A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
biophilia
The idea that human beings have an inherited pull toward living things and living systems — that our attention goes to animals, water, trees, and the horizon on its own, without being trained to look there, because it was useful for a very long time to do so. It is a hypothesis, not a finding, and it has been argued over for forty years.
Etymology
Greek bios, life, plus philia, affection or friendly love — literally love of life. Erich Fromm used it first, in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness in 1973, as a term of psychology: the passionate love of life and of everything alive, understood as a quality a person could develop or fail to develop. Edward O. Wilson took the same word in 1984 and moved it from psychology to biology, arguing the tendency has a genetic basis and belongs to the species rather than the individual. Two men, one word, two entirely different claims underneath it.
Notes
The idea has had its largest practical effect in architecture, where biophilic design has become a working brief for daylight, plants, water, natural materials, and views out. Wilson published Biophilia in 1984 and followed it with The Biophilia Hypothesis, a collection edited with Stephen Kellert, in 1993.