SOME PEOPLE DIDN’T believe in the white deer of Mission Hills until they saw it, usually at dusk, slipping through the canyon chaparral. For a decade, the little deer haunted an old urban neighborhood in San Diego, and the people who saw it came to love it. They named it Lucy. After an animal control officer, in a misguided effort to protect it, shot the deer with a tranquilizer gun and it died, over two hundred men, women, and children came to Lucy’s funeral at a nearby park. In these hard-edged years, such sentiment may seem strange; to some, even silly. As it turned out, the deer wasn’t even truly wild, but an escapee from one of the last urban farms. Even when that information was made public, people in surrounding neighborhoods, including my own, continued to talk about the deer for years, almost as if it were still alive.
To me, the tale illustrates the deep yearning that many urban dwellers feel, a desire to be part of a community that extends beyond human neighbors to the fellow creatures among us. That yearning, acted upon, can improve our lives in countless ways by surrounding us with a larger sense of belonging. In 1995, Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, in his seminal book, Bowling Alone, described the increasing isolation of life, how the associations that once held us together have fallen away. He pointed to plummeting membership in PTAs, Boy Scouts, and yes, bowling leagues. He used a variety of methods to measure “social capital,” a term that describes how well people in a community look out for one another.
Since the publication of his book, Putnam’s methodologies have been challenged. Some social psychologists point to the rise of other forms of community, such as book clubs and Internet-based social networking. Nonetheless, Putnam’s phrase has entered the language and serves as a useful concept. Now it’s time to broaden the social capital hypothesis to human/nature social capital, whereby we are made stronger, richer, through our experiences not only with humans but with our other neighbors—animals and plants, and the wilder and more native, the better.
Until recently, researchers seldom, if ever, considered exposure to nature a factor in avoiding social alienation or as an important ingredient in the formation of social capital. Building on studies suggesting that wilderness adventures increase participants’ capacity to cooperate and trust others, a newer body of research reveals an even broader impact.
Scientists at the University of Sheffield in the UK have found that the more species that live in a park, the greater the psychological benefits to human beings. “Our research shows that maintaining biodiversity levels is important … not only for conservation, but also to enhance the quality of life for city residents,” said Richard Fuller of the Department of Animal and Plant Science at Sheffield. In related work, researchers at the University of Rochester, in New York, report that exposure to the natural environment leads people to nurture close relationships with fellow human beings, to value community, and to be more generous with money. By contrast, the more intensely people in the study focused on “artificial elements,” the higher they rated wealth and fame. Participants were exposed to natural or man-made settings by looking at images on computer screens or by working in a lab with or without plants. “Previous studies have shown the health benefits of nature range from more rapid healing to stress reduction to improved mental performance and vitality,” one of the researchers, Richard M. Ryan, noted. “Now we’ve found nature brings out more social feelings, more value for community and close relationships. People are more caring when they’re around nature.”1
Andrew Przybylski, a coauthor of the Rochester study, offered one explanation: the natural world connects people to their authentic selves.2 Humans evolved in hunter-and-gatherer societies that depended on mutuality for survival, Przybylski said, thus the evolution of our “authentic selves” is connected to our biophilia. (“Right now, I feel like I can be myself,” said one participant in the study, when focused on nature.) Natural environments may also encourage introspection and may provide a psychologically safe haven from the man-made pressures of society. “Nature in a way strips away the artifices of society that alienate us from one another,” said Przybylski. The authors said the findings have implications for urban planning and architecture. Netta Weinstein, the study’s lead author, suggested that people can also take advantage of the hidden benefits of nature by surrounding themselves with indoor plants, natural objects, and images of the natural world.3
More contact with nature within cities can also, in some settings, reduce violence. Research conducted in a Chicago public housing development compared the lives of women living in apartment buildings with no greenery outside to those who lived in identical buildings—but with trees and greenery immediately outside. Those living near the trees exhibited fewer aggressive and violent acts against their partners. The researchers linked violence to low scores on tests of concentration, which can be caused by high levels of mental fatigue. This study demonstrated that women living in housing with no greenery outside were both more fatigued and more aggressive.4 The same researchers, at the University of Illinois, have also shown that play areas in urban neighborhoods with more trees have fewer incidences of violence, possibly because the trees draw a higher proportion of responsible adults.5
Human/nature social capital is boosted by the botanical, but animals, like the deer in Mission Hills, also do their part.
Lucy Hollembeak was in her seventies when I first met her. I was eighteen then, and working on a small-town newspaper. Sometimes I would walk to her little house in Arkansas City, Kansas, at dusk, and we would talk far into the night. She was a woman of the prairie who had lived through her share of tragedies; after her husband died, she lived alone for three decades, by choice. She was in her nineties the last time I saw her.
