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I have a slide I use in a lot of my talks. It shows a simple statistic: fewer than 10 native species can be recognized by the average child. More than 1,000 corporate logos can be identified without hesitation.
Every time I show it, the room goes quiet.
Professor Hans Van Dyck has a version of that slide too. His shows that fewer than 23% of Flemish children between the ages of 8 and 17 can identify a blackbird. A blackbird — one of the most common, loudest, most conspicuous birds in Western Europe. Less than 5% could name a peacock butterfly, one of the most strikingly beautiful insects on the continent. The mole scored highest at 89% — not because of nature education, Hans points out, but because the mole is a beloved character in children’s stories.
As it turns out, nature isn’t disappearing only from our landscapes…it’s disappearing from our minds 🤯
Winners, losers, and one very successful ape
Hans is a behavioral ecologist at UCLouvain in Belgium, where he leads the Behavioural Ecology and Conservation group. His work focuses on what he calls winners and losers in anthropogenic landscapes — the organisms that adapt to human-altered environments, and the ones that don’t.
The winners tend to be flexible. They shift their behavior, find new resources, and sometimes even evolve rapidly enough to keep pace with us. The losers are the specialists — the ones that need a specific host plant, a particular kind of meadow, a landscape that no longer exists. They respond to cues from an environment we’ve changed beyond recognition, and in doing so, they’re fooled. Not maliciously. Just structurally. We’ve rewritten the information landscape they depend on, and no one sent them the update.
I asked Hans where Homo sapiens falls on that spectrum.
By strict biological criteria, he said, we are extraordinarily successful. Our population trends are enviable. Our cousins — chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans — are threatened or vulnerable. We are, in the most literal sense, winning.
And yet. There’s a version of winning that looks a lot like losing in slow motion.
The price of our own niche construction
Hans introduced me to a concept I keep turning over: niche construction. Beavers do it — they build dams, alter hydrology, reshape their own habitat to suit themselves. Humans do it too, just at a scale and speed no other species has ever managed. Agriculture. Urbanization. Medicine. We have been extraordinarily effective at building a world for ourselves.
But there’s a catch. A lot of what made that niche construction survivable — in ways that connect directly to what Geof Donovan and I talked about in S7E2 — was that nature was still there. Even when we weren’t paying attention to it, it was colonizing us. The microbes in the soil, on plant leaves, in the air of biodiverse green spaces — they were doing their work on our immune systems, whether we appreciated them or not.
Now, in dense urban environments with little green cover and even less biodiversity, that background exposure is gone. And we are only beginning to understand what that costs us.
Hans pointed me to pioneering work out of Helsinki, where ecologists and immunologists have collaborated to study how biodiverse urban environments affect human microbiomes — and by extension, immune system development in children. It connects directly to the work Geof Donovan described with childhood asthma and leukemia in New Zealand: genus-level biodiversity, not just greenness, appears to matter for the microbial communities that shape our health from the earliest years of life.
Read more in S7E2👇
More diverse plants. More diverse leaf microbes. More diverse microbiomes. Less disease.
We evolved surrounded by an overwhelming richness of other life. The question isn’t whether we can live without it. The question is what it costs us when we do.
The extinction of experience
In 1978, an American butterfly biologist named Robert Pyle coined the phrase that structures a lot of Hans’s public-facing work: the extinction of experience. The idea is simple and devastating. It’s not only species and habitats that go extinct. It’s also the opportunity — particularly in childhood — to encounter them. To find a frog in a creek. To hold a moth. To climb a tree and feel the bark. To be bored in a meadow and discover that it isn’t boring at all.
Hans’s father, now in his 80s, grew up knowing the names of birds and plants — not from textbooks, but from just being around them. That knowledge came through his skin. Like osmosis. You just absorbed what was around you.
Pyle’s insight was that this loss feeds itself across generations. If you didn’t have those experiences, you can’t pass them on. Dr. Miles Richardson at the University of Derby calls it a generational problem because disconnection compounds. What your grandmother didn’t feel, your mother didn’t show you. What you didn’t learn, your children won’t inherit.
And there’s something even eerier happening beneath that. Hans calls it the shifting baseline: each generation inherits not just less nature, but a compressed sense of what “normal” nature looks like. His ecology master’s students had never seen a cuckoo in the field. Not because cuckoos are rare — but because they were already rare in their childhood. The reference point had moved, and no one had told them. What we mourn, they’ve never missed. What they’ll mourn, their children won’t have words for.
But the extinction of experience isn’t just cultural loss. Hans argues it’s a public health emergency. And increasingly, it’s becoming something worse.
When blindness becomes fear
Nature blindness — not seeing what’s there, not being able to name it, walking past it as undifferentiated background — is one thing. What Hans is noticing now, and what I think is the most important thread of our conversation, is that blindness is giving way to biophobia.
He told me about a teacher who brought a class of eight and nine-year-olds on a nature walk with a box of tissues — so that each time a child touched a plant, they could immediately clean their hands.
He told me about a group of teenagers on a café terrace in Amsterdam — bold, tattooed, loud — who scattered in genuine panic when a large butterfly flew through their space. Not noticing a butterfly is one thing. Being afraid of it is another.
