Nature is good for you in oh so many ways. So says Florence Williams in her upcoming book The Nature Fix, and in this Wall Street Journal preview essay. Sadly, we don’t behave as if we understand this, as two social scientists learned when they mapped where people are happy:
“[O]ne of the biggest variables for their subjects (who tended to be young, employed and educated) was where they were. They were significantly happier outdoors, especially in natural settings, than they were indoors, even when the researchers tried to control for the effects of being at work.
But there was a catch: Most of the participants didn’t behave as if they knew this, because they were rarely outside. They were indoors or in vehicles for 93% of their waking hours.
The Mappiness study reveals our epidemic dislocation from the outdoors—an indictment not just of the structures and expectations of modern life but of our self-understanding. As the writer Annie Dillard famously said, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. Why don’t we do more of what makes us happy? Part of the answer is that we’re flat-out busy. But even when we have free time, we’re not always smart about how we spend it.
I have long been a believer in the connection between happiness, creative energy, and the outdoors. Put me on a bike or on a walk (throw in a dog for a multiplier effect) and I always come home feeling good and with at least three worthwhile insights into work or life. Put me on a boat and I come home transformed.
Busyness, as Florence notes, is a huge block to feeding our souls in the outdoors (and busyness is so often purposeless). Social media and cable news are also two indoor, soul-sapping, distractions (and connecting to social media while outdoors is a particularly odious felony). So do we have a formula for a better, happier, existence? I think we do: Fewer electronic distractions, less meaningless busyness, more time outdoors and unplugged. Pretty simple and pretty effective.
You could say cinema and nature got off on the wrong foot, or paw, right from the start. In 1926, to much excitement, an adventurer named William Douglas Burden brought back two komodo dragons to New York’s Bronx zoo – the first live specimens the western world had ever seen. Most of that excitement had been generated via a movie Burden had made depicting these semi-mythical reptiles in the Indonesian wild, voraciously devouring a wild boar. By comparison, the real, live komodo dragons were something of a disappointment. They just lay about lethargically in their cage, and died a few months later. It later transpired that Burden’s film had been heavily edited and staged to amp up the drama. The dragons hadn’t actually killed the boar; it had been put there by Burden as bait. The slow reality of nature was no match for the drama of the screen, it turned out. The science couldn’t match the fiction. One of the first to learn this lesson was the film-maker Merian C Cooper. He went on to incorporate elements of Burden’s Komodo expedition into a fictional movie: King Kong.
We have come a long way since Burden’s day in many respects, but that tension between rigorous natural history and populist entertainment is still very much at work in the nature genre, especially now that it has migrated on to the big screen in a big way. Where once we flocked to see animals painted as man-eating monsters in the movies, Jaws-style, now we want to get closer to them, physically and spiritually. There could be several explanations. Maybe it’s guilt at our destruction of their habitats, the proliferation of internet-related animal cuteness or because there are parents keen to give their children something more edifying than Iron Man 3. Or maybe it’s just because we’ve got so much better at filming wildlife. Nature films are one place where all the technological advances of film-making really come into their own: high-definition, 3D, surround sound, lightweight cameras.
But while cinema has made all these advances, nature itself hasn’t really got with the program. Unlike characters in Madagascar or The Lion King, real wild animals haven’t learned to take direction any better than Burden’s giant lizards. It can take years of uncomfortable, patient, expensive observation to gather enough footage for a feature-length documentary. And although it was common practice in the past, faking it is very much frowned upon. We like our wildlife cinema authentic, but we also want it exciting and dramatic, and that is still a challenge.
My view, based on the fact that the more we learn about almost any animal, the more we realize that their thinking and social lives are more complex and sophisticated than we assumed, is that we should err on the side of anthropomorphism. But perhaps “anthropomorphism,” is not even the right word anymore. It is a concept that is based on the idea that humans are unique in the animal world, and so to assume nonhuman animals have intelligence, or emotion, is to assume they are like humans. Instead, I think what science is showing us over time is that intelligence and emotions are to greater and lesser degrees universal among animals. And so perhaps we should start thinking of emotion and intelligence in the animal world as qualities which don’t necessarily set us apart from other animals, but connect us to other animals.
One of the elements of Blackfish that strikes audiences is the degree to which the orca brain has an architecture that suggests cognitive abilities we don’t yet comprehend, cognitive abilities which may in certain respects be superior to human cognitive abilities. So maybe one day as we come to better understand orca cognition and the relative quality of human cognition we will find ourselves orcapomorphizing.
I’m happy to say that this article picks up on exactly that, because Blackfish should make you think, for the first time, that the hierarchy of intelligence and cognition might not always have humans at the top:
Another new film in this vein throws the anthropomorphism debate into fresh relief. Blackfish by Gabriela Cowperthwaite deals not with animals in the wild, but in captivity, namely killer whales at the SeaWorld chain of resorts in the southern US. These creatures are essentially coerced into performing entertaining tricks for the benefit of a public audience, but one whale has been linked to the deaths of three people. Free Willy it ain’t.
As the story progresses, ex-trainers express regret over the treatment of whales, and the lies they routinely trotted out about how “happy” the whales were. There is much sinister footage and gruesome description showing just what killer whales can do to humans if they feel like it.
Blackfish makes no attempt to anthropomorphise its whales and it doesn’t need to. Like chimpanzees, they are evidently highly intelligent and social creatures, and they clearly don’t like what SeaWorld is doing to them – which is in effect imprisoning and torturing them until they snap. Where once they roamed the open ocean, they are now confined to tiny pools, mothers are separated from their calves, and they are forced into unnatural, violent behaviour towards themselves and us. If anything, we empathise with the whales more than the humans because they’re treated like animals. Does that mean they haven’t been anthropomorphised enough?
Like the other nature docs, Blackfish is a gripping movie, with drama and characters and emotion, but unlike them, it’s one that reminds us how much of a gap there is between humans and animals, and between movies and reality, which often amounts to the same thing. Thanks to cinema, we’re able to see nature better, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re any closer to it.
During filming, one of the ideas we used to joke about a lot with the former SeaWorld orca trainers is the idea that Blackfish is like “Planet Of The Apes,” except the humans are the apes who are incarcerating a being who they don’t really understand or credit with intelligence and emotion. After a few beers, we’d have Tilikum banging the tank walls, protesting “I am not an animal!”
The idea that an orca, say, or a chimpanzee, might have intellectual or emotional capabilities that exceed a human’s obliterates the idea of anthropomorphism. That makes it a revolutionary, and thrilling, idea that can completely change how you think about, and relate to, animals.
Nature restores mental functioning in the same way that food and water restore bodies. The business of everyday life — dodging traffic, making decisions and judgment calls, interacting with strangers — is depleting, and what man-made environments take away from us, nature gives back. There’s something mystical and, you might say, unscientific about this claim, but its heart actually rests in what psychologists call attention restoration theory, or ART. According to ART, urban environments are draining because they force us to direct our attention to specific tasks (e.g., avoiding the onslaught of traffic) and grab our attention dynamically, compelling us to “look here!” before telling us to instead “look over there!” These demands are draining — and they’re also absent in natural environments. Forests, streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans demand very little from us, though they’re still engaging, ever changing, and attention-grabbing. The difference between natural and urban landscapes is how they command our attention. While man-made landscapes bombard us with stimulation, their natural counterparts give us the chance to think as much or as little as we’d like, and the opportunity to replenish exhausted mental resources.
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