How to Reinvent Your City, Burning Man Style

by Jessica Reeder, UTNE Reader: http://www.utne.com/arts/reinvent-your-city-burning-man-style

This post originally appeared at Shareable.net

Every August for one week, the Burning Man festival takes place in a temporary city of its own creation, called Black Rock City after Nevada’s Black Rock Desert where it is located. This year, Black Rock City’s population will be 60,000 — bigger than Carson City, the state capital of Nevada.

Our real-world cities, meanwhile, are struggling to provide the services citizens need, limited by declining tax income, record debt, and increasingly complex social issues. Cities have no choice but find ways to do more with less. Many seek to harness the creative energies of citizens to fill the gaps, asking them to take a more active role in governance, service provision, and even in creating new services.

It’s easy to write off Burning Man as a hippie love fest in the desert. It has its own problems like any city, but that's selling it short, especially in one regard - its remarkable ability to foster participation. The event -- which for 26 years has expected participants to practice sharing, gifting, and radical self-reliance -- is an effective proving ground for experiments in community self-organization. In fact, participants build most of the city without any direct oversight from organizers.

Given that cities need its citizens more than ever, can the lessons of Burning Man’s Black Rock City, which pushes citizen participation to the limit, be applied to modern cities? Of course they can. Here are a few ways you can support participation, sharing and community in your own town.

First, Adopt the Right Mindset: There are No Spectators 

Michel Bauwens, the founder of the Peer to Peer Foundation, believes that the proper role of government in our emerging networked society is that of partner in social production. This means that in a myriad ways government helps citizens help themselves. This turns the existing model of government as a top-down service provider on its head. Instead, government works in a bottom up fashion to empower citizens to provide for themselves.

Burning Man does exactly this. It fosters a culture of participation through its Ten Principles and provide basic infrastructure such as roads, sanitation, and safety, which, by the way, rely heavily on volunteer labor. Participants fill in the blanks beautifully with a seemingly unlimited number of options for care, connection, artistic expression, education, sustenance, and fun. At Burning Man, there are no spectators. Likewise, we increasingly need cities where every citizen is intimately involved in creating their city on a day to day basis.

Crowdsource The Budget 

Almost none of the hundreds of art projects exhibited at Burning Man are fully funded by the festival. Many of them are crowdfunded through Kickstarter or Indiegogo. This requires active community participation, and it also organically vets projects ensuring that the best ideas are likely to be funded.

The city of Vallejo, California is taking this idea for a spin, testing out participatory budgeting for 30 percent of its funds. Community members decide which projects to fund, and must work together to get the funding approved.

"If you live in northern Vallejo and you want a bus shelter, then you know what, you've got to partner with people in other parts of the city who want bus shelters too," Councilmember Marti Brown told The Atlantic Cities. "People are going to have to learn how to think like that. It encourages people to work with groups they've never worked with before."

Vallejo is the first to try participatory budgeting city-wide, though it’s now being considered in San Francisco. Want to see participatory budgeting in your city? Get involved.

Build Your Own Bank 

Burning Man famously bans all exchange of money, recommending that people share and “gift” their resources within the community. That’s not likely to happen in the rest of the world very soon — but with the recession, the housing boom-and-bust and the financial crisis all tightly linked to the banking industry, an ever-growing number of people are ditching their Wall Street banks for citizen owned banks like credit unions and public banks. A new report suggests that a public banking could reverse the effects of recent consolidation, bolster the treasuries of government banks, and put financial controls back in the hands of the people.

Though common in Germany and elsewhere, The Bank of North Dakota is currently the only state-run bank in the United States, and it’s been hailed as an “economic miracle.” Could each city or county set up a local bank to create its own community miracle? It certainly could.

Share Your Profits 

There’s another way to share your money and your values with your community: Join a local cooperative and encourage your city government to support the growth of the cooperative sector. Coops are owned and controlled by either workers or customers. They are more democratic, community-minded, and more stable job creators than most private businesses.

Did you know that 120 million Americans belong to at least one cooperative? That 25 percent of the nation’s electric grid is cooperatively owned? 2012 is the International Year of Cooperatives, and this proven, fast-growing business model is offers many advantages over conventional, tightly controlled private businesses.

