The Crocodile Whisperer

Sept. 4, 2006 — -- Steve Irwin was driven to bring humans -- as we really are -- ever closer to nature as it really is.

If there was any mystery to his success, it may have been in his unabashed and good-natured abuse of what scientists call our "biophilia."

Biophilia is much more than the natural human "love of nature," scientists say.

Biologist Edward O. Wilson, who coined the term, told ABC News that "biophilia is the instinctive attraction to nature and all forms of life and even life-like processes."

Biophilia helps explain many aspects of human behavior, says Wilson, from why so many have cats and dogs to why people who can afford to so often buy property with lots of nature on it -- trees and lawns and, if they're really rich, a stream running through it.

Hospital patients recovering in rooms with windows looking out onto nature -- trees and fields and cloudscapes -- have been discovered in several studies to heal much faster and get home sooner than those with a view of a brick wall or highway.

TV News producers know that one sure way to spice up a show is a good animal story.

We naturally evolved biophilia because survival depended on it, Wilson says. Where else but in "nature" (as we now call it -- back then it was all there was) did we find food, love and reproduction, shelter, diversion and necessary relaxation -- and also the negative thrill of extreme danger.

Steve Irwin's shocking death at 44, leaving behind a young wife and two children, reminds us of that danger.

So did "Grizzly Man," the recent documentary about the young wildlife activist Timothy Treadwell, who spent 13 summers living among the great bears, only to be killed and partially eaten by one of them.

Treadwell, a loner, and Irwin, gregarious in the extreme, were each controversial: Treadwell was advised repeatedly not to get so close and Irwin was dismissed by some as little more than a colorful TV character. Irwin, despite the boyish enthusiasm that came through so clearly, was in fact, say colleagues, a deeply serious naturalist and protector of wilderness who was trying to familiarize great urban audiences with nature.