Nature

The Joys of Nature

the United States once threw a short length of hose pipe into an enclosure containing chimpanzees. The chimps panicked because they thought it was a snake. But that chimpanzee colony had been born in captivity for more then ten generations and none of those generations had ever seen a snake.

Many Irish people are nervous of spiders and in some it becomes a full-blown phobia. There are no dangerous spiders in Ireland but there are plenty in Africa where your ancestors lived 70,000 years ago. One of my sons, when he was very young, suffered from recurrent nightmares in which a very large cat came out of the darkness and carried him off.

But genetic memory is not just about phobias and things we dislike. It also carries information about things that we do like, things that stimulate the pleasure centres in our brain. This, I think, is the explanation for the joys of nature.

I look around as I’m writing this. I’m sitting on the patio in the shade of a tree

because it’s sunny and I need to be able to see the screen. In front of me is a rock garden with two pools connected by a waterfall. There are fish in the lower pool. Behind me is a barbeque area - not a gas barbeque, one that burns charcoal or wood. Everything is very green. I created this environment over a number of years but I never designed it. I just gradually transformed a barren area into a place where I felt good. But if I look at it now I think my genetic memory was urging me to create a facsimile of an environment my ancestors lived in tens of thousands of years ago.

Later on today I will obey a strange urge to abandon an efficient and modern kitchen and light a fire outdoors. I’ll grill meat and then eat some strawberries. Surely this is atavistic? My late father was a pipe smoker and he always claimed that one of the chief pleasures of a pipe was that it allowed him the satisfaction of kindling a small fire in its bowl several times a day.

The ability to control fire seems to be something that we developed very early in

our history. In fact there is a modern theory that it’s when we learned to use fire to cook food, which meant that we got more nutritional advantage from it and had to spend less time chewing, that we shot away from the other anthropoid apes and became truly human. Cookery may be the skill that got us where we are today.

But let’s get back to the joys of nature. If you accept that genetic memory plays a much larger role in our lives than most people acknowledge and if you accept that for at least 95 percent of our history we were a part of nature, it’s not surprising that we should enjoy returning to it.

Try analysing what goes on in your brain when you’re selecting a place to go walking. You might head for the high hills, you might chose a forest or a towpath beside water. If I ask you to explain your choice you’ll probably say something like: ‘because it’s beautiful’ or ‘because I like it there’. But maybe, just maybe, you’re listening to the voices of your ancestors who lived and died fifty millennia ago.

Many people enjoy nature - and I suspect recreational walkers enjoy it more than most. It’s a universal

phenomenon, though it may be strongest among people who live in unnatural environments such as towns and cities. It’s also very ancient - songs, poems and essays on the joys of nature are as old as literature. But why? What is it in the natural world that gives us so much pleasure?

To answer the question I think we have to look at the history of our species. It’s not that long a history, on an evolutionary scale, because modern humans only appeared about 200,000 years ago in and around the African Rift Valley. Although there is some scholarly debate about this, it’s likely that the first of several human migrations out of Africa took place about 70,000 years ago. We

then lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers until the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution about 10,000 years ago in the Middle East.

The Neolithic invention of agriculture allowed people to build permanent settlements which eventually became villages, town and cities and also to build things like Newgrange and the Great Pyramid. This paved the way for the development of what we like to call civilisation. But if you take the history of our species to be 200,000 years and the history of civilisation to be, at the most generous estimate, 10,000, years then for 95 percent of our history we have been uncivilised.

Being uncivilised, in this context, meant being totally part of nature - after all there was no alternative. We depended for our survival on our understanding of the natural environment and our appreciation of the threats it posed and the opportunities it offered. There is recent genetic evidence to

suggest that the threats were very real because it seems that at one stage the total population of humans in the world was reduced to between 1,000 and 10,000 breeding pairs. World population is now just under 7 billion.

With a history like that, which includes the near extinction of our species, you’d think that we might end up distrusting and disliking nature. But this is where the phenomenon of genetic memory comes into play.

Genetic memory is memory that is inherited rather than derived from experience. It undoubtedly exists in humans and most other higher animals, though in animals we often label it as instinct. It is genetic memory that allows a young swallow hatched in Ireland to find its way back to Africa a fortnight after its parents have left or prompts your dog to bury a bone in the vegetable garden. A behavioural scientist in

“For 95 percent of our history we have been uncivilised.”

Our appreciation of nature may just be the most natural thing about us, says Dick Warner

There's no place like home: Africa's Rift Valley