By Robin Lyons / Full360 Columnist

As a child, looking around at pavements and cities and the like, a thought came to me. It was an image of a concrete plaza that stretched to the horizon, and in the center, a small singular fountain, with dolphins cramming themselves into the space. I asked myself, “Will there be any water left soon?”

It was an infantile thought, thinking that such extremes would be met, but it did reveal a truth about the world – and problems we are already experiencing.

Humans are animals. This isn’t an exaggeration or a metaphorical statement – we are. And that goes beyond scientific classification, too.

We are biological entities who grew in the cradles of savannahs and forests. Yet now, we find ourselves in jungles not of wood, but of concrete. The bodies and brains and spirit we cultivated over millions of years is now in a totally alien environment. One has to wonder if this is any good for us.

As a matter of fact, it isn’t.

In a 2010 study published in Psychiatrica Scandinavica titled “The current status of urban-rural differences in psychiatric disorders,” it was found that the prevalence of psychiatric disorders was found to be significantly higher in urban areas than in rural areas.

Even if it was found that urban environments have no negative effect, what we do know is that nature in general has a positive effect. And why wouldn’t it? No matter how many skyscrapers we build, or forests we pave over, or lakes we pollute, we grew up among the trees and grasses. It is where we are supposed to be.

The idea that nature is an innate part of existence, and that we have a built-in positive response to it, is an idea presented in the Biophilia Hypothesis. Biophilia is a term first used by  psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in  The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. The term is defined as “the passionate love of life and all that is alive.”

Later, Edward O. Wilson, a biologist, wrote Biophilia, a work proposing that this attraction to living things has a genetic basis; making it a more fundamental part of existence.  While still deemed a hypothesis, the idea has been popularized and elaborated on since, and the belief that a strong attraction to life and lifelike processes is rudimentary in human psychology is commonly accepted.

There are numerous studies that find both surface-level mood increases, and deeper psychological effects, like a reduction in stress levels, from even short experiences in natural environments. Even just having a house plant can help. If a humble little plant in a pot is enough for us to start feeling better, I’m not sure much else needs to be said about why the Biophilia hypothesis has at least some merit.

And yet, nobody seems to care. Seemingly no thought or caution is put into planning our cities as it concerns green spaces. We seem content with freezing flowers in stone and blotting out the sun with glass and metal. Worse yet, outside our cities, what is still wild is dwindling into nothingness. Extinction rates have climbed to over a hundred times more than the baseline extinction rate – and its safe to say that humans are to blame. At this rate, what will be left for us to enjoy in a thousand years? A hundred? Just ten? Will we be reaching something like the infinite concrete plaza that I imagined as a child?

This is where the entire field of conservation comes in.

Conserving what we still have left is an important issue for many practical reasons; protecting ecosystem health ultimately protects our physical health. If we lose our pollinator species, we won’t have food to eat. If we lose our wetlands, then we won’t have ecosystems that protect our waterways from pollution by absorbing toxins. If we lose forests, we lose lumber.

But is the preservation of things we inherently love not enough of a reason? It has been argued that the Giant Panda plays no key role in its ecosystems, but the cultural impact of the panda is far enough of a reason to keep it around. All that you really need to do is ask; would you want a world without this organism? Do you want humans to have caused a problem and not have solved it?

And yet further, lacking these organisms that we are pushing to extinction is not just a practical issue, or a cultural issue, but a spiritual one, too. Imagine yourself in a world without nature. No parks, no forests, no swamps, no praires. Maybe we could find a way to keep going as the world collapses into dust around us – but we would have taken the final step away from the world we knew and loved, and our mental and spiritual health would fall into ruin.

There is an inherent love of living things in humans – be a human and protect those things.

Sources for this article included works from PubMed, PLOS ONE, and Psychiatrica Scandinavica.