Nearing the end of her life, she was amazed and awed and touched by the smallest things. “My sons say I can get more out of watching a butterfly than anybody they know,” she told me. As long as she could maintain her kinship with other species, she did not feel alone.
“Simply getting people together, outside, working in a caring capacity with nature, perhaps even intergenerationally, may be as important as the healing of nature itself,” suggests Rick Kool, a professor in the School of Environment and Sustainability at Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia. “Perhaps, in trying to ‘heal the world’ through restoration, we end up healing ourselves.”
Indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests that social capital is increased when people get together to improve or protect the environment in their communities. According to a 2008 comprehensive review of scientific literature conducted by researchers at Australia’s Deakin University, when young families were engaged in such activities, “significant social benefits were found to flow from that involvement, including the widening of their social networks.” Volunteers working together to care for land “experienced and contributed to higher levels of social capital” and noted “the ‘symbiotic’ relationship between social and natural capital.”6
The Western definition of civilization is simply too narrow. At the center of an ancient Chinese view of civilization is the notion of wen, which at its root means patterns or markings, like patterns formed by a tangle of branches or the patterns of bird feathers and tree bark. (Wen also means cultural or literary values, and was a much-discussed term that was especially important in Chinese governance from 960 to about 1279 CE, during the Song dynasty.) Nature explains itself through these patterns. From wen comes:
wen-ren—the civil and literate person
wen-xue—literature
wen-ya—refinement
wen-hua—culture
wen-ming—civilization
Our current concept of civilization, which stems from the words citizen and city, is bound to the human-made environment; Chinese tradition has it coming from nature. (The existence of this older philosophy does not suggest that China’s modern cities are more nature-friendly than anywhere else. There, and in other modern cultures, the work of civilizing our urban life through nature is beginning anew.) As we’ll see, building human/nature social capital offers multiple benefits, among them: productive work for people of all ages; new or deepened relationships with neighbors or networks of people who share an interest in urban wildlife or urban agriculture; a social relationship with other species that enriches daily life. Through the restoration of species other than our own comes the restoration of our community—and our families. A caveat: nature alone does not civilize us. Adding more nature to our lives improves our civilization only in the context of personal, social, and economic justice.
One of the advantages of living in most cities is human cultural diversity; by applying the Nature Principle, our homes, our neighborhoods, our cities can become more biodiverse, more interesting places to live. Species diversity, like cultural diversity, enriches our lives and gives us hope.
Building human/nature social capital in our cities can restore optimism among even the most discouraged conservationists. Suzanna Kruger, a seventh-grade life science teacher at a small public middle school in Seaside, a town on the north coast of Oregon, tells how, in the summer of 2002, a connection to another species gave her a sense of hope. She was attending graduate school at Portland State University, at the time, and working as a field assistant for a study of the diversity and abundance of small mammals in remnant urban green spaces within the Urban Growth Boundary in the Portland Metro area. Twice a day she and her colleague checked 156 live traps, tagged the ears of any creatures they caught, and released them. Mostly, they caught deer mice, and sometimes voles and shrews.
“One day we were having a very gloomy conversation about the destruction of the Earth’s environment, the type that biologists and biology students frequently fall into,” she recalls. The conversation had lasted most of the day. They were working at Marshall Park in southwest Portland. Midway through the collection, she picked up a trap and felt a creature inside. By its movement, she could tell it was not a mouse. She poked open the top door and a little head, like a snake’s, popped up and stared into her face. She quickly closed the door. It was a short-tailed weasel. “Our gloom-and-doom conversation stopped immediately and we celebrated finding such a tiny predator not two miles from downtown Portland. Later that summer we caught northern flying squirrels. Everyone I tell—’Hey, did you know that you are living with flying squirrels and weasels in your backyard?’—is astounded. No one knows this. They know about coyotes and deer and raccoons, sure, but not these small nocturnal creatures that are either up in the canopy or under the litter layer.
“I came to question the idea that to have a ‘wilderness experience’ one must be separated entirely from other human beings in a non-human-impacted environment,” she adds. Though she has led numerous wilderness treks for young people, and likes being able to “leave the city behind and get up into the craggy places above timber-line,” she values her summers as a field assistant in the Portland Metro area just as much.
Mike Houck, executive director of the Urban Greenspaces Institute in Portland, has helped revive or create green spaces there, and has published several editions of his book Wild in the City, which is about the wildlife within the Portland city limits. “When I started working as an urban naturalist at the Audubon Society of Portland, I was told by local and regional planners that there was no room for nature in the city, that nature was ‘out there,’ “he says. Portland Parks and Recreation was preparing to bulldoze what later became a regional prize, Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge, “a 160-acre wetland in the heart of the city, where I’ve seen over one hundred species of birds over the year, and last year witnessed five immature bald eagles in one tree.” In 1980, conservation groups ridiculed Houck for wasting time and resources on what he was told was a “totally trashed” environment. The older conservation theories, he believes, were too attached to Henry David Thoreau’s aphorism: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Conservation was focused almost exclusively on wilderness areas, agricultural lands, old-growth forests, and the marine environment.
