Fear of Nature

What the word actually says

Wiktionary gives the whole of it in three words: aversion to nature. The construction is bio- plus -phobia, and the same entry records that it is a piecewise doublet of zoophobia, the word this catalogue files as a fear of animals. One takes life and the other takes the animal, and they are built from roots that mean nearly the same thing.

No diagnostic manual carries biophobia. Nobody has published a case under it, no prevalence has been measured, and the reference literature on phobias does not run an entry for it. What it has instead is a role in an argument, and the argument is about whether human beings are built to like living things.

Why a fear of nature supports biophilia

The biophilia hypothesis, named by Erich Fromm and developed by E. O. Wilson, holds that people are drawn to living systems by their biology. Wilson's formulation is that biophilia describes the connections human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life. The evolutionary version of the claim is that ancestors with stronger connections to the natural world held an advantage in knowing where food, water and shelter were.

The part that concerns this entry is a single line in the hypothesis. Affiliations toward natural objects count as evidence for biophilia whether they are positive or negative, and phobic reactions are named among the negative ones. What matters, in that framing, is that the reaction to a natural object differs from the reaction to a manufactured one. A fear of nature is not the opposite of a love of it, but a second proof of the same wiring.

This catalogue is full of the examples that argument runs on. The fears with the deepest histories and the widest distributions attach to living things and natural events rather than to the objects people actually get hurt by:

• snakes and spiders, the two standing exhibits in every account of prepared fear
• thunder, deep water, heights and the dark
• forests, as a place rather than as a thing inside one

None of them are power tools, traffic or electrical sockets, which injure far more people and have produced almost no named fears at all.

Where the fear of nature became a design problem

The other place the word does work is architecture, where biophilia was turned into a specification. Fractal fluency, a neuroscience model, proposes that human visual systems adapted to nature's repeating patterns and process them with unusual ease, and that patterns with a fractal dimension between 1.3 and 1.5 reduce physiological stress and improve cognitive performance when people look at them.

Biophilic design takes that finding and builds the patterns into rooms, on the reasoning that people now spend 92 per cent of their time indoors and away from natural scenery. The Fractal Chapel at the state hospital in Graz is one of the built examples. Whatever else that is, it is an admission that a species said to love nature has arranged its life so as not to meet any.

Why biophobia and ecophobia are not the same word

The neighbouring term is ecophobia, and its history has made it the more useful of the two. George F. Will coined it in the Chicago Sun-Times on 18 September 1988 to name the fear that the planet is increasingly inhospitable. Simon C. Estok then turned the 1988 coinage around: in his hands ecophobia is the fear of, or the ethical undervaluing of, the natural environment that produces cataclysmic environmental change.

Estok's version is where the two terms overlap, because his spectrum runs from fear through contempt and indifference to simple lack of mindfulness. That covers most of what biophobia would mean if anybody used it seriously. The difference is the accusation. Ecophobia, as Estok uses it, names a disposition that damages the planet, and biophobia names only a reaction to it.

David Sobel uses ecophobia for something closer to what a child feels: a helpless sense of dread about the future, produced by oil spills and deforestation rather than by the natural world itself. Three writers, one word, and the object moves each time. Biophobia stays where the dictionary left it, meaning an aversion to nature and nothing more precise than that.