The paradox of Biophilia.

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: Note from a World Watcher

Edward O. Wilson wasn't the first to use the term "biophilia," but he brought it into popular discussion. His interest, as reflected in Biophilia (Harvard University Press, 1984) and with Stephen R. Kellert in The Biophilia Hypothesis (Island Press, 1993), appears not to be simply a pursuit of dispassionate science. There's also a moral pursuit involved. Wilson sees biophilia--our often obscured but nonetheless hard-wired love of nature--as an important clue to how biodiversity can be saved. If we can get back in touch with just how deep an emotional attachment to nature we really have, we might be more consciously motivated to refrain from destroying it.

But love of nature, like love of people, is fraught with treachery. Just as people who care about each other often hurt each other, those whose culture has been built on developing a relationship with the land often hurt the land. It's irrational, but plainly visible. Whether the Sumerian, Indus, Mayan, and other ancient cultures that destroyed their own land knew that they were doing so is not clear. But subsequent civilizations, which presumably knew what had happened to those earlier ones, continued to inflict the same abuses--allowing deforestation, erosion, soil depletion, salinization, and contamination to gradually degrade and destroy the land that meant so much to them. And that kind of destruction continues. We love the land most when we have conquered it. Why that is so remains one of the key mysteries of sustainability.

Oscar Wilde once wrote, "Each man kills the thing he loves." It was part of a poem he composed while in prison, the "Ballad of Reading Gaol," about his reflections on a fellow prisoner who had murdered his wife. The poem isn't widely remembered, but that line has been often quoted. It resonates widely, and many literary critics, philosophers, and psychologists have speculated about why it does. A common theme is that love too easily transmutes into a desire to possess and to control. And that, in turn, precipitates backlash from the object of the love, who may chafe under such a constricting bond. When the suitor is rebuffed, the desire for possession may be angrily transmuted into a desire for conquest, which may quickly escalate into violence.

Whatever the explanation, Wilde's comment seems all too good a description of our relationship with nature: we love it...