Worker-owned businesses like The Evergreen Cooperatives are addressing poverty and unemployment, helping money stay in the community where previous charity initiatives have failed. National coops are booming too, including chains like ACE Hardware which help mom-and-pop shops stay open.

Hitch, Surf & Crash 

Want to live well on a budget at Burning Man? Pool your resources with a “camp” of anywhere from five to 500 people, who share kitchens, showers, shelters and even transportation so that everyone can afford access to these necessities.

Want to live well on a budget in your city? Use the same logic: join a car-sharing program, try out a coworking space, share your lodging and, if you’re traveling, rent somebody’s empty room instead of shelling out for a hotel.

Many cities are beginning to adopt community bike programs (of which Black Rock City also has one), but beyond that, there is plenty of room to expand. City-run sharing networks could generate income while saving residents money.

Think it’s a good idea? You might need to start your own. And encourage your city to adopt sharing-friendly policies.

Plug In to the Resource Grid 

Just a few months ago, Burning Man launched a tool called Spark. Designed to facilitate collaboration between attendees, the site allows anyone to create a free “ad” for services or resources needed or offered (on a gift basis). Today’s ads include a call for carpenters, an offer to “freeze anything” and several musicians looking for performance opportunities.

Resource sharing is complicated mostly because it can’t be done over longer distances. Sites like Craigslist, Freecycle and Taskrabbit are good places to start active collaboration on projects, and new platforms are being developed that will further facilitate getting things done without buying a bunch of supplies. One new platform-in-progress, Social Alchemy, is being developed by Burners Without Borders’ leader Carmen Mauk and hopes to be a collaborative project management tool — for example, helping relief workers in disaster areas find the equipment and labor they need to do their work more efficiently.

You might need to start your own local sharing network using a service like ShareTribe — but first, check Craigslist, Freecycle and your local tool lending library to find out what’s already going on.

Reprogram Your Government 

Burning Man organizers lay out the roads and some infrastructure, then allow the population to build its own city. In the rest of America, we don’t have as much creative control — but many of us are exercising much less control than we could, often because of the difficulties of dealing with bureaucratic government bodies.

Do you want transparent, efficient government? Participatory budgeting? Streamlined voting? Easy access to your representatives? It’s all made more possible with technology.Code for America is a group that works with city governments, helping them transform their information infrastructure to improve citizen engagement, efficiency and transparency. Can you help your city adopt new social technologies? Yes, you can.

“As our futures are increasingly becoming urban, cities need to start experimenting with citizen participatory process,” says James Hanusa, New Initiatives Consultant to Burning Man. He points to the Urban Prototyping project, which seeks citizen participation in redesigning San Francisco public spaces, and the Burning Man Project, which supports the application of Burning Man's Ten Principles in many communities.

These ideas just scratch the surface. Much more can be done to make cities as participatory as Burning Man. And while the above innovations increase citizen participation, they lack one thing Burning Man offers.

Black Rock City is manifested by thousands of people in the spirit of celebration. The passion of participants is unmistakable. They are drawn into the civic drama by the drama of their own self-actualization. They experience — sometimes for the first time — what it’s like to be accepted completely in public, and so are willing to give their best to the city that invites the best in them. This is the way the city is made, and how it makes people.

The true flowering of cities may not occur until the civic is married to the celebratory. This too is within reach.

  

Jessica Reeder is a member of the Black Rock City Department of Public Works, and occasionally writes for the Burning Blog.

Image by Christopher, licensed under Creative Commons.  

New Website Helps Communities Build ‘Good’ Local Economies: Online Toolkit Shows How Economic Development Can be Driven by Communities Rather Than Imposed From Above

by the New Economics Foundation: http://neweconomics.org/2017/10/new-website-helps-communities-build-good-local-economies/

A new website will help councils and community organisations to build ‘good’ local economies.

Launched by the Centre for Local Economic Strategies and the New Economics Foundation, with funding from the Friends Provident Foundation, it brings together case studies from across the UK on housing, finance, energy, procurement and commissioning, and local economics.

Called ‘Building a Good Local Economy’, the website sets out the powers and resources currently available to both local government and local communities to help them improve local housing provision, build up local energy supplies and create a thriving local economy.

Building a Good Local Economy website

Case studies include Homebaked, a bakery in the shadow of Liverpool football club that has become a model of community-led regeneration, and Manchester and Preston Councils’ work using local procurement budgets to build community wealth.

