S7E8: “A Nature-Blind Society Is a Sick Society” — On Ecological Illiteracy, Biophobia, and the Children We’re Raising Without Nature, with Prof. Hans Van Dyck of UCLouvain

About this episode

The episode discusses the impact of ecological illiteracy and biophobia on children and society, featuring insights from Prof. Hans Van Dyck.

Fewer than 23% of Flemish children between 8 and 17 can identify a blackbird. Less than 5% can name a peacock butterfly. The mole scores highest — not because of nature education, but because it's a beloved character in children's stories. Nature isn't just disappearing from our landscapes. It's disappearing from our minds. In this episode, I sit down with Prof. Hans Van Dyck, behavioral ecologist at UCLouvain and head of the Behavioural Ecology and Conservation group, to talk about what happens to a species — and a society — when children grow up without meaningful contact with the living world. We get into the winners and losers of human-altered landscapes, and where Homo sapiens really sits on that spectrum. We talk about niche construction and its hidden cost — how we built a world for ourselves, and what we quietly subtracted in the process. Hans walks me through Robert Pyle's devastating 1978 concept of the "extinction of experience," and why disconnection compounds across generations. We get into shifting baselines — why each generation inherits a smaller idea of what "normal" nature looks like, without knowing it. And we talk about the move from nature…

People in this episode

Host: Dr. Nadina Galle

Guest: Prof. Hans Van Dyck

Topics covered

• ecological illiteracy
• biophobia
• nature connection
• children and nature
• behavioral ecology
• shifting baselines

Keywords

• nature blindness
• Flemish children
• blackbird
• peacock butterfly
• niche construction
• human-altered landscapes
• nature education

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: UCLouvain, SUGi

Books & works: extinction of experience

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