Adrian Wong from the SUGi Project, whom I interviewed in Season 6, told me about children who showed up to a school yard tree planting event in full hazmat suits. That story sounds like a joke. It isn’t.
Hans is careful here — he’s a scientist, not an alarmist. These are anecdotes. But he’s watching what’s happening in Japan and the UK, where the research is further along, and he doesn’t like what he sees. Biophobia creates its own feedback loop. If people are afraid of nature, they oppose rewilding. They lobby against biodiverse planting in their neighborhoods. They connect pollen allergies to the presence of (any and all) vegetation — and demand less of it — not realizing that the immune dysregulation driving those allergies is likely caused by too little biodiversity exposure, not too much.
The vicious circle, he said, closes on itself.
The school yard as a leverage point
If I had to pull one thread from this conversation as a practical takeaway, it’s this: school yards are one of the highest-leverage interventions available to us.
Children spend enormous amounts of time on them (or at least, should). They’re distributed throughout cities — including in neighborhoods where access to parks and nature reserves is limited. Greening them doesn’t require a child to have a wealthy family, a garden, or parents who can afford to drive to the countryside on weekends. Done well, they can be the great equalizer.
And the benefits compound in ways that surprised even me. Hans pointed to research by behavioral scientist Jolanda Maas in the Netherlands showing that greened school yards are associated with fewer peer problems and more social support among children (AKA less bullying).
The theory (and I find this fascinating) is that nature creates a kind of shared common challenge. Nature gives children something to be curious about together, something that temporarily dissolves the social hierarchies that produce cruelty. There’s no time to pick on someone when there’s a dragonfly doing something inexplicable six centimeters from your face.
It also helps that greener, more complex school yards give children places to be. The gray asphalt panopticon (look it up, it’s this dreadful 18th-century prison design), designed for supervisory efficiency, is a pressure cooker. A yard with trees and varied terrain and things living in it is a habitat. Children in habitats behave differently from children in cages.
You don’t have to be a biologist
One of the things I appreciated most about Hans in this conversation is how insistently practical he is. His Google Scholar profile speaks for itself: over 18,000 citations and an h-index of 58 — and yet, he will happily tell you that you don’t need to know the name of a single species to do this work.
If you’re a teacher who doesn’t know your birds: ask the children what they would call it. The female blackbird is brown — so why do we call it a blackbird? Who decided? Can you come up with a better name? Suddenly, you’re doing etymology, biology, and creative writing simultaneously, and no one has had to be an expert.
What Hans is really describing — without using the term — is what American developmental psychologist Howard Gardner calls naturalistic intelligence: the capacity to notice, classify, wonder. It doesn’t require a degree. It requires permission.
He told me about a recent visit of his to a kindergarten class — children of five and six — where he brought some preserved specimens from his lab. A few butterflies. A dragonfly. Dead, but intact. Within minutes, the children were asking questions he thought were genuinely remarkable. How does a butterfly sleep? How does a bee find its hive without a GPS? These are not naive questions. These are, in compressed form, the questions that have driven decades of research.
Children are born naturalists. Hans didn’t invent that idea — he traces it back to Darwin, and to the nature study movement of the late 19th century, which had remarkably similar arguments to the ones we’re making today. The difference is that those arguments were made when nature was still an unavoidable part of daily life. We are making them now, when it isn’t.
Which makes it both harder and more urgent.
What governments and conservation groups should do
Hans’s answer to this is less complicated than you might expect from someone who has spent decades in academic ecology. Green the school yards. Do it with the children and the teachers, not just for them — so that it becomes their space, their project, their investment. Permit them to touch things, to catch things, to get dirty. Don’t just install a garden and put a sign on it.
For practical tips on optimal school yard greening read/listen to my conversation with Ian Mostert of IVN Nature Education👇
And invest in nature contact as a tool for conservation, not just as a nice-to-have. There’s good research showing that people who have had meaningful nature experiences as children are more likely to care about conservation as adults. Nature organizations that ignore nature education are, in a real sense, failing to cultivate their own future constituency.
He’s not, he was careful to say, trying to overwhelm nature reserves with school groups. Belgium is small, and its reserves are small, and a reserve manager is not going to thank you for sending every class in Flanders to catch butterflies in an already-fragile habitat. But common species in a greened school yard are more than sufficient to do the work. You do not need a rare orchid. You need a curious child and something alive to look at.
Hans’s website is, by his own admission, overdue for an update — but his scientific work is available on Google Scholar and ResearchGate. He is also the author of Het orakel van de bosnimf. Van vlinders en mensen (Lannoo). His December 2025 op-ed in De Standaard, “Children can no longer tell a blackbird from a sparrow”, is a wonderful place to start — and a thank you to Simon Demeulemeester for sending it my way, which inspired this episode.
Happy trails,
Nadina
P.S. Prefer a different platform? Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
P.P.S. The Bernard van Leer Foundation generously supports this season, and I’m honoured to be a Van Leer Fellow — exploring whether urban nature can truly fulfill our evolutionary need for wilderness during the most formative stages of life: pregnancy, early parenthood, and childhood. It’s a question that runs like a thread through every conversation this season, including this one.
