The quest to measure our relationship with nature

As a movement, environmentalism has been pretty misanthropic. Understandably so—we humans have done some destructive things to the ecosystems around us. In the 21st century, though, mainstream conservation is learning that humans can be a force for good. Foresters are turning to Indigenous burning practices to prevent wildfires. Biologists are realizing that flower-dotted meadows were ancient food-production landscapes that need harvesting or they’ll disappear. And the once endangered peregrine falcon now thrives in part thanks to nesting sites on skyscrapers and abundant urban prey: rats. 

For decades (two, but that counts), I’ve been writing about how humans aren’t metaphysically different from any other species on Earth. Conservation can’t only be about fencing people out of protected areas. A lot of the time the real trick is not to withdraw from “nature” but to get better at being part of it. 

Still, I recognize that living in harmony with nature sounds like a mushy idea. I was therefore stoked to participate in a meeting in Oxford, UK, that sought to build more precise tools to assess human-nonhuman relationships. Scientists have invented lots of measurements of environmental destruction, from parts per million of carbon dioxide to extinction rates to “planetary boundaries.” These have their uses, but they engage people mostly through dread. Why not invent metrics, we thought, that would engage people’s hopes and dreams? 

It was harder than I expected. How do you quantify how good people in any given nation are at living with other Earthlings? Some of the metrics the group proposed seemed to me to be too similar to the older, more adversarial approach. Why tally the agricultural land use per person, for example? Environmentalists have typically seen farms as the opposite of nature, but they’re also potential sites for both edible and inedible biodiversity. Some of us were keen on satellite imagery to calculate things like how close people live to green space. But without local information, you can’t prove that people can actually access that space.

Eventually the 20 or so scientists, authors, and philosophers who met in Oxford settled on three basic questions. First, is nature thriving and accessible to people? We wanted to know if humans could engage with the world around them. Second, is nature being used with care? (Of course, “care” could mean lots of things. Is it just keeping harvests under maximum sustainable yield? Or does it require a completely circular economy?) And third, is nature safeguarded? Again, not easy to assess. But if we could roughly measure each of these three things, the numbers could combine into an overall score for the quality of a human-nature relationship. 

We published our ideas in Nature last year. Though they weren’t perfect, green-space remote sensing and agricultural footprint calculations made the cut. Since then, a team in the United Nations Human Development Office has continued that work, planning to debut a Nature Relationship Index (NRI) later this year alongside the 2026 Human Development Report. Everyone loves a ranked list; we hope countries will want to score well and will compete to rise to the top. 

Pedro Conceição, lead author of the Human Development Report, tells me that he wants the new index to shift how countries see their environmental programs. (He wouldn’t give me spoilers as to the final metrics, but he did tell me that nothing from our Nature paper made it in.) The NRI, Conceição says, will be critical for “challenging this idea that humans are inherent destroyers of nature and that nature is pristine.” Narratives around constraints, limits, and boundaries are polarizing instead of energizing, he says. So the NRI isn’t about how badly we are failing. It speaks to aspirations for a green, abundant world. As we do better, the number goes up—and there is no limit. 

Emma Marris is the author of Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World.