The website is part of the Good Local Economies programme, run by CLES and NEF for the last two years, which this year has worked with five cities – Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff, Bristol and Leeds – to help them activate and model new approaches to local economic development.

The website aims to become a comprehensive database of projects across the UK that are challenging the dominant approach to local development. If you would like your project to be included, contact Clare Goff.

Visit the Building a Good Local Economy website.

U.S. Mayors Agree that Everyone Needs a Great Park Within a 10-Minute Walk: Non-profits, 134 Mayors Launch National 10-Minute Walk to a Park Campaign

by Adrian Benepe, Children and Nature Network: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/us-mayors-agree-everyone-needs-a-great-park-within_us_59dbb212e4b0a1bb90b83001

JENNA STAMM

Children play in a schoolyard converted to a community playground in Philadelphia.

At a time when Americans are fractured by politics and policies, there is one thing
most of us agree on and which has broad, bi-partisan support—convenient access
to a high quality park.

Today, The Trust for Public Land (TPL), the National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA), and the Urban Land Institute (ULI) launched the
10-Minute Walk to a Park Campaign with the support of 134 mayors from cities 
across America and from both sides of the political aisle. These mayors signed on during the past year, endorsing the goal of providing every neighborhood with a 
quality park that improves life for city residents, serves as a safe place for people to gather, and adds to the beauty of the city.

Great parks are one of the anchors of healthy, sustainable communities and vibrant American cities. Today, more than 85 percent of the US population lives either in a
city or a suburb, and the research is clear that close-to-home parks boost the
wellbeing of entire neighborhoods. Parks play vital roles in enhancing
environmental sustainability, absorbing carbon and other air pollutants, lowering temperatures, and capturing storm water runoff. They are also crucial to public 
health—data show that when people live near parks they exercise more. Parks also enhance property values, and create community cohesion by bringing diverse
people together in social settings. Cities that invest in parks and open spaces are directly benefiting local residents and their physical and mental health by creating
life-enhancing ways to get outdoors and be active.

In cities across America, mayors and park directors are working with other elected officials, citizens, and non-profit partners to come up with visionary ways to pay for
new parks, and improve existing parks.

For example, the city of Houston has made a bold and ambitious goal to increase
the number of residents who live within a 10-minute walk of a park from 48 percent
to 75 percent by 2040. To do this, they have made improved access part of its
official park master plan. Working with a non-profit partner known as Spark Parks,
city officials are identifying scores of schoolyards that could be converted into community parks. Likewise, in hundreds of cities across the country, underused schoolyards represent the “low-hanging fruit”—land already owned by the city,
possibly not even needing major improvement—just the stroke of a policy pen to
make them “joint-use’ facilities and creating more nearby outdoor spaces for tens of millions of Americans.

SPARK SCHOOL PARK PROGRAN

Matthys Elementary School Park in Houston, newly renovated and opened to the community through the SPARK Parks program.

In Los Angeles County last year, residents approved Measure A, which will
generate at least $1.8 billion—$100 million a year, indefinitely—for new and
improved parks across the county. In Boston, voters also last year approved a
Community Preservation Act measure that will generate $20 million for the same 
cause, and New York City has allocated $300 million to renovate 70 small parks and playgrounds in under-served areas. In Minneapolis and San Francisco (which 
recently became the first city in America where 100 percent of its residents have a 
park within 10-minute walk), park leaders worked with community residents and 
local leaders to solve equity problems, and to make sure everyone, regardless of income or race, has access to high quality parks. Both cities have set aside large amounts of funding to ensure equitable park quality.

ALEX RANDOLPH

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee announces that his city is the first to have 100% of its residents within a 10-minute walk of a park at an event in Hilltop Park.

So, where did the “10-minute walk” idea come from? For several decades, city
planners and social scientists have measured distances people will travel on foot to basic services such as shopping, schools, or transit. They concluded that half a
mile is about as far as people will reasonably walk. Though walking speeds vary,
the U.S Department of Transportation agrees that most people can walk a half-mile
in 10 minutes.

