More and more people are afraid of nature due to alienation, scientists warn. Biophobia is on the rise with urbanization, while experts suggest more contact with the natural environment as an antidote.
A walk in the woods, a little gardening, or even gazing at green hills: contact with nature can be a real balm for the soul. There is even a special word for love of nature, "biophilia," a concept popularized by the biologist E.O. Wilson in the 1980s, who argued that human beings possess an innate tendency to seek connections with other living systems. For most of human history, this affinity was simply a given: our survival depended on reading landscapes, understanding animal behavior, and living in rhythm with the seasons. Nature was not something we visited; it was where we lived.
In recent years, however, there has been a marked increase in the opposite phenomenon: biophobia. A landmark systematic review published in December 2025 by a team from Lund University in Sweden, working in collaboration with the University of Tokyo, has found that people's relationship with nature is deteriorating at an alarming pace. The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, analyzed 196 scientific articles from fields spanning environmental science, psychology, medicine, and social sciences, drawing on research conducted across countries including Sweden, Japan, and the United States. It represents the most comprehensive attempt yet to unify the fragmented scientific understanding of biophobia, the aversion to, fear of, or disgust toward nature and its living creatures.
Johan Kjellberg Jensen, lead author of the study and a researcher at Lund University's Centre for Environmental and Climate Science, explains that the phenomenon is clearly connected to urbanization. "Today, the majority of the world's population lives in cities, which means that future generations may be at increased risk of biophobia," he told DW. The concern is not merely academic. As the review reveals, biophobia threatens both public health and environmental conservation, and it is expected to intensify as urbanization accelerates and contact with nature continues to diminish.
The Urbanization Factor
The scale of global urbanization makes the connection to biophobia impossible to ignore. According to the United Nations World Urbanization Prospects 2025 report, released in November 2025, cities are now home to 45 percent of the global population of 8.2 billion, more than double the share of 20 percent in 1950, when the world had only 2.5 billion people. The number of megacities, urban areas with 10 million or more inhabitants, has quadrupled from 8 in 1975 to 33 in 2025, with over half of them located in Asia. Jakarta, Indonesia, has overtaken Tokyo as the world's most populous city, with nearly 42 million residents, followed by Dhaka, Bangladesh, at close to 40 million. Looking ahead, two-thirds of global population growth through 2050 is projected to occur in cities, with seven countries alone, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia, expected to add more than 500 million city residents between now and mid-century.
This relentless concentration of human life into built environments has consequences that extend far beyond infrastructure and housing. Between 1975 and 2025, the amount of built-up land occupied by humans grew almost twice as fast as the global population. The average amount of built-up land per person surged from 44 to 63 square meters. As concrete, asphalt, and glass replace meadows, wetlands, and forests, the spaces where children once encountered tadpoles, beetles, and wildflowers simply disappear. In the most densely urbanized regions of Europe, North America, and East Asia, it is now entirely possible for a child to reach adulthood without ever having stood in a forest, waded through a stream, or watched a bird build a nest.
The Extinction of Experience
People's alienation from nature has been documented since at least the late 1970s, but the phenomenon gained a powerful conceptual framework in the 1990s when the American lepidopterist Robert M. Pyle coined the term "extinction of experience", a phrase that has since become central to conservation biology and environmental psychology. In a seminal 2016 review published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, researchers Masashi Soga from the University of Tokyo and Kevin J. Gaston from the University of Exeter provided extensive evidence that people, especially children, are becoming progressively less likely to have direct contact with nature in their everyday lives. Their work demonstrated that this loss of interaction not only diminishes a wide range of health and well-being benefits, but also discourages positive emotions, attitudes, and behaviors regarding the environment, creating what they described as a self-reinforcing "cycle of disaffection toward nature."
According to psychologist Dirk Stemper, this alienation particularly affects industrially developed countries. "Children are increasingly growing up in unnatural environments and spending most of their time indoors and in digital spaces," says Stemper. Their lives lack experiences related to physical or other contact with nature, such as climbing or observing animals. The shift is dramatic and measurable: research consistently shows that children today have far fewer daily experiences with nature, visiting natural environments, observing wild animals, picking wildflowers, than their parents and grandparents did as children. A survey of more than 1,000 elementary-school students in China, for instance, revealed that children living in rural areas visited natural environments and participated in a wider range of nature-based activities more frequently than those living in city centers. Yet even in more rural areas, studies have found that children display unfamiliarity with or low preference for local animals, suggesting that the disconnect between children and local biodiversity is becoming pervasive regardless of geography.
The digital displacement of outdoor experience compounds the problem. Research from the Children and Nature Network, drawing on multiple international studies published in 2024 and 2025, paints a stark picture. A study of college students in the United States found that screen time was linked to increased anxiety, depression, and stress, while time spent in green environments was associated with lower levels of all three. Research in Japan examining children aged two to four found that toddlers with more than one hour of daily screen time had significantly lower scores for communication and daily living skills by age four. A survey of nearly 23,000 Chinese adolescents found that those with higher nature exposure were significantly less likely to exhibit internet addiction, with feelings of awe toward nature providing a measurable pathway between nature exposure and reduced compulsive screen use.
