Erz

As a landscape architect, I've come to understand that our relationship with the natural world isn't just about aesthetics or resources - it's fundamentally about ethics. The way we interact with landscape shapes our moral understanding. Our moral compass doesn't form in a vacuum. It emerges from the complex web of relationships we maintain - not just with other humans, but with the living world that sustains us.

We may have abandoned the notion that the sun rotates around the earth, but we have yet to challenge the equally unscientific and amoral notion that nature revolves around humanity.

The IRL Web
Imagine the natural world as an In Real Life (IRL) web - a vast network of interconnected natural and human systems. This network extends far beyond the digital interfaces we've grown addicted to. Unlike the internet, this web isn't optional. We're embedded within it, dependent on it, and morally accountable to it. Every breath we take is a reminder of our participation in this system: the oxygen produced by trees, the atmosphere maintained by oceans, the soil microbes that make life possible.
This isn't just poetic sentiment; it's a framework for moral decision-making. When we understand ourselves as threads in this living network rather than separate from it, our ethical calculations shift dramatically. Suddenly, what is right must account for our impact on the entire system, not just our immediate human concerns.

Moral Myopia in the Digital Age
The digital revolution has given us unprecedented access to information, but it's also accelerated our moral myopia. We scroll through news of environmental catastrophes with the same emotional detachment we bring to cat videos. This disconnection from the physical world hasn't just changed our habits, it's altered our response to moral situations, creating distance instead of empathy, reaction instead of direct action.
Consider how differently we respond to environmental harm we can touch versus what we merely read about. A child who watches their favourite tree being felled for development will experience moral outrage. An adult reading about deforestation might feel concern, but rarely the same visceral sense of wrong. This gap between direct and mediated experience has profound implications for our moral development. The very interaction we are engaged in now is digitally mediated, and a pale reflection of a face to face discussion.

The Ethics of Embodiment
Our bodies are not just vessels for our minds, they are our primary interface with the IRL web. This embodied existence carries moral weight. When we design places that cut people off from nature, we're not just making an economic choice, we're making a moral one. We're deciding what kinds of relationships people can have with the living world, and by extension, what kind of moral agents they can become. This is especially true in the design of schools and nurseries.
Research shows that children exposed to soil have better immune systems, that natural play enhances learning outcomes, that outdoor education builds confidence, that green space enhances mood and resilience. But a deeper implication is that our physical connection to landscape fundamentally affects our capacity for moral reasoning. A person who has never experienced the intricate relationships within a healthy ecosystem may struggle to understand why preserving such systems matters.

From Rights to Relationships
Traditional environmental ethics often focuses on rights: human rights, animal rights, even the rights of nature. But the IRL web suggests a different framework: a systems-based approach to ethics - inter-relationships and shared responsibilities. Just as we have moral obligations within our human families and communities, we have obligations within the broader ecological community.
This shift from rights to relationships, to understanding the IRL Web, transforms how we approach ethical decisions:
• Instead of "Do trees have rights?" we ask "What are our responsibilities within the forest ecosystem?"
• Rather than debating whether animals deserve moral consideration, we examine how our actions affect the web of life we depend on, including how our actions will affect ourselves and other people.
The question becomes not just "What can we do?" but "What maintains the health of the whole IRL Web?"

Moral Education in the Age of Screens
When children play in nature, they're not just building immune systems, they're developing moral intuitions. They learn cause and effect in real time. They experience being part of something larger than themselves.
They develop what philosophers call "moral imagination" - the ability to understand complex relationships and foresee the consequences of actions. This has profound implications for education. If we want to raise morally competent individuals, we must ensure they have direct, sustained engagement with the IRL web.
Virtual experiences, no matter how sophisticated, cannot fully replace the moral education that comes from putting your hands in soil, watching plants grow, or observing ecosystem relationships firsthand. We have to provide green education as a complement and counterbalance to increased dependence of digital education.

Beyond Dominion
The Hebrew concept of "radah" (stewardship) was mistranslated in the Bible as “dominion”. Understanding this error is a step forward from pure dominionist thinking, but today we need an even more sophisticated moral framework. Perhaps what we need is a model of moral partnership with the natural world. This partnership approach recognizes that:
• We are both shaping and being shaped by the landscape
• Our moral choices have ripple effects throughout the IRL web
• We have the capacity to either enhance or diminish the system's ability to sustain life
• Our own moral development is inextricably linked to our relationship with the natural world

Moral Literacy in the IRL Web
The challenge we face isn't just environmental, it's moral. We need to develop a new kind of moral literacy that reads not just human intentions but ecological relationships. This literacy must be grounded in direct experience with the IRL web.
Here's what this means in practice:
• Recognize that time in nature isn't just recreational, but fundamental to moral development
• Design communities that facilitate regular, meaningful interaction with natural systems
• Make ethical decisions that account for our embeddedness in the IRL web
• Develop educational approaches that nurture both ecological and moral understanding

Double Click on IRL
The next time you reach for your phone, consider this: What moral capabilities might you be losing by choosing the digital web over the IRL web? What ethical insights await in the complex relationships outside your door?
The choice isn't between progress and nature, it's between a truncated moral understanding and one that encompasses the full scope of our existence. The IRL web isn't just waiting for us to notice it. It's actively shaping who we are and who we can become as moral beings.
If we seek dominion over nature then we may well achieve it, but we should be careful what we wish for. If we remake nature in our own image, we may not like the picture of Dorian Gray that emerges.
Step away from the screen. Go outside. Pay attention. Your very breath depends on the green leaves and is sustenance for them. To imagine ourselves as lords of all we survey is the ultimate folly.

This post first appeared on https://moral-universe.beehiiv.com/