Nearly 17 years ago, at an all-staff gathering of The Trust for Public Land, Will
Rogers, who still serves as the organization’s President, talked about headlines he hoped to see in the next decade. One of those headlines was his prediction that the NRPA and US Conference of Mayors would join TPL in working to ensure that no
one lived “more than a 10-minute stroller ride from a park or playground.” A few
years later, in an article penned for the American Planning Association Journal in
2004, Peter Harnik documented cities that had standards for how far residents 
should have to walk to get to a nearby park. Harnik, then Director of The Trust for 
Public Land’s Center for City Park Excellence, found that most cities had no 
standards, and those that did ranged from a tenth of a mile to a mile, with about half having a half-mile as the standard.

A year later, Jack T. Linn, Assistant Commissioner in the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, developed a new standard for the ideal walking distance to a 
park. He determined that it should be measured in time, not distance, and proposed
that every New Yorker should have a park or playground within a 10-minute walk.

That standard was adopted two years later in PlaNYC—the sustainable 
development plan for New York City under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

As a centerpiece of PlaNYC’s park and environment program, the Mayor called for converting 250 part-time, asphalt schoolyards into full-time community playgrounds,
used by schools during school hours but available to neighborhood residents after school and on weekends. That move, accompanied by $150 million to improve the playgrounds, led to a 15 percent increase in the number of New Yorkers who had a
park or playground within a 10-minute walk.

NOMI ELLENSON

The old asphalt schoolyard at La Cima Charter School in Brooklyn, NY was converted by The Trust for Public Land to a green community playground that also captures stormwater runoff.

Last June, the US Conference of Mayors (USCM) validated Will Rogers’ prediction
by officially endorsing the 10-Minute walk in a resolution introduced at its national gathering. The USCM resolution said, in part “that the United States Conference of Mayors supports the goal for cities to increase the number of people in urban
America who live within a 10-minute walk of a high-quality park; that the [USCM] will celebrate mayors that make quality parks and access to them a first-tier solution to
their municipal challenges; and that the [USCM] supports investments in parks and
open spaces with the goal for everyone in urban American to live within a 10-minute walk of a high-quality park.”

There was another major challenge for the 10-Minute Walk partners when they
launched the campaign nearly three years ago: How could they know how many
people had 10-minute walk access to a park in the 14,000 communities within the
3,000 areas defined as “urban” by the U.S. Census Bureau? The answer came in
TPL’s award-wining Geographic Information Systems (GIS) unit, which created ParkServe, an effort to find and map all the parks in those 14,000
communities, and then to figure out how many lived within or outside of the
10-minute walk “service areas” of those parks. Working with the help of Esri, the
world’s leading GIS mapping company, and using their Network Analyst software,
they are tracing the street network to determine if and how someone could walk to a park—without encountering barriers such as freeways, rivers and canals, or railroad tracks.

ParkServe, now underway for two and a half years, has already surveyed 7,600 of
the 14,000 communities, encompassing 67 percent of the U.S. population. Based
on preliminary analysis, they estimate that as many as 150 million Americans may
not have a park within a 10-minute walk. ParkServe is also generating the nation’s
first-ever database of urban parks and providing tools that city officials and citizens
alike can use to help identify park deserts and the best ways to add green oases.

So now that the campaign is officially launched, and is supported by 134 mayors,
how do we close that gap for so many Americans?

First, the three partners, TPL, NRPA, and ULI, working with other non-profit organizations, will engage with mayors and cities to deploy tools and strategies to
help them increase access to new parks and improve existing parks, building on successful models and strategies already in place. TPL and ULI experts in
conservation and urban park finance are working with cities to identify both
traditional and new sources of funding for park creation and improvement, from
voter measures and bonds to tax-increment financing and social impact bonds. ULI
will use its 51 regional councils to work with local leaders and deploy advisory
panels representing developers, planners, financiers, economists, and public
officials to provide practical and objective advice to cities.

The campaign soon will launch a competitive grant program, challenging cities to
come up with innovative approaches to adding and improving parks. This program
will build on traditional NRPA strengths in research on best practices, case studies,
and comprehensive data, including its Safe Routes to Parks program, to help make
the case for expanded park funding.

So, with all this effort and energy, Americans in cities and suburbs across the
country may soon have close-to-home access to the aspect of city life that may
best define quality of life: a high-quality, green, and safe park for all to enjoy.

