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

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 blindness to biophobia: the teacher who brought tissues for children to clean their hands after touching plants, the teenagers who fled a butterfly on a café terrace, the children in hazmat suits at a tree-planting (a story Adrian Wong from SUGi first told me in S6E7). Hans also makes a compelling case for school yards as one of the highest-leverage interventions available to us — for biodiversity, for reduced bullying, and as an equalizer for children whose families can't drive to the countryside on weekends. And he reminds us that you don't need to know the name of a single species to do this work. Curious children are already doing it for us. Hans's December 2025 op-ed in De Standaard — "Children can no longer tell a blackbird from a sparrow" — is a wonderful companion to this conversation. He's also the author of Het orakel van de bosnimf. Van vlinders en mensen (Lannoo), and his scientific work is available on Google Scholar and ResearchGate.