Natural Happiness By Paul Bloom Summary

A Breakdown of “Natural Happiness” by Paul Bloom

There is this feeling we all experience when we step away from the chaos of rushing cars, infrastructure, and artificial lights, and we step into nature. Some describe it as bliss, comfort, excitement, pleasure or just pure happiness. This is the answer to the question Paul Bloom asks “Why should we care about nature?” in his article “Natural Happiness.” Paul goes through this process in which he uncovers the fact that “real natural habitats provide significant sources of pleasure for modern humans”, regardless of our need for food, clean water, and air. There are 3 main arguments that Paul makes in this article that I find particularly interesting, they include: “Our hunger for the natural is everywhere. In many regards our species has already kissed nature goodbye, and we are better off for it. There is a considerable mismatch between

the world in which our minds evolved and our current existence.” In this paper I will analyze Paul’s arguments to better understand how we need nature for pleasure because artificial objects cannot provide the same feeling consequently why we seem to be destroying nature if it provides us with pleasure. I agree with Paul that “the preservation of the natural world should be important to us,” but I also believe that we are failing to protect our natural environment because we have become so modernized that capital gain rules the interests of the majority that is making it harder for the rest of us to protect our land and ecosystems.
Firstly, how do we emulate that we need nature in order to better our everyday lives? That’s easy for me to answer because every free chance I get away from completing homework, running adult errands or working, I am either snowboarding, hiking, slacklining, or longboarding. But why? All of these activities provide me a certain kind of pleasure that I cannot experience from watching TV. I don’t quite understand why, but I would agree with Paul’s statement that “Our hunger for the natural is everywhere,” furthermore that “We thrive in the presence of nature and suffer in its absence.” I crave to be outside in the sun every moment of the day, because I experience happiness when I am in natural environments. I’m not the only one either, Paul states, “many of us seek to escape urban environments whenever we can – to hike, camp, or hunt.” We can also measure how “Our hunger for the natural is everywhere” Paul gives the example how “it is reflected in real estate prices: if you want a view of the trees of central park, it’ll cost you.” Also, Paul claims “many studies show that even a limited dose of nature, like a chance to look at the outside world through a window, is good for your health.” It could be true that this is because of biophilia. Biophilia is “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life” (E. O. Wilson). Biophilia can also be described as the “Love of Life.” I believe in the biophilia hypothesis until I read Paul Bloom’s statement: “In the end, an indiscriminate biophilia makes little sense. Natural selection shaped the human brain to be drawn toward aspects of nature that enhance our survival and reproduction, like verdant landscapes and docile creatures. There is no payoff to getting the warm fuzzies in the presence of rats, snakes, mosquitoes, cockroaches, herpes simplex and the rabies virus. Some of the natural world is appealing, some of it is terrifying and some of it grosses us out.” I agree with Paul here because I love going out hiking during the summer, but if I don’t bring bug spray I get eaten alive by mosquitos, but to experience the outdoors is still worth it to me. It’s true that we pick as well as choose what aspects of nature, we like or would do without and this may be why some people disregard all nature by cutting down trees, but I believe that in order to have to good you have to have some of the bad also.
So now we know that it’s proven that nature provides humans with pleasure, so why is it that we continue to destroy it? Paul Bloom mentions how “In many regards our species has already kissed nature goodbye, and we are better off for it.” I believe the reason for this is because we are not willing to give up our convenient lifestyles, where we can take hot showers, drive our cars anywhere we want, and drink hot coffee in a cup we only use once then throw away. We have become so accustomed to these pampered lifestyles that if it meant we had to give up any one of these things in order to save the environment, we probably wouldn’t. It’s sad, but a true reality we live in, moreover I will admit that I am guilty. Paul puts this into perspective with a statement from Donald Norman that states, “The average American encounters 20,000 different kinds of artifacts in everyday life, which would be more than the number of animals and plants that we can distinguish. And right now, there are about 1.5 million identified species on Earth — impressive, but nothing compared to the more than 7 million United States patents.” This boggles my mind. The number of US patents exceeds the number of identified species on Earth and is still growing. Paul mentions how “You might think that technology could provide a simulacrum of nature with all the bad parts scrubbed out. But attempts to do so have turned out to be interesting failures.” This is interesting because of instead trying to protect the real thing we now pick as well as choose which parts of nature we want to keep, then create inventions that only emulate the good parts, but they are not the real thing, and we can tell. “Consider a recent study by the University of Washington psychologist Peter H. Kahn Jr. and his colleagues. They put 50-inch high-definition televisions in the windowless offices of faculty and staff members to provide a live view of a natural scene. People liked this, but in another study that measured heart-rate recovery from stress, the HDTVs were shown to be worthless, no better than staring at a blank wall. What did help with stress was giving people an actual plate-glass window looking out upon actual greenery” (Paul Bloom). I think this provides a perfect example of how we cannot replicate nature with inventions nevertheless gives us an excellent reason to protect it.
Finally, I believe the reason we continue to destroy nature, even though it provides us humans with obvious innate pleasure is because, as Paul Bloom states, “There is a considerable mismatch between the world in which our minds evolved and our current existence.” Paul explains how, “Our species has spent almost all of its existence on the African savanna.

While there is debate over the details, we know for sure that our minds were not adapted to cope with a world of billions of people.” I believe technology as well as the growth of the industrialized world is to blame for this disconnect. We are money hungry, not all of us, but the United States, specifically revolve around a Capitalistic society where the mentality is that wealth is the main source of happiness. Paul states how, “Thousands of years ago, there was no television or Internet, no McDonald’s, birth-control pills, Viagra, plastic surgery, alarm clocks, artificial lighting or paternity tests. Instead, there was plenty of nature. We lived surrounded by trees and water and animals and sky.” And guess what, we

survived.
In conclusion, I believe that we are failing to protect our natural environment because we have become so modernized that capital gain rules the interests of the majority that is making it harder for the rest of us to protect our land and ecosystems. I agree with Paul that, “Our hunger for the natural is everywhere, our species has already kissed nature goodbye, and we are better off for it, and there is a considerable mismatch between the world in which our minds evolved and our current existence.” I don’t believe that we will ever be able to invent something that can replace nature or the pleasure it provides to humans additionally, Paul Bloom is correct in that, “this basic fact about human pleasure is an excellent argument for keeping the real thing.” I also believe that we should stop trying to pick as well as choose which parts of nature to protect or what to destroy and start preserving as much as we can because I don’t think we know how it might affect us in the future. Paul Bloom sums this up perfectly in that “The preservation of the natural world should be important to us.”