I'm a nature writer. I like to think that I have a pretty strong relationship with the more-than-human world: watching birds, collecting frogs, helping my kids find bugs under logs. I think nature is complex and amazing. Sometimes I think it's beautiful. But never in my life did I consider it sacred, and never once did it occur to me to consider my relationship with nature “spiritual.”
Current trends suggest that I'm missing something.
“Connected to nature” is a confusing term, but it is backed by a strong (and expanding) academic foundation. Authors of 2025 study make the alarming claim that higher levels of “connectedness with nature” or “feeling of oneness with nature” are associated with “higher spirituality” and skepticism of “science over faith.” This discovery might surprise many in the natural sciences—it certainly surprises me—but it is a sentiment that permeates recent research in nature.
Where the Druids of old worshiped nature by cultivating sacred groves of mistletoe and oak, we 21st-century dwellers find charm and fellowship in our own sacred space: the nature section of a bookstore, somewhere between gardening and personal development. The fact is that it is in writing about nature that many of us discover most, if not all, of our connection to nature. We receive this through distance, mediation, translation. We are ornithologists by proxy, second-hand botanists, armchair researchers. And I think that's okay. Life is busy and most of us live in cities or suburbs. One of the wonderful things about human life is that we can be transported to dense forests or high hills by ink marks on wood pulp.
The problem, I think, is not how we connect, but what we think we connect to. Nature is not a fantasy or a parable. It exists on the same earthly plane as we do – it is us – and it is still amazing, still fascinating, still impressive when viewed through the lens of science. It is difficult to see what can be achieved by separating science from a sincere love of nature.
It would help if we reconsidered our enthusiasm for finding lessons in nature. Maybe we really can study from moss how to stick together and follow the laws of nature, study grass resistance and study from mushrooms, allow the cycles to end, as naturalist writers recently advised. But we can also learn from the shoebill how to drive our weaker child out of the nest to starve to death, and from various internal parasites how to make our hosts die by suicide. Looking at nature since the advice seems as wise as asking ChatGPT to solve our personal problems (both resources literally have all the answers). Perhaps wise humanism is to find our own lessons among ourselves.
Then there's the age-old question of where the man—that is, the man with the book deal—is in all of this. Some argue that the first thing a nature writer needs to learn is to remain silent. But the ugly truth is that all writers love the sound of their own voice. We all need to find a balance between what's going on outside and how things are here – there is enormous value in both if done well, and the best nature writers write from both sides with clarity, experience, sensitivity and skill. Sometimes “there” means the non-human—the animals, plants, and landscapes we live among. I would like to see this more often meant other people, with different backgrounds and different points of view.
I really hope that nature writing, warts and all, continues to grow. I hope it only gets richer, more intricate, more interdisciplinary and intricate. He will have to keep up with the ever-changing “nature,” whatever we mean by that—real life, the living, breathing world, and our place in it all.
Richard Smith is the author The indifference of birds and Jay, Beech and Saucer
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