We’re so Nature-Deprived That Even Footage of Wilderness Lifts our Spirits

Adrienne Matei · The Guardian · October 26, 2020

Featuring Peter Kahn, Nature and Health researcher and Steering Committee member

In 2017, I spoke to Dr Peter Kahn, a psychology professor and director of the Human Interaction With Nature and Technological Systems Lab at the University of Washington, for the publication Quartz. He made the point that the benefits humans get from digital nature are contingent on us having some firsthand context for what we’re watching.

“Teenagers who have grown up in urban areas can put on a VR headset and get some small awareness of a wild place, but that visual awareness is severed from the meaning of interacting with that place,” he said. “As children grow up in less natured areas, they have fewer experiences with actual nature, and so when they then experience a technological version of nature, they have less to map it onto. In this way, the physical and psychological benefits we’re seeing of technological nature in this generation will likely diminish in the generations ahead.”

For many people, access to wild places is an increasingly rare privilege. By 2050, almost 70% of Earth’s population will live in urban areas, according to the UN. Technologically simulated nature may be a useful and even necessary tool to provide urban inhabitants with the psychological wellbeing they otherwise might not be able to access. And – as we’re learning now, with much of the world in lockdown – “digital nature” is better than nothing.