Don’t Be Scared About the End of Capitalism: Be Excited to Build What Comes Next

by Jason Hickel and Martin Kirk, Fast Company: https://www.fastcompany.com/40454254/dont-be-scared-about-the-end-of-capitalism-be-excited-to-build-what-comes-next

When have we humans ever accepted the idea that change for the better is a thing of the past? [Image: Ket4up/iStock]

These are fast-changing times. Old certainties are collapsing around us and people are scrambling for new ways of being in the world. As we pointed out in a recent article, 51% of young people in the United States no longer support the system of capitalism. And a solid 55% of Americans of all ages believe that capitalism is fundamentally unfair.

But question capitalism in public and you’re likely to get some angry responses. People immediately assume that you want to see socialism or communism instead. They tell you to go and live in Venezuela, the current flogging-horse for socialism, or they hit you with dreary images of Soviet Russia with all its violence, dysfunction, and grey conformity. They don’t consider that you might want something beyond caricatures and old dogmas.

These old ‘isms’ lurk in the shadows of any discussion on capitalism. The cyber-punk author William Gibson has a term for this effect: “semiotic ghosts”; one concept that haunts another, regardless of any useful or intended connection.

There’s no good reason to remain captive to these old ghosts. All they do is stop us having a clear-headed conversation about the future. Soviet Russia was an unmitigated social and economic disaster; that’s easy to dispel. But, of course, not all experiments with socialist principles have gone so horribly wrong. Take the social democracies of Sweden and Finland, for example, or even post-war Britain and the New Deal in the U.S. There are many systems that have effectively harnessed the economy to deliver shared prosperity.

But here’s the thing. While these systems clearly produce more positive social outcomes than laissez-faire systems do (think about the record high levels of health, education and well-being in Scandinavian countries, for example), even the best of them don’t offer the solutions we so urgently need right now, in an era of climate change and ecological collapse. Right now we are overshooting Earth’s carrying capacity by a crushing 64% each year, in terms of our resource use and greenhouse gas emissions.

The socialism that exists in the world today, on its own, has nothing much to say about this. Just like capitalism, it relies on endless, indeed exponential GDP growth, ever-increasing levels of extraction and production and consumption. The two systems may disagree about how best to distribute the yields of a plundered earth, but they do not question the process of plunder itself.

Fortunately, there is already a wealth of language and ideas out there that stretch well beyond these dusty old binaries. They are driven by a hugely diverse community of thinkers, innovators, and practitioners. There are organizations like the P2P (Peer to Peer) Foundation, Evonomics, The Next System Project, and the Institute for New Economic Thinking reimagining the global economy. The proposed models are even more varied: from
complexity, to post-growth, de-growth, land-based, regenerative, circular, and even the deliciously named donut economics.

Then, there are the many communities of practice, from the Zapatistas in Mexico to the barter economies of Detroit, from the global Transition Network, to Bhutan, with its Gross National Happiness index. There are even serious economists and writers, from Jeremy Rifkin to David Flemingto Paul Mason, making a spirited case that the evolution beyond capitalism is well underway and unstoppable, thanks to already active ecological feedback loops and/or the arrival of the near zero-marginal cost products and services.This list barely scratches the surface.

The thinking is rich and varied, but all of these approaches share the virtue of being informed by up-to-date science and the reality of today’s big problems. They move beyond the reductionist dogmas of orthodox economics and embrace complexity; they focus on regenerating rather than simply using-up our planet’s resources; they think more holistically about how to live well within ecological boundaries; some of them draw on indigenous knowledge and lore about how to stay in balance with nature; others confront the contradictions of endless growth head on.

Not all would necessarily describe themselves as anti- or even post-capitalist, but they are all, in one way or another, breaking through the dry seals of neoclassical economic theory upon which capitalism rests.
Still, resistance to innovation is strong. One reason is surely that our culture has been stewed in capitalist logic for so long that it feels impregnable. Our instinct is now to see it as natural; some even go so far as to deem it divine. The notion that we should prioritize the production of capital over all other things has become a kind of common sense; the way humans must organize.

