Why do birds have wings? A biosemiotic argument for the primacy of naturogenic sporting sites

ABSTRACT

Where sporting games may be said to epitomize our species’ unique agential capacity for playful movement, sports played in nature differ from their equivalent played indoors in that they envelop the human agent within the living physical environment from which our agency originates. In this paper, we draw attention to how sporting sites differ according to origin by pursuing a biosemiotic line of reasoning. Here, the story of a meaningful human life begins with the eukaryotic cell, even though the human subject itself arises much later. As such, the story of nature in relation to our agency, here, in sports, changes too. We present key concepts from biosemiotics, including its continuum life-as-semiotic-agency view, Umwelt, metasemiosis, and semiotic scaffolding to advance our argument that naturogenic sporting sites provide continuity to the macro processes that have generated our semiotic ability to play. Meanwhile, secluded anthropogenic environments constitute yet another discontinuity for the modern sportsperson where the moving body steps into an anthroposemiotic loop and its restricted signscapes from centralized agency. We conclude on the primacy of naturogenic sporting sites as they preserve the quality and complexity of animal ludens’ constitutive relations and therefrom semiotic freedom, on which current and future gameplaying depends.

KEYWORDS:

• Nature
• sports
• technosphere
• semiosis
• agency
• freedom
• scaffolding

Introduction

‘Birds fly because they have wings.’ The plausibility of this statement is more dangerous than we are inclined to think, for it disguises the complexity of the relationship between behavior and its technical and material agents. We forget to ask, ‘why do birds have wings?’ (Eichberg 1982, 43)

Humans act because we have agency. As only one of 7.77 million identified animal species, ours is the particular agential ability that disproportionately affects the whole of the planetary habitat we share alongside all agents of nature (Mora et al. 2011). At the current stage, any discussion of human beings and our doings has to be contextualized with the fact that our impact dramatically challenges the ecological macro processes sustaining life on Earth (Hornborg 2023; Lade et al. 2020; Maxwell et al. 2020). What consequences the current Anthropocene may have for play, games, and sports have yet to be understood in full. One isolated and increasingly prominent aspect is how the sites for play-based physical activity are moving from nature-made to entirely human made environments. Today, many sports that used to be played in nature are practiced inside, such as skating, swimming, and even climbing, to name a few, as technologization greatly diversifies our options. As of 2024, virtual sports, from e-games requiring minimal bodily movement to physical virtual sports such as virtual rowing, have managed to challenge even the century-old traditional idea of Olympic sports (Parry and Giesbrecht 2023, 209–210). While the dueling dialectic between artificial and natural environments is a recognized theme in the modern history of sport (Eichberg 1982), humanmade constructions have reached an unprecedented, systemic level where geologists now speak of its totality as the technosphere, placing human made sporting sites in a new macro context (Donges et al. 2017; Haff 2014; Zalasiewicz et al. 2017).

At first glance, the assumption could well be that nature-made and human made sporting sites are interchangeable. Why should not sport experiences such as soccer played inside a gymnastics hall provide at least equal values as those played outdoors, such as a soccer match on a pitch in the city park? Or a bicycle fastened to the floor compared to a cycle ride through the woods? Notably, indoor facilities now also open the doors into the convincingly imitative realm of immersive technology. Immersive virtual nature (IVN) technologies provide a representation of ecology in a consecutive flow of both visual and auditive cues, such as a virtual rower hearing the waves and splashing from her ‘oars’ hitting the ‘water’. Litleskare et al. (2020, n.p.) argue that IVN may have the potential to ‘enable, reconnect and augment human-nature experiences’ rather than cause further disconnection’. Still, they conclude that ‘the long-term effects of using IVN are also unknown; it is possible that the positive effects identified by short-term studies will diminish in the long term’ (Ibid.).

