is now consistent with recent science
that is finally taking steps away from mechanistic processes and
towards integrated biological systems.57
Chinese thinkers rarely mistook ideas for facts, and they saw how
nature worked harmoniously and effortlessly, the days and seasons
came and went, and the river flowed.58 Philosophies such as Taoism
extolled working with the flow of nature rather than purposeful
action against it. In The Patterning Instinct, Jeremy Lent offers a rare
 The Great Theft  11

insight into the philosophy of the Chinese Song dynasty, which,

he argues, is highly relevant to modern environmental challenges.
Before and after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, Song
thinkers linked mind and body, reason and emotion. This coherent
theory used terminology that is lacking in English. The heart and
mind, Xin, were combined as the site of feeling and reason, with
that relationship extended to all living systems within a universe
governed by principles and dynamic patterns of cohesion, termed
Li. An understanding of Li was a sense of love, Ren, arising from the
engaged realisation of connectedness to all other beings. Human’s
spiritual goal and destiny was not to transcend or repress emotions
but to honour and harmonise them with the wider natural world,
and realise and feel part of it. Ren was a route to optimising one’s
own life and existing in harmony with others and wider nature.59 As
we’ll see, this destiny parallels the modern psychological construct
of nature connectedness. Such harmony of emotions can also be
compared to current models of affect regulation that explain how
nature helps to manage our moods and keep us well.
Although this Neo-Confucian worldview may seem unscien-
tific, Lent explains how this dynamic interconnectedness and being
within a larger whole is seen in modern systems biology, from cells
to ecosystems. Indeed, although dualistic thinking dominates our
everyday outlook and discourse, well-known thinkers concur with
the more holistic approach. Albert Einstein wrote:

A human being, is part of a whole, called by

us ‘the Universe,’ a part limited in time and
space. He experiences himself, his thoughts
and feelings as something separated from the
rest – a kind of optical delusion of his con-
sciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison
for us, restricting us to our personal desires
and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this
prison by widening our circle of compassion
to embrace all living creatures and the whole
nature in its beauty.60
12  Reconnection

The Song dynasty fell to a Mongol incursion in 1279. The Neo-

Confucian worldview did eventually become established in the
Chinese state by the sixteenth century. However, over time some
of the pioneering thinking became lost, and the philosophy was
blamed for the Western colonialism of imperial China.61
More harmonious worldviews can be found elsewhere in the
world. The Bishnois, a Hindu community in India, have been
referred to as ‘born nature lovers’, and South Asian and Indian
religions also suggest greater unity between human and nature’s
wellbeing through the concept of Dharma.62 Even when faith has
dualistic elements, there can be a strong ethos of nature conserva-
tion, with nature being held in high regard. For example, in the
Bahá’í tradition, there is a distinction between matter and spirit,
yet also a focus on unity and oneness of all things.63 Rather than
dualism being fundamentally flawed, it is perhaps the dualism of
the dominant Western worldview that is problematic.
There were alternative philosophies in Europe too. Spinoza
offered a more emotional and relational understanding that
combined God and nature, mind and body.64 In several respects,
the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was unusual, but
notably for us in that he absorbed Indian thinking and its core
principle that the free individual is a mirage that conceals reality.
Schopenhauer saw that we are at one with other animals, driven
by bodily needs in a world where everything is related.65 The
Romantic movement also rejected mechanistic metaphors and
saw a world alive with emotions rather than functional objects.
However, the strength of that argument perhaps furthered the
divide between emotion and reason. Nature lovers can be seen as
romantics, forever in confrontation with rational mechanists who
seek to remove emotion from learning about nature.66
For some, nature, as a dynamic living system with many in-
terconnections, could never be fully understood. Such ideas
can be seen in the formation of phenomenology in the early
twentieth century. Phenomenology rejects scientific objectivity
and recognises humans as embedded in the wider natural world.
Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher
who highlighted the interconnection between the perceived and
 The Great Theft  13

perceiver, and how humans are embedded in the landscape. He

wrote of the human body as ‘the vehicle of being in the world’ and
‘the Flesh’ as a collective term for the flesh of the human body and
the flesh of the wider world.67 Phenomenology moves us away from
a goal-directed focus to a holistic worldview without our boxes for
‘human’ and ‘nature’ where people are separate from nature and
dominant over it.
As we’ve seen, the idea that we inhabit a shared place in the
natural world is often an ancient worldview, ousted by science.
However, ideas of embodied cognition and extended mind have
recently emerged, where our minds and the wider environment
operate as a coupled system.68 Such philosophical and psycho-
logical arguments firmly embed us in the environment. More and
more, researchers are highlighting the integration between biology,
phenomenology and the sciences of mind.69 Humans are biological
beings evolved to make sense of the natural world we’re embedded
within.
A little earlier than phenomenology, the science of ecology
also focused on relationships, examining all the self-organising
systems within systems that form the natural world. It explores
a complex network of nature where one change can have an un-
expectedly large effect elsewhere. Simple rules of cause and effect
don’t apply. Yet, in science, we ask questions that require studies
to control variables to isolate causality. A systems view is more
inclusive of the relationships within the natural world and helps
understand the complex nature of reality. Relationships matter.
Nature is embedded, interdependent and dynamic. Fixed laws do
not apply. And that includes humans – a reality at a distance from
the dominant metaphors that form our thinking today.
During the second half of the twentieth century, relational
thinking developed in areas such as cybernetics, where humans
are embodied as part of a living system where one part can never
control the whole. Gregory Bateson (1904–80), the anthropologist,
social scientist and systems theorist, wrote that we should not be
working towards control based on our imperfect understanding
of the natural world. Instead, we should think about how we can
work towards improving reconnection with nature and the wider
14  Reconnection

