One morning during our backpack in the wooded wilderness of the Big Snowy Mountains near Lewistown, MT I woke up to a pink morning sky and the remnants of the night prior’s full moon on the banks of Swimming Woman Creek. I walked into the woods to have a moment alone, pulled some rock-licking hippy crap and hugged a tree for a few minutes—it looked like it needed it, and I felt it asking for one.
Later that morning we sat in a circle around the campsite’s fire pit and started class for the day which was focused on discussing biophilia: human’s love and desire to be connected with the natural world. We discussed the way in which biophilia is manifested and the perceived gradual disappearance thereof in the modern cosmopolitan world while each of us outlined the way in which we developed a love for nature. Many pointed to the central role that the open and wooded landscapes they grew up played in the creation of their relationship with nature, asserting that access to green space is of paramount importance. My biophilia, however, was not born of access to green space or awe at natural landscapes; it was born within the concrete walls of New York City.
Growing up, I spent weekend afternoons sitting outside of my Dad’s restaurant, a little café called The Crooked Tree Creperie. It sat in the middle of Manhattan’s East Village on the bottom of St. Marks Place and was marked by a tall crooked tree in the middle of the block. I spent each day with a motley crew of locals and passersby as my dad kept an eye on me through the window. As the hours of the day came and went along with the short conversations, the crooked tree was a constant. Every so often, I would glance at it, noticing its bark, its leaves and the way it moved with the wind. It provided as a reminder of nature and its beauty in a life consumed with people and their creations, it provided a comfort of familiarity.
I watched that crooked tree transform throughout the seasons and years. In the early spring, as the snow on the sidewalk melted it grew little green and brown bulbs that turned into pink as the temperature rose and the weeks passed. The cornucopia of bulbs eventually popped into florescent big green leaves in the summer that turned into the yellow and red leaves that scattered the sidewalk in front of the Café in the fall. As winter came, the tree’s branches rid their leaves and became bare—holding the snow up off of the sidewalk. I don’t know what type of tree it is, nor do I care, it’s just a crooked one that has become important to me, a piece of nature I felt personally connected to.
Since my tree-watching days, I have developed a true love and respect for nature using my crooked tree as a proxy for that. My tree allowed me to think of natural beings as important entities to which I could develop a personal relationship. Biophilia is not an inaccessible privilege of those living in our world’s more natural environments; it is a universally accessible privilege. The development of a relationship with a single natural being brings forth the idea that natural things are worth loving, a sentiment that spreads outwards and breeds love for the natural world as a whole. So it is to say, to develop a biophilic mindset, you don’t need much more than a single blade of grass and some time.