Goodbye conkers? Our personal relationships with nature are endangered

Imagine a future where children no longer know the pleasure of holding a cool, smooth conker in their hands, pockets bulging with shiny orbs destined to be strung and battled, to go dull and wrinkly on a shelf or to produce a spindly young tree in a corner of the garden. A few years ago the Oxford Junior Dictionary caused controversy by cutting the word "conker". Children just weren't using that word any more.

In 2019 the horse chestnut tree was added to the European Red List of Trees, which assessed its conservation status as vulnerable to extinction. This iconic tree joined hundreds of other European tree species, 58 per cent of the tree species native to Europe are in danger of disappearing.

The horse chestnut itself is not actually native to Ireland, but was introduced from the Balkans a couple of centuries ago and was quickly adopted into childhood culture. The rise and fall of the horse chestnut captures the dynamic way that people interact with nature.

A recent study by Lars Langer and colleagues used the world's largest open collection of fiction books from 1705 to 1969 from Project Gutenberg to quantify biodiversity in more than 16,000 works of western literature. Mentions of biodiversity in literature increased until the 1830s and then started to decline, possibly due to the loss of biodiversity from people's lives caused by industrialisation, urbanisation and intensification of land use.

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Danish poets

The statistical analysis of biodiversity in literature was started by the retired Danish plant ecologist Christen Raunkaier who quantified the diversity, and even the density, of plants in the works of Danish poets at the start of the 20th century. I wonder how his estimate of 172 plant species mentioned by the poet Jeppe Aakjaer would compare with modern-day poets?

The progressive loss of human-nature interactions has been named the “Extinction of Experience” and goes hand in hand with the extinction of biodiversity itself as well as the fact that our lifestyles increasingly exclude us from nature. It is a concern not only because our interactions and experiences with nature are a source of health and wellbeing, but also because of the effects the extinction of nature experience have on people’s support for pro-biodiversity policies and management actions.

Nature can be experienced in many ways – from playing with a pet dog to open water swimming with diving gannets, from watching nature documentaries to playing computer games within virtual ecosystems such as Animal Crossing, Minecraft or Red Dead Redemption. These examples cover the continuum from direct sensory interaction with nature to indirect experiences, one step removed from nature, and from domesticated or cultivated nature through to wilderness. The explosion in new media means that our indirect experiences of nature are no longer through reading Danish poetry or great works of literature but through a screen or smartphone.

Desert planet

What will our future interactions with nature look like? Science fiction writers give us a glimpse into the possible worlds of experience that await us. My favourite writers acknowledge their debt to ecologists for helping them to imagine future worlds. Frank Herbert dedicated his novel Dune, the desert planet, to "the dry-land ecologists, wherever they may be, in whatever time they work, this effort at prediction is dedicated in humility and admiration". Diane Cook (The New Wilderness) quotes the great American naturalist Aldo Leopold: "I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in." Kim Stanley Robinson, in The Ministry for the Future, superbly researched the near-future of nature, and our interactions within its changed climate are truly chilling, and yet hopeful in its emphasis on action.

It is clear that people experience nature in ways that go far beyond how scientists normally measure biodiversity. People describe the functions, behaviours, colours, smells and shapes of species. Our relationships with nature through cultural influences and childhood memories are deeply meaningful. Nature is not something external to people but inextricably tied to how we experience and find value in the world. We should fight to protect biodiversity, and its place in the very fabric of our lives and experiences.

Yvonne Buckley is an ecologist, Irish Research Council laureate and professor of zoology at Trinity College Dublin