ecology. Before the current environmental movement developed,

Bateson argued that ecological destruction was being caused by
our conscious purpose and our ways of knowing and seeing the
world, which separate us from nature, writing, ‘We are not outside
the ecology for which we plan’.70 To Bateson, wildlife and plants
were systems through which matter continually passed. Those
systems did not have boundaries, but rather interfaces, such that
ultimately all is one. Bateson felt that relationships should be at the
centre of our epistemology and ontology. As we’ve noted, this is at
odds with the dominant worldview, and Bateson saw remedies for
this flawed way of thinking in the arts, in aesthetics and in contact
with the natural world.71
The dualistic perspective of the separated ‘human’ and ‘nature’
can be seen as a defining feature of modernity, and it is clear that
modern humans have caused damage to the natural world. Nature
would be in a different state without us. The reality is that humanity
exists embedded within nature. Great thinkers such as Einstein
knew this, and modern scientists such as Sir Bob Watson, lead of
the IPBES global assessment, talk of the need to tune into and form
a closer relationship with nature to address the existential crises of
climate warming and biodiversity loss.72 Yet that human relation-
ship with the rest of nature is not a widespread discipline and is a
surprisingly limited topic of study. When the human–nature rela-
tionship with nature is broken to the extent that civilisation as we
know it is under threat, what could be more important?
At our great seats of learning, degree courses generally fall into
studying humans, their activities, processes and technologies, or
nature. Approximately 60% of undergraduates at Oxbridge study
humans in a range of topics from medicine, classics, psychology,
philosophy, history and language to human activities such as law
and economics. Human technologies such as computer science
and engineering account for a further 20%. The remaining 20%
seek to further their understanding of the natural world in subjects
such as biology, geology, physics and natural sciences. These
courses tend to focus on humans or nature in a dualistic fashion.
Of course, others have highlighted modern fractured thinking: ‘a
single, underlying fault upon which the entire edifice of Western
 The Great Theft  15

thought and science has been built – namely that which separates
the “two worlds” of humanity and nature’, as described by Tim
Ingold. This is a fracture that divides disciplines, with those related
to the human and its products on one side and the natural world
on the other.73
Within these degree courses, there are modules where that
essential relationship between people and the rest of nature may
be considered. They occur, for example, within anthropology,
philosophy and geography, but these are very wide disciplines within
themselves. There’s also an environmental branch of psychology,
which may well focus on the built environment rather than the
human–nature relationship. Either way, environmental psychology
is not a core undergraduate topic in psychology. Similarly, environ-
mental history is rarely a focus of history programmes. When rela-
tionships are studied, they are those between countries, and within
modern societies. The question of ‘what it is to be human’ tends to
focus on social and cultural relationships rather than the relation-
ship with the natural world.
The fracture between ‘human’ and ‘nature’ that defines our
modern world can even be detected in the solutions proposed
for the environmental crisis. For instance, the UN Sustainable
Development Goals can be seen as dualistic. Some focus on
humans, such as ensuring health and education or ending poverty
and hunger. Others focus on nature, such as conserving marine
and terrestrial ecosystems. However, none of the seventeen focus
specifically on improving the relationship between humans and
the rest of the natural world.74
In sum, a revolution in the way we think released a revolution
in science and industry, and a revolution in the exploitation of
natural resources. Humans broke free of the bonds of nature,
creating a fracture so profound that its separation seeps into our
everyday language. With a box created for humans and another
created for nature, it became unnatural to think in terms of rela-
tionships. Humans celebrated their greatness and became addicted
to individualism. Nature was diminished. At its best, the dualistic
scientific approach has delivered many great advances and
benefits. Yet the illusion of separation hid ongoing relationships.
16  Reconnection

All the time, the natural world has been reacting on a global scale.
Humanity is finding it was never in control, that it is part of a re-
lationship dynamic. The forces unleashed by pumping one part
of the natural system (coal) into another (the atmosphere) could
be disastrous for the civilisation our technological advances built.
Similarly, the destruction and pollution of the natural habitat is
breaking the ecosystem that all life depends upon.
A question now is whether further science and technological
development can and should be used in an attempt to control and
rebalance the complex systems of nature. Or do we reduce control
and find solutions through living more harmoniously with nature?
As we will see, there is a potential harmony to be found that could
bring forth meaning in life, the meaning originally promised by
the technological progress and wealth that are harming the natural
world. The difficulty is that the fracture is so ingrained that it
constrains solutions. So profound is the split between people and
nature that we struggle to see the relationship as a tangible target
for action. Western patterns of thinking are likely to centre on
technological solutions that focus on the symptoms of the broken
relationship – rather than the root cause itself, and the forging of a
new bond between people and the rest of nature.