![]() For every three nature-related words in the popular songs of the 1950s, for example, there is only slightly more than one 50 years later. ![]() Next, we checked how frequently these 186 words appeared in works of popular culture over time, including English fiction books written between 19, songs listed as the top 100 between 19, and storylines of movies made between 19.Īcross millions of fiction books, thousands of songs, and hundreds of thousands of movie and documentary storylines, our analyses revealed a clear and consistent trend: Nature features significantly less in popular culture today than it did in the first half of the 20th century, with a steady decline after the 1950s. We created a list of 186 nature-related words belonging to four categories: general words related to nature (e.g., autumn, cloud, lake, moonlight), names of flowers (e.g., bluebell, edelweiss, foxglove, rose), names of trees (e.g., cedar, laburnum, whitebeam, willow), and names of birds (e.g., finch, hummingbird, meadowlark, spoonbill). If novelists, songwriters, or filmmakers have fewer encounters with nature these days than before, or if these encounters make less of an impression on them, or if they don’t expect their audiences to respond to it, nature should feature less frequently in their works. Works of popular culture, we reasoned, should reflect the extent to which nature occupies our collective consciousness. Instead, we turned to the cultural products they created. To find out how the human relation to nature has changed over time, we asked ourselves: How can we define and measure all the various ways in which people connect with nature? How can we count all the times people stop to watch a sunset or listen to birds chirping, or how long they spend walking tree-lined streets? We could certainly ask these questions to living people, but we couldn’t ask people who lived a hundred years ago. QFS promotes the highest standards of keeping and breeding of birds through promotion of the hygienic keeping and scientific feeding and breeding of birds in the best and most natural conditions possible.It is widely accepted that we are more disconnected from nature today than we were a century ago, but is that actually true? A recent study we conducted suggests that it is-and that may be bad news not only for our well-being but also for the environment.
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