Crucially, a study of German adolescents found that participants in a 10-day screen-free outdoor adventure program experienced measurable improvements in mental health, suggesting that providing time away from mediatized lifestyles may compensate for the negative health impacts of screen time. Preliminary analysis of data from over 4,000 infants in Germany's "Screen-free till 3" intervention found that children whose parents limited device use around them, and who spent more time in nature demonstrated stronger patterns of motor, language, and social-emotional development.
What Does Alienation from Nature Mean?
It is precisely direct, sensory experiences with the natural world, climbing trees, turning over rocks, watching ants carry food, that create familiarity with nature. And according to psychologist Lea Dom, the protection of the planet depends indirectly on this familiarity. "The willingness to defend the environment and the climate is greater when we feel connected to nature," Dom explains. Research by Soga and colleagues, drawing on a questionnaire survey of 5,375 Japanese children, confirmed this quantitatively: children who frequently experienced nature were more likely to develop emotional affinity toward biodiversity and to support conservation efforts. The reverse was equally true, a decrease in direct experiences with nature measurably increased biophobia.
Jensen adds that "if parents have a negative attitude towards nature, this can influence their children and lead to a vicious circle of increasingly limited contact with nature." This intergenerational transmission of biophobia is one of the most concerning findings of the Lund University review. The way children are educated by their parents can lead them to associate nature with the idea of danger in their minds. A parent who recoils from insects, refuses to let a child play in mud, or warns constantly about "dirty" outdoor environments transmits a set of emotional responses that may calcify into lasting aversion. Soga and colleagues described this dynamic in a 2023 paper in Trends in Ecology & Evolution as "the vicious cycle of biophobia", a self-reinforcing loop in which limited exposure to nature breeds fear, which drives further avoidance, which deepens unfamiliarity, which intensifies fear.
Environmental educator Susanne Ziegler from Cologne has observed this cycle firsthand. "When we ask children to collect branches in the forest, some touch them hesitantly, others use a handkerchief, and some do not touch them at all," she reports. Many children refuse to pick up pinecones or chestnuts, preferring only to look at them. The idea of touching worms, beetles, or harmless insects is for some children entirely out of the question. These are not phobic reactions in the clinical sense — they are learned behaviors, cultural inheritances of discomfort transmitted through families and reinforced by environments that offer no opportunity for correction through experience.
When Fear Becomes Hostility
Research from the Lund University review has also shown that fear of nature can escalate beyond mere avoidance into active hostility. Studies have linked biophobia with support for the killing of predators, bears, wolves, and sharks and with the use of insecticides against harmless or even ecologically beneficial species. Nearly all biophobia research to date has focused on animals, with 98 percent of the 196 studies examined involving fear of creatures rather than nature more broadly. Mammals and spiders dominate, accounting for 30 percent and 27 percent of studies, respectively. Amphibians appeared as a primary focus in just 0.5 percent of studies, essentially a single paper. This narrow research focus means that scientists still know very little about why people increasingly fear or dislike species that pose no threat whatsoever.
The conservation implications are substantial. When people who fear wolves vote on wildlife management policy, the result is often lethal control programs that undermine ecosystem balance. When homeowners who are disgusted by insects spray pesticides indiscriminately, the collateral damage extends to pollinators essential for food production. A 2024 study by Gish, Hisano, and Soga investigated whether aversion to insects affects insecticide use, finding the relationship plausible but calling for improved methodological approaches in biophobia research. The broader point remains: an emotionally disconnected public is a public less likely to support the increasingly urgent conservation measures that biodiversity loss demands.
How Is Our Image of Nature Shaped?
Our relationship with nature is strongly influenced by the culture we belong to and the stories we hear. "In Central Europe, the forest used to be seen as a place of danger, wild animals, and threats," says Stemper. The Germanic and Slavic folk traditions of medieval Europe are saturated with forest-as-peril narratives: the dark woods of the Brothers Grimm, the wolf lurking on the path, the witch in the heart of the forest. These stories served a practical purpose, keeping children from wandering into genuinely dangerous terrain, but they also planted deep psychological associations between nature and menace.
Since the 19th century and the Romantic movement, however, a counternarrative emerged. Writers like Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Goethe reimagined forests and mountains as places of beauty, spiritual renewal, and creative inspiration. Forests became destinations, places that people actively sought out. In Japan, a parallel tradition of reverence for nature was formalized in the 1980s through the concept of shinrin-yoku, or "forest bathing," originally advocated by the Japanese Forestry Agency in 1982 in response to a national health crisis linked to rising stress-related illness in an increasingly technology-dependent workforce.
Today, Stemper warns, fear of nature is returning, this time driven not by wolves and witches but by alienation and digital distraction. Digital media often present a distorted image of nature, a "hyperreality" that is much more intense and vivid than actual experience. Virtual nature experiences, images posted on Instagram, wildlife footage in video games, and curated nature content on social media create the illusion of engagement without any of the sensory richness, unpredictability, or genuine encounter that real nature provides. "Virtual nature experiences seem more intense and 'real' than actual contact with forests, meadows, or animals," Stemper observes. The result is a generation that may feel they "know" nature from screens while being simultaneously frightened by its actual textures, smells, and unpredictability. The Lund University review explicitly notes the role of traditional and social media in compounding biophobia, as negative information about nature, shark attacks, bear maulings, and tick-borne disease spreads rapidly and disproportionately through digital channels, reinforcing the perception that the natural world is primarily a source of danger.