We believe this latter insight hits a nerve in our case at hand. In our view, the technosphere embodies a modern coalescence of polyvalent discontinuity for the sportsperson, from breaching the planet’s regenerative boundaries reminiscent of the biological limits of the human body to replacing the origin of the very space in the world we move through. Far from being only a material-spatial phenomenon, the totality of human made constructions is arguably accompanied by transformative psychocultural and socioecological processes on the part of the individual that may be slow to accrue. So slow, potentially, that its consequent change may even occur primarily not in persons but in our species. Critical reflection on a commensurate macro level and from an ecological perspective is needed. How significant is the moving body’s biophysical environment for its agential ability to enjoy the richness of its sports? Or, entertaining the thought one level deeper as per Henning Eichberg’s approach, why do humans have agency to play?

Numerous sport philosophers have already employed ecological perspectives on the moving body in sports (Breivik 2019, 2020; Edgar 2021; Loland 1996, 2021; Long, Bazin, and Bai 2018). Typically, views herein highlight the holistic coexistence with nature, physiological dependency on thriving ecosystems now and in the future, health-promoting psychological benefits, as well as the potentially existential need to experience nature directly as a significant part of a good life (see for example Breivik 2022). While we greatly value these contributions, we believe it is both possible and fruitful to advance current ecological perspectives and accentuate a biological point of view in which nature is seen not just as an ingredient but a constituent of human meaning-making. Consequently, we take as our starting point that also deliberate sense-making of the world is ‘biological at heart’; a stance following from the emerging, integrated field of biosemiotics or the study of signs in all of nature, not just humans. Semiosis is the act of the organism where it interprets, then adapts to, the multitude of signs that exist in its relation to its environment as a uniquely species-specific state of being from meaning-making.

In the following, we thus embark on a search for unclaimed values of the non-human made physical environment when functioning as sporting sites. To do so, we delineate sports as per Suits (1967, 1973) as any game playing that involves bodily capabilities, skills, rules related to the purpose of the activity, and a lusory attitude as constitutive elements, while also including training for such gameplaying with the aim of developing capacities and technical and tactical skills relevant to the sport in question (Loland 2022). Examples run from training for and taking part in highly popular and commercialized Olympic sports such as soccer and athletics to less spectacular events such as orienteering and off-road running. Furthermore, we define sports in nature independently of nature. While our argument could play into the ongoing discussion on conceptualizing nature sports specifically, our objective here is the relation between sports and nature-made sites (Krein 2018; Krein et al. 2023). We exclude outdoor living or friluftsliv without the competitive element as there are no rule-based objectives guiding movement, which renders our notions of fiction and the play-world superfluous, and because these activities are necessarily outdoor-bound from the outset, defeating the purpose of our comparative discussion.

A natural environment is the physical space and its objects on the outside of the body that has emerged and been shaped without human interference, so ‘by nature’ or naturogenic.¹ A non-natural or artificial environment is one which originates from the modifying forces of human interference, so ‘by humans’ or anthropogenic. With regards to the ‘grey areas’ of semi-altered environments such as human made triathlon or skiing tracks, the point of interest for inclusion into our notion of a naturogenic sporting site is whether the practitioner is encapsulated by nature so that, for the purpose of conducting the exercise, human alterations do not wholly replace natural topography and ecosystemic content. This excludes football stadiums that are otherwise engulfed in natural surroundings and i.e. with an open ceiling but includes activities in natural environments that are modified only in part by humans, such as tracks or cliff-diving boards. Other sports in naturogenic environments include the outdoor versions of winter sports such as snowboarding and skating or water sports such as surfing, ocean swimming, and canoeing.

In what follows, we describe the biosemiotic perspective, focusing on some key concepts of relevance to the sport context, before presenting in a second section an integrated comparative discussion of naturogenic versus anthropogenic sporting sites.

Biosemiotics: key concepts

Our mission here is not that of semiotics per se. Rather than go into the technical discussion of the sign as per between Charles Sanders Peirce, John Deely, Thomas Sebeok, and many others (Jappy 2023), we focus our efforts on higher-order theorems such as Umwelt, semiotic scaffolding, and semiotic freedom.

