(which no other creature can do) to our pleasure in bodily adornment, from men’s attraction to slim-waisted women (who appear to be not pregnant and thus available for mating) to women’s attraction to high-status men (who can better defend them) – even to our preference for certain types of landscape.
And there, it gets more fascinating still. Surveys have demonstrated that, shown different landscape images, people overwhelmingly favour one form in particular, one of open grassland interspersed with trees and a view to the horizon, and if possible water, and animal and bird life; and it has been suggested that this closely resembles the tropical African savannas on which Homo sapiens evolved, before spreading out across the rest of the world. (The idea is known as the savanna hypothesis.) The reason that many thousands of years ago we might have developed attachments to certain landscape features so powerful that they became hard-wired in our genes and are with us today, is simple: it was necessary for survival. The hunter-gatherers of the Pleistocene were constantly on the move – their existence was memorably characterised by Gordon Orians, originator of the savanna hypothesis, as ‘a camping trip that lasts a lifetime’ – and choosing which new landscapes to enter and which to avoid must have been an absolutely critical decision, a never-ending process of weighing up dangers against opportunities, of balancing the possible presence of predators (and hostile humans) against the chance of new food resources and shelter. Thus, many specific aspects of nature which aided survival – trees which branch close to the ground, undulations in the landscape which offer view-points, the presence of large mammals – evoke an instinctive and favourable response in us still. The profounder implication of it all is that, in more general terms, there persists,deep inside us, deep in our genes, an immensely powerful, innate bond with the natural world.
The notion that we are part of nature, and nature is part of us, is of course not new; numerous pre-industrial societies, from Native Americans to Australian aborigines, have seen the world in this way (with their ways of imagining taken up by the modern Green movement), and many, many individuals have felt it, and often given it expression. But such notions of our unity with the biosphere have by no means entered mainstream thought, certainly among those people who administer the modern world, who make its decisions and run its governments and its corporations, and the countless millions who take their cue from them: rather, whatever their intrinsic value may be, such concepts have been largely ghettoised as anthropological or spiritual curios. The point about the idea of our bond with the natural world which comes out of evolutionary psychology – call it the bond of the fifty thousand generations, if you like – is that it is of a different order, for if it is true, as I believe it is, then it is not just spiritually true, it is also empirically true. It actually exists. It is a matter of fact.
But what might it mean to us? Powerful or not, might it be no more than a mere curiosity, a redundant evolutionary bequest that just happens to be there, like nipples on men? On the contrary, the bond seems increasingly to be of enormous practical importance for our physiological and psychological well-being, a phenomenon illustrated by the burgeoning research on the links between nature and human well-being, physical and mental. The study of this really took off in April 1984, when the prestigious journal Science carried a paper with one of those titles which, from time to time, make people around the world instantly sit up and take notice. It said: ‘View through a window may influence recovery from surgery.’ Its author, Roger Ulrich, an American architect who specialised in hospital design, had found that over nine years, patients in a hospital in Pennsylvaniawho underwent
M. Stratton, Skeleton Key
Glimpses of Louisa (v2.1)
Barbara Siegel, Scott Siegel