Urgent Biophilia: Human-Nature Interactions and Biological Attractions in Disaster Resilience
By K. Tidball. 2012
113 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This contribution builds upon contemporary work on principles of biological attraction as well as earlier work on biophilia while synthesizing literatures on restorative environments, community-based ecological restoration, and both community and social-ecological disaster resilience. It suggests that when humans, faced with a disaster, as individuals and as communities and populations, seek engagement with nature to further their efforts to summon and demonstrate resilience in the face of a crisis, they exemplify an urgent biophilia. This urgent biophilia represents an important set of human-nature interactions in SES characterized by hazard, disaster, or vulnerability, often appearing in the 'backloop' of the adaptive cycle. The relationships that human-nature interactions have to other components within interdependent systems at many different scales may be one critical source of resilience in disaster and related contexts. In other words, the affinity we humans have for the rest of nature, the process of remembering that attraction, and the urge to express it through creation of restorative environments, which may also restore or increase ecological function, may confer resilience across multiple scales. In making this argument, the paper also represents a novel contribution to further theorizing alternatives to anthropocentric understandings of human-nature relations, and strongly makes the case for humans as part of, not separate from, ecosystems.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/af05e2bce0be34f8d7945917560c3bd74db58e44
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
Citations in the corpus
- The Relationship Between Perceived Greenness and Perceived Restorativeness of University Campuses and Student-Reported Quality of Life (2016, background): “Research suggests that vulnerable populations are more likely to seek out green restorative environments for resilience (Tidball, 2012); thus, a restorative environment could be considered a health resource (Hartig, 2007) for college students experiencing stress.”
- Connectedness as a Core Conservation Concern: An Interdisciplinary Review of Theory and a Call for Practice (2014, background): “This call echoes the views of ecologists, environmental educators, and nature writers who have long stressed the importance of individuals’ connectedness with nature (CWN) in fostering an ethic that motivates people to become more engaged citizens who practice environmentally responsible behavior (E”