On life view

To begin, biosemiotics is the study of sign interpretation throughout all organic life from the viewpoint of fusing general biology and general semiotics. As with all worthwhile disciplinary syntheses, this emerging field stirs the pot in both directions: by endowing principles from biology directly unto social phenomena and linguistics, and subjectivity and agency via interpretative and adaptative skills to all of biology – meaning all lifeforms, humans included. Differentiating by complexity and degree rather than type when compared to the abilities of humans, biosemiotics presents not just an interspecies but an inter-lifeforms continuum view of life as inherently agential. The continuum understanding stands in contrast to a category view of largely incomparable types of lifeforms where agency is thought only to arise for sentient creatures, and as quite limited in nonhumans, typically leading to human exclusivism. In the eyes of biosemioticians, semiosis or the process of sign interpretation and adaptation is central to studying living systems as semiotic activity is considered the benchmark at which life arises. A sign in this context is anything referencing something other than itself in a way that is meaningful to its recipient, in turn depending on the agent’s ‘phenotypic structure, which is the joint product of (…) its evolutionary and developmental history’ (Ferreira 2010, 108).

Signification, then, comprises life as action, without which there is either naturogenic, abiotic matter (i.e. water, soil, air, rocks, metals) or synthetic materials. Biosemiotics’ continuum life-as-semiotic-agency view involves a biological-theoretical move from mechanistic information to fallible interpretation at all levels of biological system organization. Rather than perpetuate biological essentialism and non-agential determinism, it amounts to a non-reductionistic reordering of ecological cosmology that reanimates every chain of events in evolution, enabling us to draw a consecutive line of semiotic activity from the current generation of complexly sentient human beings back to the first prokaryotic cell (Hoffmeyer and Stjernfelt 2016, 10). Here, even the cellular organism is a semiotic or sign-interpreting agent. As such, it may interpret wrongly, such as failing to identify and combat a submicroscopic viral intruder; a misinterpretation of cues leading to disease. The same goes for complex individual creatures as in the case of a person, or collectively, where whole species exert agency in maladaptive ways, causing their own natural demise. As it is, while an agent’s ability to interpret in the present may be due to its ancestors’ adaptive success in the past, agency in itself is no guarantee of the agent’s own success – quite on the contrary.

On Umwelt

The concept of Umwelt put forward by biologist Jacob von Uexküll (1864–1944) in the early 1900s presents an elementary premise in biosemiotics (Kull 2010, 353). As such, it is defined in several slightly different ways. Jesper Hoffmeyer (2008, 187) defines Umwelt as the sentient organism’s internal model of the parts of its external environment that are of relevance to the organism’s survival and well-being, while Kalevi Kull (2010, 353) highlights the relational aspect and presents Umwelt as ‘a set of relations an organism has in an ecosystem’. As a conceptual representation of agents’ relation to the environing world, Umwelt encapsulates meaning as a derivative of a pre-existing biological ability to perceive according to the perceptual-sensory system endowed by way of a species’ specificity. This means that a subject’s Umwelt consists exclusively of the external objects that at all have meaning to it, whether positive, negative, or neutral, which in turn stems from the subject’s biological constitution. For example, a person might walk in the forest for recreational purposes and focus on its undifferentiated aesthetics and specific colors and smells. Meanwhile, a hawk could be assessing the trees for the purpose of finding a suitable spot to nest. Its species-specific anterior criterion for relevance provides a different and more specific focus. A tree with branches twisting at just the right angle at the perfect height may elicit a joyful and enthusiastic response in the hawk. Important to note, however, while subjectivity here presents as a species-specific ability, the specific content of that subjectivity in each instance of a life depends on the given subject. Another hawk may disregard the same tree, and another person may not find value in a walk in the forest at all.²

Uprooting and reconstructing established concepts of subjectivity and agency from their historical human-centeredness, biosemioticians’ terminology departs not from one isolated species but from the web of relations between any lifeform and the world as it appears to the specific organism according to its species-specific interpretative ability. Here, the web of relations is not just experiential or accessible to us through our experience of it, but constitutional and so preceding that experience, amounting to a relational ontology.³