The Health Implications
The irony of biophobia is that the thing people are learning to fear is one of the most powerful sources of physical and psychological healing available to them. "Real contact with nature boosts our mental health," says Dom, and the scientific evidence supporting this claim has grown enormously over the past two decades.
The Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku has been the subject of particularly rigorous investigation. Research led by Qing Li, a professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo and one of the world's leading authorities on forest medicine, has demonstrated that spending time among trees reduces the stress hormones cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrenaline; increases the activity of natural killer (NK) cells, a type of white blood cell that plays a critical role in immune defense and tumor suppression; improves sleep quality; lowers blood pressure and heart rate; and reduces anxiety, depression, anger, and fatigue as measured by standardized psychological assessments. In one study, participants who walked in a forest for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon experienced a significant increase in anti-cancer proteins and immune cells, with the effects persisting for at least seven days afterward. A systematic review and meta-analysis of 22 studies, published in the International Journal of Biometeorology, confirmed that in all but two of the studies examined, cortisol levels were significantly lower after forest exposure compared with urban control groups.
The mechanism behind these effects is partly chemical. Trees release volatile organic compounds called phytoncides, antimicrobial substances that, when inhaled by humans, appear to activate immune function and reduce stress hormone production. Li's research showed that even diffusing concentrated essential oils from Japanese cypress trees into hotel rooms produced approximately 40 to 50 percent of the health benefits of actual forest immersion. The forest, in other words, is not merely a pleasant backdrop; it is a biochemically active therapeutic environment.
Beyond forests specifically, studies consistently show that access to green space improves concentration, reduces distraction, enhances emotional regulation, and supports healthier developmental outcomes in children. Exposure to nature has been shown to help prevent myopia, improve the management of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and foster pro-environmental behaviors. Research from the University of Illinois found that children with ADHD who spent time in ordinary natural settings during after-school hours and weekends experienced significant reductions in symptoms, a finding described by the researchers as a potential widespread, accessible treatment for a disorder affecting roughly one in every fourteen children. A study of nearly 23,000 Chinese adolescents found that for economically disadvantaged students with limited screen time, higher levels of greenness around their schools were significantly associated with reduced depressive symptoms, suggesting that greening schoolyards could simultaneously address mental health disparities and educational inequity.
The Lund University review underscores these findings in stark terms: negative emotions toward nature cause people to miss out on these well-documented health benefits while simultaneously contributing to attitudes and behaviors that undermine conservation and sustainability.
Reconnecting with Nature: The Path Forward
Contact with nature is something that can be cultivated, and the scientific literature offers clear guidance on how. Jensen argues that an important first step is increasing exposure to nature, particularly for children, by developing green spaces and strengthening biodiversity in cities. Urban planners and policymakers have a critical role to play: community gardens, green rooftops, accessible parks, tree-lined streets, and restored urban waterways can all provide the daily encounters with living systems that prevent biophobia from taking root.
Education matters profoundly. As Jensen notes, the more we learn about plants and animals, the more we appreciate them. Ecological knowledge and direct experience work in tandem: a child who learns that a spider is a garden's most efficient pest controller may overcome a visceral aversion; a teenager who understands the ecological role of wolves in maintaining forest health may be less likely to support lethal wildlife management policies.
According to Susanne Ziegler, the best way to reconnect children with nature is through play, unstructured, physical, joyful engagement with the outdoors. "If children fall while playing tag in the forest, hide behind trees, or crawl into bushes, then touching branches is no longer a problem," she says. The point is not to lecture children about nature's importance but to create conditions in which familiarity develops organically through the body, through running, climbing, digging, splashing, and exploring.
The Lund University review calls for a diverse toolkit to address biophobia, recognizing that no single intervention will suffice. In some cases, increasing knowledge and contact with nature is the priority; in others, reducing points of conflict between humans and wildlife may be more important. Longitudinal studies, which currently constitute only 11 percent of biophobia research, are urgently needed to track how the phenomenon evolves over time and across generations. The current geographical bias in research, concentrated overwhelmingly in Western countries, must also be addressed, as cultural and regional differences in human-nature relationships remain poorly understood.
"The phenomenon of biophobia is broad and requires a diverse toolkit," Jensen concludes. "We need to understand the mechanisms behind the negative emotions better to reverse the trend."
What is ultimately at stake is not only the health of individuals but also the health of the planet. A species that fears nature will not fight to protect it. A generation raised on screens and sealed off from the living world will lack not just the knowledge but the emotional motivation to confront the ecological crises that define our era. The extinction of experience, if left unaddressed, threatens to produce an extinction of caring, and with it, an acceleration of the very biodiversity loss that makes the natural world ever harder to encounter, ever easier to fear, and ever more urgently in need of defenders.