"Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches"

Jane Jacobs warns that an overly sentimental attitude toward nature can actually undermine its true value. Sentimentality is an emotional response that often replaces complexity and reality with comforting illusions. When people indulge in romantic notions about nature, they risk overlooking the actual processes, interrelationships, and sometimes the harsh realities that define the natural world. Instead of fostering genuine understanding or stewardship, such sentimentality may reduce nature to an aesthetic object or an imagined sanctuary detached from social, economic, and ecological dynamics.

Denaturing, in this context, means stripping away the genuine character of something, in this case, nature itself. To denature is to alter in a way that removes essential qualities. By embracing a sentimental view, people may believe they’re expressing care for the environment, when in fact they are projecting their own desires or nostalgia onto it, ignoring its real conditions and needs. This leads to simplistic solutions or ineffective policies, such as preserving “green spaces” merely for their visual appeal rather than supporting ecological health, or assuming all human impact is inherently harmful without considering the possibility of positive, adaptive management.

Such attitudes can also obscure the practical, sometimes messy, work required to sustain or restore natural systems. Real ecosystems are dynamic, shaped by disturbance, adaptation, conflict, and even destruction as part of their renewal. Viewing nature exclusively through a sentimental lens prevents honest engagement with these realities. People may resist necessary interventions, such as controlled burns or culling invasive species, because these actions violate their idealized image of nature as pure and harmonious.

Authentic respect for nature requires understanding its complexity, resilience, and the intertwining of human and natural processes. To confront ecological challenges effectively, society must move beyond sentimentality and instead cultivate an informed, sometimes demanding relationship with the natural world, one that recognizes both its beauty and its rigor.