Today, Houck represents a sea change in thinking. He recommends a twenty-first-century complement to the protection of wild lands. “In livable cities is preservation of the wild, he says.” Building human/ nature social capital is at the heart of his work—and could be applied to urban regions everywhere, bringing cities to life by bringing more life into cities.
As an extension of his advocacy, Houck leads field trips for Portlanders who want to meet their local urban wildlife. When I spoke with him, he had just returned from escorting twenty people to a local wildlife refuge. “All of them were waxing eloquent about the experience they’d just had,” he said. “They watched an immature Cooper’s hawk preen for fifteen minutes. They were blown away to see critters that they couldn’t imagine live in the heart of the city.” Since the 1970s, the Audubon Society of Portland has grown from about one thousand members to over eleven thousand members, “mostly due to the fact that we started doing conservation work in their neighborhoods.”
Houck has witnessed firsthand the impact of urban wildlife on the social fabric of the city. “People feel that they are part of a new family. Some of the members of that family are people, some are critters. People develop elaborate walking paths through the city, and they come to have a relationship with the animals they see. They come to know the kingfisher who they see every morning.” Houck added, “I had a wonderful feeling this morning, as I walked. I saw the Anna’s hummingbird that I’ve seen almost every day for the last three years. I saw him when I stepped out of my car. Anyone who had a camera would have caught me with this huge smile on my face—because there was my buddy.”
The bird was not a buddy to have a beer with, as Houck might say, nor a friend in the human sense, but a neighbor at once familiar and alien, known but mysterious. “With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange,” wrote the British critic and writer John Berger. “Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.”7
Researchers have yet to determine just how deeply the nature, meaning both animals and plants, of a new place can seep into a person’s consciousness—if it can find a residence as deep in the soul as the first landscape experienced. But surely we can grow closer to a place, and the life that inhabits it, by deciding to do so. To paraphrase the old song: If you can’t be with the land you love, love the land you’re with.
La Jolla, California, lost a tree one day, but perhaps only Elaine Brooks noticed. She had moved west from Michigan in 1962, but had never quite adjusted to California. Still, in her spare time, Brooks, a marine biologist and community college teacher, studied and cared for the last piece of open natural land in that seaside California town. The patch of canyon and grassland and woods, forgotten in time, nourished her, even after construction began on multimillion-dollar homes crammed into the 1.7 acres along West Muirlands Drive, chewing away the elbow of the patch. In three days, a single bulldozer “removed just about everything that had taken fifty or more years to grow there,” Brooks told me that week. For some reason, a camphor tree survived, like one of those freakish points of light—a school, an intact chimney—that remains after a tornado has rummaged across the plains.
In the three years that followed, Brooks often walked past the stunted little camphor tree, stopping to photograph it and all the changes taking place around it. But one Sunday, on her walk along Muirlands to the grocery, she realized that something had changed. “The tree was gone, not gone really, but it was splintered into a crumpled heap at the curb mixed with mounds of dirt and slabs of concrete, wrested into a pile.”
A cynic might say that a camphor tree is relatively insignificant; it does not contribute to the economy or the high-tech future, and is replaceable, like the rest of us.
People can become deeply attached to trees, even ones like Brooks’s camphor tree, neither native nor particularly special. And some trees are magnificent: consider the giant Moreton Bay fig tree of Spring Valley, south of here, the object of a community drive to protect it from the axeman: or, to the north, the Tasmanian blue gum eucalyptus of Escondido, which stands more than ten stories high, the focus of a fifteen-year community effort to protect it—a campaign that survived even the death of a homeless man who fell from the blue gum’s highest branches one December morning; or, to the east, the colonnade of Ramona’s red gum eucalyptus trees, planted by the children of pioneers in 1910, which, like soldiers in a slow-motion battle, are falling to an invading insect known as the lerp psyllid. The town hopes to replant the row with strong young trees, but the future takes a long time to grow.
Brooks believed that the vegetation that surrounds us “for any length of time completes a kind of transkingdom emotional graft.” That graft is easily severed. “It used to take a man with a shovel and an ax or crosscut saw and a team of horses a day or so to cut down a sizable tree, and with the longer time it took, there was also time for reflection about whether or not it was a good thing to do,” she said. Yet, standing over what was left of the camphor tree of La Jolla, Brooks told me, she felt a stirring. “What was remarkable to me was that there was this lingering cloud of camphor odor, a rich old scent that just hung in the air over the exposed roots and the wilting leaves, released from the root tissue in the destruction of the bulldozers. Although the carcass was hauled away days earlier, you could still get a whiff of it as you walked by.” Just before the camphor tree was removed, she took a few cuttings and carried them home.