Word: Biophilia

I have a word stuck in my head, and that word is biophilia. I was introduced to it in Eric Weiner's The Geography of Bliss in a chapter on Switzerland:

The Swiss are a humorless, uptight nation. Everything works, usually, and envy is squelched, but at a cost: You’re always being watched, monitored, judged. Where’s the bliss? “It’s simple,” says Dieter. “Nature. We Swiss have a very deep connection to nature.”

Biophilia hypothesis: the more connected to nature, the happier we are.

Biophilia. Pronounce it. It's lovely to say. So lovely that it's become an earworm that is stuck in my head! Carrying the word around in my head for the past two weeks has lead me to surfing the web for it.

Introduced by Edward O. Wilson in his book Biophilia (1984), biophilia is a theory that humans have an instinctual bond with other living beings and systems including nature, landscapes, weather, and animals. Here is the Wikipedia version, and for those of you more hard-core and analytical, here's Bjørn Grinde and Grete Grindal Patil's study Biophilia: Does Visual Contact with Nature Impact on Health and Well-Being? published in September 2009 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

Did I mention björk has an album titled Biophilia? Actually... it's more than an album. It's a multimedia project and educational project - as best as I can sum up. Björk's version of biophilia is a whole other research project on to itself!