To question capitalism can trigger a visceral reaction; it can feel like an attack not just on common sense but on our personal identities. [Image: Ket4up/iStock]

Another reason, clearly linked, is the blindness of much of the academic world. Take, for example, the University of Manchester, where a group of economics students asked for their syllabus to be upgraded to account for the realities of a post-crash world. Joe Earle, one of the organizers of what The Guardian described as a “quiet revolution against orthodox free-market teaching” told the newspaper: “[Neoclassical economics] is given such a dominant position in our modules that many students aren’t even aware that there are other distinct theories out there that question the assumptions, methodologies and conclusions of the economics we are taught.”

In much the same way as House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, rebuffed college student Trevor Hill when he asked whether the Democratic Party would consider any alternatives to capitalism, Manchester University’s response was a flat no. Their economics course, they said, “focuses on mainstream approaches, reflecting the current state of the discipline”. Mainstream, current, anything but fresh. Such attitudes have spawned a global student movement, Rethinking Economics, with chapters as far afield as Ecuador, Uganda, and China.

Capitalism has become a dogma, and dogmas die very slowly and very reluctantly. It is a system that has co-evolved with modernity, so it has the full force of social and institutional norms behind it. Its essential logic is even woven into most of our worldviews, which is to say, our brains. To question it can trigger a visceral reaction; it can feel like an attack not just on common sense but on our personal identities.

But even if you believe it was once the best system ever, you can still see that today it has become necrotic and dangerous. This is demonstrated most starkly by two facts: The first is that the system is doing little now to improve the lives of the majority of humans: by some estimates, 4.3 billion of us are living in poverty, and that number has risen significantly over the past few decades. The ghostly responses to this tend to be either unimaginative–“If you think it’s bad, try living in Zimbabwe”–or zealous: “Well, that’s because there’s not enough capitalism. Let it loose with more deregulation, or give it time and it will raise their incomes too.”

One of the many problems with this last argument is the second fact: with just half of us living above the poverty line, capitalism’s endless need for resources is already driving us over the cliff-edge of climate change and ecological collapse. This ranges from those that are both finite and dangerous to use, like fossil fuels, to those that are being used so fast that they don’t have time to regenerate, like fish stocks and the soil in which we grow our food. Those 4.3 billion more people living ‘successful’ hyper-consumption lifestyles? The laws of physics would need to change. Even Elon Musk can’t do that.

The path to a better future will be cut by regular people being curious and open enough to challenge the wisdom received from our schools, our parents, and our governments. [Image: Ket4up/iStock]

It would be a sad and defeated world that simply accepted the prebaked assumption that capitalism (or socialism, or communism) represents the last stage of human thought; our ingenuity exhausted. Capitalism’s fundamental rules–like the necessity for endless GDP growth, which requires treating our planet as an infinite pit of value and damage to it as an “externality”– can be upgraded. Of course they can. There are plenty of options on the table. When have we humans ever accepted the idea that change for the better is a thing of the past?

Of course, transcending capitalism might feel impossible right now. The political mainstream has its feet firmly planted and deeply rooted in that soil. But with the pace of events today, the unimaginable can become the possible, and even the inevitable with remarkable speed. The path to a better future will be cut by regular people being curious and open enough to challenge the wisdom received from our schools, our parents, and our governments, and look at the world with fresh eyes.

We can let the ghosts go. We can allow ourselves the freedom to do what humans do best: innovate.

How Modern Life Became Disconnected from Nature

BY SELIN KESEBIR, PELIN KESEBIR, GREATER GOOD MAGAZINE: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_modern_life_became_disconnected_from_nature

It’s hard to overstate how much good nature does for our well-being: Study after study documents the psychological and physical benefits of connecting with nature. People who are more connected with nature are happier, feel more vital, and have more meaning in their lives.

Even in small doses, nature is a potent elixir: When their hospital room had flowers and foliage, post-surgery patients needed less painkillers and reported less fatigue. And merely looking at pictures of nature does speed up mental restoration and improves cognitive functioning.

These studies, along with hundreds of others, all point to the same conclusion: We stand to benefit tremendously from nurturing a strong connection with nature. Yet our connection to nature seems more tenuous than ever today—a time when our children can name more Pokémon characters than wildlife species.

It is widely accepted that we are more disconnected from nature today than we were a century ago, but is that actually true? A recent study we conducted suggests that it is—and that may be bad news not only for our well-being but also for the environment.

