Nature Deficit Disorder and Technological Surplus: Implications for Individual Identity Development and Educational Solutions

One of the consequences of the speed of modern times and the digitalization of our daily lives is to distance the individual from his or her natural environment, reducing contact with nature and increasing the amount of time we spend indoors and in urban areas. Knowing the benefits of the relationship between the link with the environment and the individual, Richard Louv coined the term “nature deficit syndrome” to refer precisely to this disconnection and warn about the dilemmas that this would cause for the individual. The present contribution focuses its interest on the binomial conformed by the nature deficit and the technological surplus and its influence on the individual’s identity development, understanding that the role of social and school education is to reconceptualize the pedagogical value given to the spaces involved in the teaching-learning processes and to reconsider educational solutions which integrate nature in the aforementioned process.