On semiotic scaffolding

Whereas Umwelt refers to the end product of the lifeform co-evolving in relation to its environment – its inner mental model – scaffolding is a procedural term referring to said co-evolution of species as a preceding agential process. To give an example, agency in a fish, i.e. a salmon, amounts to how it relates to its aquatic habitat, constituting a unique lifeworld based on its (biological) needs and where it exists on the food chain.⁴ In turn, semiotic agency in another animal species that feeds on the salmon, say the North American brown bear, follows from its successful development of an inter-species response within what Hoffmeyer (2015, 153) calls ‘self-perpetuating evolutionary dynamics’: while the bear needs technical adaptive tools like claws to penetrate fish skin, it also needs interpretative (semiotic) tools such as a well-adapted anticipatory sense for seasonal migration, an ability to read the complexities of free-flowing water areas, and overall hunting instincts. As the result of earlier learning to gain the upper hand of margins (Kull 2017, 46), the case of catching prey exemplifies the interpretative (rather than simply technical) call-and-response mechanism that is called semiotic scaffolding (Hoffmeyer 2007, 2015).

Notably, this scaffolding occurs not just between species, but within the constitutive relations Wendy Wheeler (2019, 185) describes as a ‘ceaseless circulation’ also between an organism and the environment or surrounding ecosystem as a whole, shaping both, through ‘the organism’s semiotic co-evolution with and constant informational reliance on its (Umwelt) in terms of cybersemiotic feedback’ (‘cyber’ here referring to cybernetics). Morten Tønnessen (2010, 376) further diminishes the difference between species and ecosystem by framing nature as an ‘intercorporal body’ altogether – ‘the body of bodies’ – wherein ‘the Earth, and its history’, including semiotic scaffolding, ‘constitutes our natural context, the frame of reference for our existence as biological (i.e. living) beings’.

On semiotic freedom

Next, our previous notions lead us to the concept of semiotic freedom. To continue on our previous example, the bear differs from the salmon in how well equipped it is prior to the hunt for understanding the surroundings and exerting its desires upon the fish, the bear being a bigger-brained, more complex superorganism. Biosemioticians hereby speak of semiotic freedom⁵ when referring to ‘the capacity of species or organisms to derive useful information by help of semiosis (or) processes of interpretation in the widest (Peircean) sense of this term’ (Hoffmeyer 2015, 153). We argue that the uniquely and accumulatively complex, or free, sign interpretation and adaptation of humans is epitomized by homo ludens: the human player’s ability to purposefully, intellectually, and even collectively engage in a form of shared fiction as a real adaptation of our sensory and perceptual systems and movements to the unreal imagined of the ‘play-world’ through rule-based sports (Huizinga 1944; 1980, 11) perfectly demonstrates humans’ semiotic freedom.

Even though it is unprecedented on the species map, anthroposemiosis in its current state is an accumulative, evolutionary, and thus inherently dependent feature. As the result of long-term semiotic scaffolding, current semiotic freedom is historically conditioned on overall biosemiosis through its co-evolution both with the pre-sentient semiosis inside our bodies (endosemiotic) and the pre-sentient and sentient in our outside surroundings (exosemiotic) (Cowley 2018, 49).

Discussion: naturogenic vs. anthropogenic sporting sites

On that note, let us attempt to apply the preceding ideas to sporting sites. The individual Umwelt to sportspersons in nature may draw on sounds and sights beyond counting, a plethora of living organisms making up the biota of an entire life-sustaining system, all of them nested within formations – be it mountains, valleys, hills, or plains – that have come about by way of deep-time ecological processes that humans are barely able to comprehend (Zen 2001). Even where there are signs of people by anthropogenic tracks or other semi-alterations, ours appears only as a part of the environing whole of diversely rich meaning. The human constructions do not hinder the sportsperson’s access to semiotic scaffolding where s/he continuously learns to adapt to other animal and plant species, and their adaptations to each other, as well as to the abiotic factors of ecosystems such as wind, humidity, rainfall, and temperature. As an example, orienteering runners learn that, to find the posts in the terrain, they must make skilled assessments of local topography and vegetation, and that, even then, both coincidence and uncertainty is involved. Rather than controlling their surroundings, what holds the promise of elevated states from a distinctive sense of achievement is their successful adaptation precisely to the uncontrollable.

