An Emerging Threat to Conservation: Fear of Nature

John R. Platt

What do we lose when natural spaces and species disappear? Increasingly, research has shown that as species and ecosystems vanish, it also chips away at our ability to preserve what remains — because we no longer understand what we're losing. You probably see it all the time. The neighbor who puts pesticides on his lawn rather than deal with pesky bees. The kid who squirms and runs at the sight of a harmless garter snake slithering through the grass. The politician who votes against wildlife protection because she's never seen a wolf in the wild. The corporation that wants to bulldoze the habitat of a rare frog, but frogs are gross, so who cares, right? At best this can be termed "the extinction of experience," where our cultural and natural histories fade from our memories and therefore our reality. At its worst it becomes something even more concerning: "biophobia," the fear of living things and a complete aversion to nature. This isn't the fiction of living in a cold, empty dystopia. Sadly it's becoming a way of life for too many people — especially children...MORE

I suffer from Biophobia. Only in my case it is fear of conservationists and an aversion to their prescriptions.