Our problem isn’t just loneliness—it’s species loneliness

Until the age of ten, I lived like many American kids of the 1970s in a primly geometric neighborhood, crosshatched with pavement, with matchbook yards and immature plantings. More than any tree, the television towered over my childhood. Sweltering hot summer afternoons were often spent indoors watching game shows and re-runs of shows like The Brady Bunch, Leave It to Beaver, and Happy Days. Though I loved these shows and the family I watched them with, and though our yard did have an aboveground pool and a tree house in an old oak tree, for me something was missing. It itched and ached like an amputated limb. It was nature.

Occasionally I hear a phrase that opens a door to understanding like a key, helping me decipher a social dynamic, a knot of emotions, or a foggy personal interaction. In an interview with Book­Page, novelist Richard Powers said something that hit me in this way. He spoke of “species loneliness.” Such powerful, true words to describe the blight of human disconnection and sickness we see around us: species loneliness.

The phrase struck me as a diagnosis of the first half of my life. Exploring uncultivated nature was rare for me as a child; the times I did wander into it, along the margins of my neighborhood, were a reprieve from otherwise incessant loneliness. I still see the arching branches I crouched through on the backsides of bushes, like knobby arms raised over my head in a wild square dance—sun-sparkled dust baptizing me like confetti. I see the rivulet streams with their split-screen reflections looking back at me.