In a world disconnected from nature and space, can art and imagination help us reconnect with the environment, others, and ourselves?

Yvette Yang on Nature-Deficit, Ecological Grief, and the Reimagining of Space

The gap in perception and the retreat of nature

In today’s hyper-urbanized and digitized society, the separation between humans and nature is not merely physical—it reflects a deeper fracture in perception and sensory engagement. In her talk, Yvette Yang begins by inviting the audience to perform a simple imaginative act: close your eyes and picture a space. This small gesture exposes a latent truth—our ability to imagine space is often bound by functionality and content. Most people’s imagined spaces are filled, annotated, explained. Very few are empty. This simple exercise reveals the growing poverty in our collective spatial imagination, one shaped and restricted by utilitarian logic and cultural conditioning.

Yang draws from psychologist Richard Louv’s theory of “Nature-Deficit Disorder,” which initially focused on children’s cognitive and behavioral issues due to their lack of contact with nature. But she goes further: this deficit is not just biological or psychological—it is existential. Despite thousands of years of civilization, our DNA remains nearly identical to that of our Stone Age ancestors. Yet, our environments have transformed beyond recognition. Our bodies expect communal, nature-embedded living—but what we experience is isolation, confinement, and over-digitization. Yang suggests that the rise in identity labels—such as "feminist," "queer," "Chinese"—reflects not only political or cultural shifts, but a primal desire to reconnect with a lost sense of belonging, to rebuild the tribal networks our evolution prepared us for.

Ecological grief: mourning what is no longer ours

One of Yang’s most powerful interventions is her discussion of ecological grief, a form of mourning rarely acknowledged in modern discourse. Unlike depression or anxiety—which are more clinically recognized—grief remains suppressed because it offers no productivity. In a society addicted to growth and constant upward mobility, grief becomes unspeakable. We are encouraged to “move on,” to “rise,” to “do better.” But in doing so, we lose the capacity to mourn what we have destroyed—ecosystems, biodiversity, meaningful contact with nature.

Yang’s artistic practice responds to this grief. Her work Fragment uses etched glass to preserve moments from nature—a visual metaphor for our desperate attempts to freeze the ephemeral. This impulse to eternalize nature, she argues, is not innocent. The same urge that drives scientific cataloguing and aesthetic preservation has historically contributed to ecological destruction. In collecting, classifying, and displaying nature, we often fix it in place—paradoxically speeding up its disappearance. Art here becomes both an act of reverence and a subtle critique of our self-defeating desire to possess what should remain wild.

Language, space, and non-human perception

Yang also explores how language shapes spatial understanding. In Chinese, the word for "space" often implies enclosure—jian (间) evokes a room or bounded area. In English, “space” suggests openness, fluidity, potential. This linguistic contrast reveals deeper cultural frameworks: we relate to space not as neutral emptiness, but as a container for utility. This insight aligns with Yang’s concern that we no longer relate to spaces through embodied experience, but through interfaces—maps, apps, reviews. We don’t wander; we search. We don’t dwell; we consume.

She contrasts this with the instinctual behavior of non-human species: elephants, migratory birds, waterfowl. Their navigation of the world is uninterrupted by national borders or property lines. For them, space is continuous, organic, relational. Yet urbanization and environmental fragmentation have disrupted even these ancient paths. Birds are now forced to alter routes, fly over dangerous terrain, or perish. For Yang, this demonstrates that space—as a human construct—is alien to most of the natural world, and our failure to recognize this is at the root of many ecological crises.

Ancestral grief and the limits of human foresight

Yang introduces another concept: ancestral grief—a cross-generational sorrow not tied to direct experience, but to a deeper, inherited sense of loss. We no longer know how to form relationships with space. Our interactions are mediated by technologies that filter, categorize, and sterilize experience. As Yang points out, when we arrive in a new city, our first instinct is not to explore, but to open apps and follow reviews. We outsource curiosity. In doing so, we lose our capacity for wonder, disconnection, and discovery.

Moreover, Yang argues that our inability to foresee ecological consequences stems from a biological limitation: we cannot easily imagine beyond the span of our own lifetimes. When we hunted wolves, we did not anticipate rodent overpopulation and desertification. When we replaced wetlands with rice paddies, we did not foresee the collapse of entire ecosystems. This shortsightedness is not malicious—it is structural. But the consequences are profound. Yang insists that environmental protection is not an act of moral altruism; it is a selfish necessity. We must preserve nature not because nature needs us, but because without it, we do not survive.

Conclusion: how else might we imagine space?

Yvette Yang’s talk culminates in a quietly radical question:
In a world where nature is distant and space is increasingly functionalized, can we still use imagination and art to rebuild authentic relationships—with environment, with others, and with ourselves?

To imagine an empty, useless, purposeless space—one not defined by capital or productivity—is perhaps the most rebellious act available to us now. In doing so, we reclaim not only the right to mourn, but the right to feel, to belong, and to exist within a world that is not yet entirely lost.