It is not difficult to come across a paper in environmental education that assumes ‘connectedness to nature’ is a good thing, and there are some influential ‘tools’ to assess it used in environmental research, such as the Nature Relatedness (NR) scale and the Connectedness to Nature Scale (CNS). (There are also many critiques of the adequacy and purpose of these scales). But what does it mean to ‘relate’ or ‘connect’ to nature?
On the face of it, some might think that ‘connectedness to nature’ would refer to one’s familiarity and understanding of nature, either through direct experience, but perhaps also theoretically through ecological science. These influential scales are for the most part, however, assessing instead a person’s feeling of having an emotional connection to nature and the extent to which they ‘self-identify’ with nature. They are after something embodied and ontological rather than merely epistemic. The idea is that if we see or feel ourselves to be ‘part of’ rather than ‘apart from’ nature, we are addressing a destructive dualism and are more likely to act in sustainable ways. The intuition stems from common philosophical positions in environmental thought, such as Deep Ecology’s Self realisation (Naess 2005) and biocentrism, but also the deanthropocentrism at the root of new materialism’s ‘flat ontology’ (e.g. Bennett 2007), albeit with ‘matter’ substituting (vapidly) for nature.
I will not argue that a feeling of connectedness to nature is a bad thing. Feelings arise and I do not think judging them is the way forward. Besides, I very much value the experience when it occurs. However, while I find the opposite feeling – an alienation from nature – less enjoyable, I want to argue that there is a clear and necessary place for it in environmental education. From my perspective, the more important questions lie in what we do with the feelings we have, how we make sense of them, and how they interplay with one another in how we concretely participate in the world. In other words, I am not aiming to replace advocating for one feeling over another, and I caution against reductionist approaches to finding ‘solutions’ to the ecological crisis. Even holistic ontologies can be reductionistic when they simplify nature, humans or their relationship and create a hierarchy between them. My concerns in this blogpost will centre around the feasibility and desirability of ‘connecting to nature’ as an ultimate end for environmental education, and I will point out that it is problematic ecologically, politically, existentially, and educationally.
My first observation is that it is not possible to feel connected to nature all the time – and perhaps it is not really possible to sustain the feeling at all. If I pay attention to my direct experience, I find that the feeling of connectedness is variable and shifting. Most obviously, because of the self-reflective nature of consciousness, I enter into loops where one moment I am experiencing something and the next moment I am experiencing *that* I am/was experiencing that thing. So I feel some interconnectedness and then feel that feeling, but as soon as I do so, some distance is brought between myself and what I felt connected to. Years of meditation can only add evidence to the phenomenological observation that this jump to the metalevel is an ongoing feature of human consciousness.
More generally, however, the feeling of connectedness also, it seems to me, is one of variable intensity. My feelings of connection and of separation are always co-existing in different tensions, ratios and qualities that shift between background and foreground for one another and give rise to many different experiences. Perhaps it is possible to develop a practice that concentrates and holds some of these dialectical interplays under the presumption that they are ‘more’ connected, but even if I can do so, it seems evident that I cannot go long holding that view. I soon need to ‘use’ something in nature and return to a habitual technological relationship (which has its own kind of connection, as technologies only ‘work’ with coordination (Heidegger 1929). It is because we slip away from the feeling of certain experiences that practices, rituals and developed in cultures to reorient. There is probably an important educational difference between aiming for feelings of ‘connectedness to nature’ as though it were actually possible (and feeling inadequate when we haven’t reached it), and aiming for it as an ideal, or orientation, or regulative principle of some kind. However, even if the latter holds a place in environmental education (and I think it does), it is insufficient and other aims also need to be held, some that are in contradiction with connection. More on this below.
A second reason to be suspicious of valuing the experience of ‘connectedness to nature’ is that nature is actually not even connected to itself. The reason we feel disconnection is because we are alive, and alive as highly centralised beings (animals). We have evolved a necessary separation. However, as much as it appears as though we are distinctly out of joint with the rest of the well-orchestrated universe, in fact no species is in perfect correspondence with its context. This is because all living things are new – that particular entity of that species has never existed before and what it is doing is in some form unprecedented. But it is also because the context in which it is living is also unprecedented (in part because it too is being constituted by other beings that are themselves unique). Of course, ecosystems have a range of reliable patterns and my aim is not to diminish the importance of them. It is simply to say that ecosystems are not merely such patterns and that tensions and ruptures are perennial too, and they constitute an essential aspect of how nature changes.
