Although many people have tried to improve our relationship with nature, only few have asked the elementary question 'what is nature?'.
Koert van Mensvoort argues our notion of nature is radically changing. Where technology and nature are traditionally seen as opposed, they now appear to merge or even trade places. Time to explore how we can design, build and live in a nature caused by people. First of all we should review our image of nature, which he considers rather naive: "If you'll ask people to describe nature, they just talk about trees, animals, green things." Partly to blame for this onedimensional image is the way in wich such images of nature are presented for commercial purposes that present only the positive sides: "You don't sell products with the darker sides of nature: cruelty, death, diseases. Because this dark side is rarely presented to us, many people percieve nature as harmonic, something which is good for us". Van Mensvoort thus believes that "much of what we think of as nature is just a comforting illusion". He thinks we should upgrade our thinking about nature to Next Nature.
Koert van Mensvoort argues our notion of nature is radically changing. Where technology and nature are traditionally seen as opposed, they now appear to merge or even trade places. Time to explore how we can design, build and live in a nature caused by people. First of all we should review our image of nature, which he considers rather naive: "If you'll ask people to describe nature, they just talk about trees, animals, green things." Partly to blame for this onedimensional image is the way in wich such images of nature are presented for commercial purposes that present only the positive sides: "You don't sell products with the darker sides of nature: cruelty, death, diseases. Because this dark side is rarely presented to us, many people percieve nature as harmonic, something which is good for us". Van Mensvoort thus believes that "much of what we think of as nature is just a comforting illusion". He thinks we should upgrade our thinking about nature to Next Nature.