Break the Biophobia Fear Loop with Nature Exposure

I’ve been gardening most of my adult life and have only been stung a few times. Insects just want to go about their business and unless I inadvertently put my hands on one, they’re not aggressive and don’t want anything to do with me. I also typically wear long overalls, a long-sleeved shirt, a hat, closed-toed shoes, and garden gloves whenever I’m working outside - and try not to put my hands or feet anywhere I can’t see them. I pride myself on being able to coexist with nature and enjoy serendipitous wildlife encounters.

I'm typically covered from head to toe when working outside and enjoy random encounters with wildlife - like this carpenter bee that rested on me for few minutes before flying off.

My relationship with being outside changed last August when I was putting veggie scraps in my compost bin. I didn’t put my gloves on because I was just doing a quick drop before it got dark. I saw a yellow jacket buzzing around and paid no attention. There was a split second when I saw she was still in the bin as I went to put the lid back on, and she stung me on her way out before I could move the lid or my hand. She was just trying not to get trapped and my hand was in the way!

Yellow jackets are an unavoidable part of our outside world!

I ran inside and put ice on my fingers to stop the sharp, burning pain. Slowly, all my fingers swelled up so I couldn’t move them, then my hand, then my wrist, then my arm turned into a giant sausage. This happened slowly over about 8 hours, so I was more curious than alarmed. I had decided if the swelling went to my shoulders I’d get medical attention. Thankfully it stopped right above my elbow. By the next morning my arm and fingers were itchy where they had puffed up and the swelling was going down.

This was my puffed up hand - for reference, I'm small and you can usually see the bones in my finger, hand and wrist

I called the doctor because a similar thing happened to my brother after being a beekeeper for decades, only he had an anaphylactic reaction and now needs to carry an EPI pen. My reaction was not anaphylactic, but my doctor gave me a prescription for an EPI pen since this was a bigger and different reaction than I’ve ever had. I’m not sure if I’ve ever been specifically stung by a yellow jacket though, so this may be the reaction I have to them. Hopefully, Benadryl will still be all I’ll need if this happens in the future, but I now have the EPI pen if I need it.

I now have this on hand just in case its ever needed

I already have CPTSD which is a stress disorder (a little TMI but relevant to this situation!) and ironically the main ways I manage it is meditation and being outside in nature. Multiple studies have confirmed the restorative effect of nature. This incident made it hard for me to get back outside, and I spent most of August and September inside. When I did go outside, I put my head-to-toe mosquito netting outfit over my usual outside work clothes and wore boot. As ridiculous as I looked, it was my Dumbo’s feather and made me feel safe outside. I still ran back inside if I saw a yellow jacket. This was not a long-term solution so I worked with a therapist to get back to where I was before the sting so I wouldn’t freak out every time I saw a yellow jacket. Now, I don't feel the need to put on the full head-to-toe netting unless the mosquitoes are bothering me.

This is the get up that got me through late summer and early fall last year!

I hate that I have this reactionary fear and wish it wasn’t a part of my life but this experience gave me an appreciation for the struggle people who have deadly bee sting allergies live with. Their fears are grounded in a scary reality. It also made me realize how fragile our relationship with nature is. If this happened and nature wasn’t such a vital part of my life, I wonder how hard I would have worked to get back outside. It’s that connection to nature that impacted my reaction and drive to restore the peace I feel outside.

Enjoying my rewilded yard and natural areas keeps me happy in this world. I can't imagine not experiencing the wonder of watching a sweet bluebird couple feeding their babies!

I also wonder if this is the kind of generalized fear people who don’t have a personal connection to nature have. I’ve pejoratively called people who don’t appreciate the natural world biophobic (afraid of living things and nature), but from a more empathetic perspective it’s just people working to manage their fear of the natural world by trying to control it in some way. Biophobia is the most common phobia in the world and increasing in urban and economically developed societies. In local neighborhood forums fear rules before facts. It’s common to see posts with an image of a poor creature that’s been killed out of fear and a question about what it is.

Entire hardware store aisles are devoted to making people feel in control of the natural world - unfortunately they all work to kill wildlife without any thought for how to coexist.

I once watched in horror from my window as a neighbor who has since moved killed a six foot rat snake in his driveway. (This experience inspired me to write about how to coexist with snakes) Shortly after the snake incident, three pest control service trucks showed up and did who knows what to the inside and outside my neighbor’s house including adding those barbaric rat poison boxes. I imagine he called a pest control company about seeing the snake and the company only fanned the flames of fear. Weeks later his wife bizarrely posted in our neighborhood group page that she was finding dead snakes in her yard and wondered if she needed to call the police. She thought someone was menacing her and putting them there! She was so biophobic and out of touch with how the backyard food web works that she didn’t connect the poisons she put out for rats and mice to the dead snakes she was finding in her yard.

The trucks that show up to "help" with "problematic" wildlife will not share the ways their "solution" harms the local ecosystem.

The cycle of death comes from fear and ignorance - fear is what the companies selling ecosystem destroying pesticides use to sell their wares. Pest control companies dominate the search engines and will explain why an insect or animal is a “pest” in some way and will even suggest that if it’s mere existence makes us uncomfortable we need to kill it. The pest control industry has even figured out a sneaky way to teach kids how to fear insects with extensive educational websites and curriculum that frame insects as pests in various ways.

This screen shot shows what pops up if you search "butterfly pest control"! Orkin is a top result with a jaw-dropping search heading of "How to Identify & Get Rid of Monarch Butterflies"! The Orkin link gives some factual information about monarchs but this illustrates how pest control companies dominate wildlife related searches on the internet. The EPA information about protecting monarchs from pesticides, which is what someone using these key words might be looking for, is AFTER the Orkin link! (Also, Orkin is owned by Rollins - the #1 pest control company in North America which is headquartered about two miles from my home.)

The fear loop can be broken by creating a positive and lasting experience of wonder, curiosity and joy around seeing wildlife every day. This is the way to ensure that even negative interactions with wildlife, like my unfortunate experience, are viewed through the eyes of coexistence. In terms a therapist might use, nature exposure is the answer - meaning the more time spent in nature, the less fear of nature there will be.

At a local nature park I watched an adorable young family and their children explore the area - the children didn't even take off their bike helmets before looking for native dewberries (Rubus hispidus). Their interaction with the natural world was one of wonder, not fear.

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