Our growing disconnection from nature

To find out how the human relation to nature has changed over time, we asked ourselves: How can we define and measure all the various ways in which people connect with nature? How can we count all the times people stop to watch a sunset or listen to birds chirping, or how long they spend walking tree-lined streets? We could certainly ask these questions to living people, but we couldn’t ask people who lived a hundred years ago.

Instead, we turned to the cultural products they created. Works of popular culture, we reasoned, should reflect the extent to which nature occupies our collective consciousness. If novelists, songwriters, or filmmakers have fewer encounters with nature these days than before, or if these encounters make less of an impression on them, or if they don’t expect their audiences to respond to it, nature should feature less frequently in their works.

We created a list of 186 nature-related words belonging to four categories: general words related to nature (e.g., autumn, cloud, lake, moonlight), names of flowers (e.g., bluebell, edelweiss, foxglove, rose), names of trees (e.g., cedar, laburnum, whitebeam, willow), and names of birds (e.g., finch, hummingbird, meadowlark, spoonbill).

Next, we checked how frequently these 186 words appeared in works of popular culture over time, including English fiction books written between 1901 and 2000, songs listed as the top 100 between 1950 and 2011, and storylines of movies made between 1930 and 2014.

Across millions of fiction books, thousands of songs, and hundreds of thousands of movie and documentary storylines, our analyses revealed a clear and consistent trend: Nature features significantly less in popular culture today than it did in the first half of the 20th century, with a steady decline after the 1950s. For every three nature-related words in the popular songs of the 1950s, for example, there is only slightly more than one 50 years later.

Percentage of nature-related words in song lyrics

A look at some of the hit titles from 1957 makes clear how things have changed over time: They include “Butterfly,” “Moonlight Gambler,” “White Silver Sands,” “Rainbow,” “Honeycomb,” “In the Middle of an Island,” “Over the Mountain, Across the Sea,” “Blueberry Hill,” and “Dark Moon.” In these songs, nature often provides the backdrop to and imagery of love, as in “Star Dust” by Billy Ward and His Dominoes, which starts with:

And now the purple dusk of twilight time 

Steals across the meadows of my heart

High up in the sky the little stars climb

Always reminding me that we’re apart

You wander down the lane and far away

Leaving me a song that will not die

Love is now the stardust of yesterday.

Fifty years later in 2007, there are only four nature-related hit titles: “Snow (Hey Oh),” “Cyclone,” “Summer Love,” and “Make It Rain.” 


This pattern of decline didn’t hold for another group of words we tested—nouns related to human-made environments, such as bed, bowl, brick, and hall—suggesting that nature is a unique case.

The source of our nature deficit

How can we explain this shrinking of nature in our collective imagination and cultural conversation? A closer look at the data yields an interesting clue: References to nature declined after, but not before, the 1950s.

The trend of urbanization—which swallows up natural areas and cuts people off from natural surroundings—is typically used to explain the weakening human connection to nature, but our findings are not consistent with that account. Urbanization rates did not change from the first half of the 20th century to the second in the U.S. and U.K., where most works we studied originated.

Instead, our findings point to a different explanation for our disconnection from nature: technological change, and in particular the burgeoning of indoor and virtual recreation options. The 1950s saw the rapid rise of television as the most popular medium of entertainment. Video games first appeared in the 1970s and have since been a popular pastime, while the Internet has been claiming more and more leisure time since the late 1990s. It stands to reason that these technologies partially substituted for nature as a source of recreation and entertainment. Classic paintings such as Winslow Homer’s Snap the Whip (1872) or Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1886) point to a time when children played in wide open green fields and adults spent their Sunday afternoons in nature.

Winslow Homer’s Snap the Whip

To the extent that the disappearance of nature vocabulary from the cultural conversation reflects an actual distancing from nature, our findings are cause for concern. Aside from its well-being benefits, a connection to nature strongly predicts pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. Such a love for nature is often born from exposure to nature as a child. This is what made author Richard Louv write, “As the care of nature increasingly becomes an intellectual concept severed from the joyful experience of the outdoors, you have to wonder: Where will future environmentalists come from?”


It’s worth remembering that cultural products such as songs and films not only reflect the prevailing culture—they also shape it. Modern artists have the opportunity to send the message that nature is worth paying attention to and to help awaken curiosity, appreciation, and respect for nature, as some did back in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Artistic creations that help us connect with nature are crucial at a time like this, when nature seems to need our attention and care more than ever.