The immediate contrast to indoor sport sites is stark. In a typical indoor facility for athletics, athletes could be encased by the plain, uninterrupted surface of walls made on restricted, public financial schemes, with minimum emphasis on architectural aesthetics and painted in the color scheme that the city council once voted on for use in public buildings. While the uncomplicated and sterile scenery may benefit immediate, short-term sporting goals such as beating a record, the sportsperson is faced with her fellow humans’ making wherever she turns, removed from a call-and-response scaffolding system between other semiotic agents flourishing in an ecosystem including biotic organisms. Instead of a sense of achievement from her adaptation to the uncontrollable, the indoor climate in her surrounding anthropogenic environment is already regulated for optimal performance.

Our example for comparison, however, is selective. Anthropogenic environments can be aesthetically pleasing and diverse. Also, we note that an ecosystem has both a biotic and an abiotic material component, the latter being the physical environment. It is not a given that the shift from one physical environment to another, such as from the naturogenic outdoors to anthropogenic indoors, means that the biotic component is completely excluded. We may imagine a future case, perhaps as a response to eroded wilderness areas and restraints on traveling to naturogenic sites or otherwise lack of public access, where indoor facilities are able to replicate many delineated ecosystemic functions and experiential values. If so, the sportsperson that enters into a form of anthroposemiotic seclusion where almost every sign the person encounters is made by and has its origin in humans’ Umwelt may, in principle, not notice the change when deep into the activity.

The emergence of innovative architectural standards emphasizes this possibility. Reeve et al. (2015) talk of ‘biophilic urbanism’ in which nature and architecture are merged. Mazzoleni (2013) develops the idea of ‘biomimetic design’ imitating the visual and tactile richness of natural materials and surfaces: combinations of softness/hardness, mixed color displays, curved lines, et cetera. This design of the abiotic could be combined with biotic interior in sport venues: we can imagine solitary cave diving in pitch-dark, sound-isolated waters with artificial pressure, next to competitive mountain running on a treadmill mountain that gradually rises from the floor, or ocean sailing with seemingly endless views, all in halls or stadiums much grander than today. In this future scenario, is it really that significant a change with regards to game-based human movement to envelop our moving bodies in strictly anthropogenic sites of the indoors? Our hypothetical scenarios alert us to the fact that it is not necessarily the perception or immediate experience of the naturogenic that is the issue, for we likely will only get better at replicating even the wildest of places should we want to.

A relevant counterpoint to advance, however, is the particular trait of anthroposemiosis that humans have an ability to reflect on signs and our interpretation of them, referred to as metasemiosis (Konderak 2017; Petrilli and Ponzio 2007, 32). We may for example attribute sport values specifically to this trait, as an arena where we connect our bodily or endosemiosis to underlying values that are culturally constructed, reflectively negotiating for instance what is to count as standards of excellence or the spirit of sport. Regarding indoor facilities, metasemiosis may entail that humans are aware of the origin of their surroundings. Can our most technologically advanced imitation of, say, a mountain towering terribly above us in the blue hour of dusk, truly give way to the same sublimity as in nature when we know it is a deception of our own making? (Krein 2018). If so, how many times would it work? At what point would resistance to willful forgetfulness on the part of our sensations’ origin kick in on a meta-semiotic level? Humans’ capacity for reflecting upon the self-made signscape that is the anthropogenic sport facility may, with time, counterfeit also the immediate experiential values of even the most advanced immersive replications.

