To go on a tangent: first of all, I have never really found things like forest bathing to be therapeutic to me. I’ve never understood those people who shudder with ecstasy while doing nothing except stroking blobs of moss for hours or staring at a houseplant’s flower (also for hours). They seem to be behaving more like aliens than humans to my perception, if I am to be honest.
I suspect that my perceptual neurobiology is fundamentally different from many people.
I mean, mosses are rather comfortable to the touch and their ecology is pretty fascinating, but I have never found their texture soothing enough to warrant being stroked by me for more than a few halfhearted seconds (and stroking mosses with one’s hands is an objectively inefficient way to acquire data about their fascinating ecology).
…Before you ask, this has nothing to do with a lack of mindfulness or my inability to be “in tune with nature”. I am very self-aware of both the organisms around me and my own mind, and I can instantly ID most insects/angiosperms I encounter (if not to species, then to morphospecies).
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Anyways, tangent aside. I’m not a fan of the whole “nature-apologist” rhetoric that’s been dominant on this forum thread. Conscious taxa murdering and attacking each other all day is not something to be romanticized, or labeled “not horrible”, or considered something that ought-to-happen-in-a-utopia for the “cycle of life”. Nature may be amoral but that doesn’t make all its murdering okay.
Look, I am well aware that if carnivores did not eat herbivores the latter would defoliate everything and cause all sorts of imbalances. Deleting all the wolves is a terrible idea (and this is why wolf populations are being protected by ecologists).
But its necessariness doesn’t make it ethical/nonhorrible - it only makes it a necessary evil. Preventing wolf extinction is not A Utopian Thing To Do but it has to be done anyways because there is no sane alternative available as far as science can tell. The laws of physics do not currently allow utopias to exist, after all (and this is why I hate the laws of physics with every fiber of my self).
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Also, just because something is horrible doesn’t prevent it from being fascinating/beautiful. I think it’s very cool and brilliant how semelparous salmonids are “designed” to maximize their genetic fitness by investing so much energy into reproduction that their bodies decay inside-out before they even stop breathing. It’s just so… efficient at accomplishing its goals that I have to admire it. And I find it similarly fascinating how cell phones and toothbrushes are designed to fall apart prematurely so customers buy more of them and make more $ for the company, even though I of course hate Throwaway Culture Capitalism.
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With all that being said, the only taxa I voluntarily have in my house are autotrophs. Watching animals torture themselves and each other all day isn’t traumatic for me but it… doesn’t look nice in my living spaces.
Don’t get me wrong, I love watching tasteful violence! But when beetles and spiders do it it’s all melodramatic and dark and emotional and that clashes with the aesthetic of my favorite desk, okay? Competing plants niche-segregate more “geometrically” and that suits the equally minimalist aesthetic of my room decor.