Homo sapiens.  People.  Humans.  What are we?  What do we do?  Why do we do it?  How can we do it better?  Two of my recent projects caused me to ask these questions as I searched for the answers to understanding our vast interconnectivity between people and with nature.  The answers that emerged after considerable reflection, research, and exploration came down to this:  we need to create deeper understanding of our role in nature and what makes us human.  And by doing this, we just may find a key to addressing what are perhaps the greatest existential threats we face as a species – our societal and environmental crises.  As a designer of schools, another question emerged:  what is the role of design in fostering empathy? 

 

At the most fundamental levels, we as living beings are part of a global flow system of energy and information.  What we do is we exist, act, and behave in accordance the fundamental laws of the universe, including the laws of thermodynamics.  As noted physicist Erwin Schrodinger posited, we as life create order from disorder; we are in a perpetual fight against the universe’s unstoppable trend towards disorder, chaos, entropy.  What others have subsequently observed however is that even just being alive, our creating order, results in greater disorder in our surroundings.  Every transfer of energy involves loss, through misdirection or friction. 

 

Try snapping your fingers 10 times quickly.  Your muscles tell of the energy you’ve exerted.  Your warm fingertips tell of the friction and the heat.  Your fingerprints may feel smoother.  The heat and the skin cells are now lost to the universe.  They may take a tour via a dust bunny or two.  That is human entropy in a nutshell.  Consider a sand castle.  Even before the incoming tide washes it away, the surrounding sand is a wasteland.  The beautifully ordered grains of sand in your castle required order be extracted from the nearby beach.  And the grains of sand you’ve moved or compressed – many are now even smaller and broken into more pieces.  Your beautiful order created more disorder.  That is what we do with our homes, our farms, our cities, our technology - everything that defines our civilization. 

 

As highly social creatures, our emotions are an important part of who we are and what we do.  They too are a form of communication, of information, of energy.  There is loss, misunderstanding, even friction when emotions are not clearly conveyed.  Here is where our almost uniquely human skills comes in – empathy. 

 

Empathy is a skill that helps us communicate emotion. It is not an emotion, such as compassion, but it can lead to that.  It is believed to have played a key role in our survival and development as a species.  It is rooted in hard science, in the mirror neurons in our brains that connect the information from our sensory organs – eyes, ears, noses, etc. – directly to our inner brain where emotions and memories are triggered.  We also apply it to other firms of life and even inanimate objects to create empathic relationships, albeit one-sided.

 

There are 3 types of empathy: 

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• emotional empathy enables us to feel the emotions of another;

• intellectual or cognitive empathy enables us to understand the emotions of another;

• somatic empathy – much less common - enables us to physically feel what another is feeling. 

 

Emotionally healthy people have these in varying degrees of balance. When these get out of balance is can be problematic.  For example, sociopaths and psychopaths lack emotional empathy but may have highly acute intellectual empathy. This allows them to manipulate others without suffering what they are feeling. 

 

Design of spaces and places shapes our actions, our interactions and relationships, and our emotions.  As such, design has role to play in supporting the learning and developing of empathic skills.  Perhaps the most influential of all building types are those where our children spend much of their time during their formative years – their learning environments, both at school and elsewhere.  There is a rapidly growing awareness in Western society that our educational systems and structures do not provide the optimum ways or spaces to learn – and that much of that can be addressed by getting students outside. 

 

Nature-based or outdoor learning environments are superior in many ways to the indoor environments found in many schools.  We know that we all learn different things in different ways at different times.  This differentiation of learning styles, educational approaches, environments, and presentation and intake of information helps form the differentiated neural networks in our brains that is critical for deeper learning and long term memory.  Activities that need space to move, to activate bodies, to get fresh oxygenated blood flowing into the brains and muscles are not readily supported in most indoor classrooms.  Nature-based environments offer holistic opportunities and inspiration for exploration, inquiry, and skills development across the full spectrum of subjects or projects. Exposure to multiple forms of life, from plants to animals, birds, insects, etc. is simply not practical indoors.  There are noted physiological, behavioral, social, and emotional benefits to spending more time outdoors, including developing empathy.  Outdoor learning environments present different challenges and need to be designed to suit the specific environmental context, but they can offer complementary benefits to their indoor counterparts.    

 

Nature is not only a great place to learn empathy for people.  By learning with nature we develop empathy for nature.  With regular, immersive experiences in nature comes greater understanding and familiarity.  And from that understanding of nature and our role in it, emerges caring and nurturing behavior.  Key to that is developing the empathic skill needed for us to create healthy relationships with those upon whom we depend – our human and natural ecosystems - before it is too late.

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© ross parker 2023