An anthroposemiotic loop

However, we recognize that a subject may find satisfactory meaning in the human-made also meta-semiotically, perhaps especially when the purpose of the activity is sport-related, by which the experience of nature may become secondary. What pulls at our conscience from a biosemiotic perspective, rather, is the quality of the experienced relations. Even in humans’ best efforts at (re)creating meaningful surroundings or signscapes of the living, biomimetic anthropogenic environments will always be just that; replicas. For all our engineering might, humans can only copy and not create the signs of nonhuman (or pre-human) life, which is what we relate to outside of a technospheric enclosure.

Undoubtedly, highly sophisticated innovations within the technosphere are, for many, meaningful in their own ways. Nevertheless, they may only give a human representation of living systems’ nonhuman signification. While we could fill our sporting halls with biotic and abiotic matter alike; animals, insects, fish; bushes, flowers, trees; soil, rocks, and waterfalls, the resulting biological whole imitative of a self-sustaining ecosystem would lack the ontological signification qualities from having followed from natural processes including semiotic scaffolding. Its composition would be fragmented, and the sign relations between lifeforms would be illogical or ‘broken signs’ because, in their natural state, they result from the opposite of controlled decision-making by a central agent.⁶ Anthropogenic imitative replicas are instead filtered through the centralized semiotic agency of the human subjects (persons, organizations, companies) responsible for the given immersive display, be it in a gym or a stadium. As a selection motivated by the human Umwelt, the filtering of signs amounts to an anthroposemiotic substitute for the natural and fine-tuned selection via semiotic scaffolding, or the ‘survival of signs’ within our environment. In result, the internal model that is the indoor sportsperson’s Umwelt fills not with the signified logos of the origin of life but the restrictive logics of a miniscule part of that life and what we think of as relevant signs in a modern, already highly technologized society.

What creative, fictitious play-worlds may arise from an internal model such as this, fueled on a form of purified or stringent secondary signification? And what culture may come out of it? Biosemiotician Ivar Puura (2013, 152–153) claims that

Deep in our memory our sensations are related to the signs of nature that we see, smell and hear even when we have not yet become aware of this. Nature that is intimately familiar to us embodies the signscape that carries traditions going back through centuries, helps culture to persist and helps human beings to stay human.

We may copy a bird’s song or coordinate a recording of a wave’s splash with the isolated motion of our arm while seeing the visuals of water through VR (virtual reality) glasses, but these auditory and visual signs will still be only a static and collective memory of the bird and the wave. Furthermore, since the mover in immersive anthropogenic sites does not experience the sensations of nature’s signs in themselves but rather fellow humans’ interpretation of that nature, what may transcend from her immersion is but a memory of a memory. Sign by sign, sport experiences could hereby entail a subtle entrapment in a pattern of incidence whilst the adventure of coincidence evanesces outside.

In sum, biosemiotic theory prompts us to consider the essential differences between and therefrom hierarchization of sporting sites. Although humans can make buildings to live parts of a meaningful life in, as living spaces, the self-made environment of one species in modern time cut us off from the semiotic scaffolding that follows from all lifeforms’ collective natural history and the quality of sign relations it entails. Scaffolding, as highlighted in Hoffmeyer (2015, 154), is ‘exactly the point that distinguishes living systems from non-living systems’, or naturogenic sporting sites and anthropogenic sporting sites, by ‘the presence in the former of a historically created semiotic interaction mechanism which has no equal in the latter’. Void of this inherent trait, an anthropogenic sports facility instead appears to block the ceaseless circulation between the moving body and the rest of ecology, locking the former in an anthroposemiotic loop of merely human-to-human signification.

As semiotic scaffolding is the preceding process that leads to freedom, then although we cannot empirically prove future phylogenesis or evolution of a species, hindering semiotic scaffolding means, in principle, changing what semiotic freedom results from it. In theory, in result, the loop makes sportspersons co-evolve through the centralized agency of merely their fellow humans, moving them closer to nature-less bodies, memories, sensations, and cultures.