A third reason is that even if it was possible to sustain the feeling of connectedness to nature, it would not be desirable. One reason for this is well known and pointed out by ecofeminists in their observation that self-identifying with another, or feeling a oneness with them collapses their difference and can promote hierarchies that silence already marginalised beings. But the main reason I want to focus on here is an acknowledgement that the capacity to feel alienated from nature has many important benefits.
One is rather obvious: alienation confers on us an appreciation of the feeling of connectedness, which we otherwise would not have. Another is that alienation is an experience of uncertainty about who and what one should be, and how one should act. It is what splits us from our habit and automaticity and is the condition for the possibility of ‘subjectivity’. It is only because we can be alienated that we can ask: what am i to do? It is difficult to see this because alienation has been blamed for many of the contemporary ills, and a range of ‘warm’ environmental education options, like place-based education, are seen to put us back into ‘right relation’ and away from being awkward and displaced. But the question of what to do disappears when one knows one’s place. The moment of subjectivity, the question of asking what should I be or do, is the moment of slipping out of the assumed coordinations. It is a rupture of the existing order.
But who says the existing order was really so ordered, or that it was ordering things in the right way anyway? We might ‘feel’ connected, but were we actually? What aspect of nature were we feeling connected to and what was being obfuscated in that feeling? What species were being silenced by our holism? What aspects of those species were we reifying at the expense of others? It is the same in matters of ecology as it is in matters of love: we seek connection, unity, oneness, but to achieve it would collapse the difference between ourself and the other. It is in the dangerous, impossible and inevitable tension that can never resolve itself that the possibility of deeper intimacy, responsibility and relationship can also arise. Not to erase the alienation, but rather as an experience that coexists with it.
Alienation is a source of suffering and it is normal to want to flee it. But it is necessary for subjectivity and freedom, and also what kind of participant a human will be in ecologies. ‘Ecologising’ our thinking about the relationship between humans and the rest of the biotic world does not involve getting ‘beyond’ this alienation, but instead involves seeing how alienation is itself also part of the ecologising process. After all, ecologies and all evolutionary processes proceed through the fact that the organisms that arrive into the world are slightly ‘out of joint’ with the existing conditions, and that they change them further through their activity. This is the insight of the role of novelty/variation and niche construction respectively. Evolution by natural alienation. And like in any ecology, alienation offers possibilities and dangers, but it is the condition for change, which is necessary for change and what distinguishes ecosystems from machines.
Alienation is not something to solve with therapy either. Because we don’t assume a ‘place’ and ‘identity’ when we feel alienated, it is also the condition for our being political (McGowan 2024), and in this case, ecopolitical. Just as ‘symbolic identity’ (identifying oneself with a category and reducing one’s singularity though doing so) is seen by McGowan as a flight from one’s subjectivity, ecological identity (in the sense of knowing or feeling ‘who’ you are or what you should be in an ecosystem) is a flight from questions of what one should do in the presence of a developing community or relations one has only vague and indeterminate knowledge of. Finally, it is not an educational pursuit to absolutise ‘connection to nature’ over alienation from nature as a goal for the same reason: a concern with subjectivity is part of the existential core of the educational project (or ‘subjectification’ in Biesta’s sense, 2020; Affifi 2024).
I’ll end with where we all end: death. The deepest ‘connection’ with nature cannot be felt because it only arises once we die. It is here where our being surrenders the separation it maintains in its metabolism, in the structure of its consciousness, in the persistence of its stable being in the face of the vagaries of the world (Maturana and Varela 1992). It is here where the ontology flattens. Fetishising the desire for connection to nature may on some level necrophilic as it asks for a denial of what sustains life: the establishing and maintaining of difference.
References
Affifi, R. (2024). The ecology of sublimity. Environmental Education Research.
Affifi, R. (2019). Anthropocentrism’s fluid binary. Environmental Education Research.
Bennett, J. (2007). Vibrant Matter. MIT Press.
Biesta, G. (2020). Risking ourselves in education: Qualification, socialisation and subjectification revisited. Educational Theory.
Heidegger, M. (1929). Being and Time.
Maturana, H. & Varela, F. (1992). The tree of knowledge. Shambala.
McGowan, T. (2024). Embracing alienation: Why we shouldn’t try to be ourselves. London: Repeater.
Naess, A. (2005). The selected works of Arne Naess (Drengson ed.), Dordrecht: Springer.
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