TodayElectronic nature just isn’t the same
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Rich Lewis
Article RatingEdward G. Robinson’s last role was as Sol Roth in the chilling 1973 science-fiction movie, “Soylent Green.”
Set in the year 2022, the movie depicts a planet ruined by pollution and overpopulation. Roth is an old man who remembers the world before natural foods, wildlife and resources became virtually extinct. In his (and Robinson’s) final scene, a disillusioned Roth voluntarily enters a euthanasia center and dies while watching nature films on a wall-sized screen. Through Roth’s death, the main character, a cop named Robert Thorn (played by Charlton Heston), fully realizes what the world has lost in terms of beauty, bounty and meaning.
I have been reminded of that heartbreaking scene twice in recent months.
Once was in February, when I wrote a column (“Virtual is nice, but real is much nicer”) about a study showing an 18 to 25 percent drop since 1981 in the number of Americans engaging in various outdoor activities at national and state parks and other public lands.
The authors of the study identified “videophilia” — or the love of video — as a major contributor to this sharp and continuing turn away from the outdoors. So much nature imagery is now available to us on television and over the Internet that we are no longer required to leave our living rooms in order to “enjoy” a mountain vista or “thrill” at the sight of a moose.
“Virtual nature, defined as nature experienced vicariously through electronic means ... appears to directly compete with time previously allocated to more beneficial, direct contact with the outdoors,” the authors wrote.
The danger in this, they concluded, was that it will be harder to involve people in conservation efforts if they have no first-hand experience with nature, because those who don’t make a place in their lives for nature will have little appreciation of its value and little passion for protecting it. Children are especially vulnerable to this loss of attachment to nature.
“Soylent Green” shows where that indifference can lead us, and I was reminded again this week of Sol Roth’s final moments by a new study that looks at the human side of the equation.
The study (available online at http://depts.washington.edu/hints/publications/520_kahn.pdf) was conducted by researchers at the University of Washington and published in the current issue of the Journal of Environmental Psychology. It points to the potential damage we are doing to ourselves as “virtual nature” is increasingly substituted for “real nature.”
In the study, 90 college students were recruited to participate in an experiment that involved performing mental tasks while sitting at a desk in an office and hooked to a heart-rate monitor. The situation involved some stress as the students dealt socially with the researcher in the room and felt anxious about doing well on the four tasks.
With 30 of the students, the desk faced a window overlooking a campus scene that included a large fountain and trees. For a second group of 30 students, the window was replaced with the plasma screen that showed the same nature scene in real time. For the remaining 30 students, curtains covered the plasma screen and the desk faced a blank wall.
The question was: Would the “virtual” scene calm the students as quickly or fully as the “real” scene it depicted.
The answer was no.
In terms of heart rate recovery from the low-level stress, the glass window “was more restorative” than either the plasma screen or the blank wall. In fact, “the plasma window was no different from the blank wall.”
And the longer the students looked out the window, the greater the degree of recovery from the stress “but that was not the case with the plasma window,” where increased looking time yielded no greater recovery.
“Technology is good and it can help our lives, but let’s not be fooled into thinking we can live without nature,” said Peter Kahn, the associate professor of psychology who led the research team. “We are losing direct experiences with nature. Instead, more and more we’re experiencing nature represented technologically through television and other media. Children grow up watching Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. That’s probably better than nothing. But as a species we need interaction with actual nature for our physical and psychological well-being.”
Yes, it’s a small study, but it hints at something important and something that makes sense given the fact that we ourselves are “natural” beings connected presumably to the rest of the natural world.
In Kahn’s words, “In the years ahead, technological nature will get more sophisticated and compelling. But if it continues to replace our interaction with actual nature, it will come at a cost. To thrive as a species, we still need to interact with nature by encountering an animal in the wild, walking along the ocean’s edge or sleeping under the enormity of the night sky.”
Taken together, the two studies, and many others like them, emphasize what should be obvious: Our relationship with nature is one in which each nurtures and protects the other and that we must take care to hold up our end of the bargain.
Sol Roth’s last encounter with blue skies, green forests, fields of grain and running deer had to be on a TV screen, not because he loved video but because he had no choice.
We still have one. And much depends on what we choose.
Rich Lewis’ e-mail address is: rlcolumn@comcast.net