Preserving animal ludens

Arguably, as we have seen, the naturogenic and the anthropogenic sporting sites cannot be juxtaposed as functionally interchangeable if one continues the ecological process that provides for the semiotic freedom to enjoy and develop sports and the other inhibits it. Of the two, only the naturogenic environment gives way to our species’ constitutive relation between ‘human’ and ‘nature’, or the human central agent and the de-centralized pre-human agency that made us. At the peak of this process arises a unique human mind, with which we have made and agreed to interact with each other within temporary and shared fictitious lifeworlds arising from the rules of games and other social constructions. Through the semiotic freedom to play evidenced herein, the modern homo ludens may continuously seek to discover what Olympic performance limits of citius, altius, fortius that the border of our biology into species involve.

Indeed however, in a biosemiotic view, the gameplaying sportsperson may be said to reappear as animal ludens. A moving semiotic body within Tønnessens intercorporal ‘body of bodies’ that is nature. Ourselves naturogenic, humans’ agential abilities stem from a relational co-evolution within equally naturogenic surroundings. It is as animals we play. In a sport-philosophical light, when striving to optimize physical performance of this nature-made body within the agential confines of human-made sporting sites, we are inclined to ask what exactly we are advancing. What future human body is this? Is it still an animal ludens? Eichberg (1982, 43) reminds us that ‘birds do not fly only because they have wings; they also have wings because they fly’. Today, we stretch our wings as players through a superb interpretative ability for collective fiction because we have used precisely that fiction-ability throughout the semiotic scaffolding process that precedes our agency today. In indoor facilities, however, humans we are largely cut off from these relations. Metaphorically then, if we do not fly today, will we have wings as the same playful fiction animals in the future?

As anthropogenic sporting sites appear to break with ecological principles of the species-specific ability currently underlying individual performance, over time they may exchange the very body-semiotic capabilities we try to optimize and take pleasure in through sports. This futuristic scenario highlights sites and signification’s connection to the raison d’être of sports altogether. Arguably, there is a categorical difference between optimizing the original (nature-made) body and realizing the potential (human-made) body. Hence one may ask, what is the semiotic purpose of sports?

Only when we move in the domain made by the forces that came before us may we continue on the path that has led us to what we are. Biosemiotically, the differences of sporting sites’ origin regard the quality of humans’ constitutive relations and are observed as contemporary accounts with possible long-term effects. To preserve sportspersons’ full enjoyment of inherent semiotic capabilities and interpretative complexity today, therefrom the animal ludens of the future, we should give primacy to the naturogenic sporting sites as being irreplaceable and inimitable by those that are simply human-made.

Conclusion

To recapitulate, we argue that, from the biosemiotic perspective on what has caused our species’ current and unprecedented semiotic freedom to play, naturogenic sporting sites are superior to anthropogenic environments for playing our sports. A central premise to our argument is phylogenetic – we posit that our species originated in naturogenic living environments and evolved through the scaffolding processes herein that are greatly diminished in the non-living systems of the technosphere, including human made sporting venues. However, as the relation between phylogenetic and ontogenetic effect regarding semiosis remains unexplained in our case, our paper has a narrative and speculative-hypothetical element wherever it touches upon the individual.

The argument on the primacy of naturogenic sport sites is also exposed to pragmatic concerns. One concern is the protection of untouched nature. Our argument could exacerbate an already significant strain on ecosystems following human activity should it encourage even more sportspersons to direct their activities to naturogenic sites. However, our conclusion follows from a comparative study: what we are proposing amounts, in practice, not to necessarily eliminate existent facilities that certainly can provide meaning and value to its indoor practitioners, but to prioritize one over the other going forward. We consider the ecological cost of naturogenic practice to be less than that of continuing to build new high-tech facilities; a major source for sports’ contribution to modern humans’ technospheric space domination.

Reflecting on sport games and rule-based play as the epitome of unprecedented human agency, we have argued for the qualitative differences between indoor and outdoor sporting sites as a matter of creative origin. In our view, an ecologically sound response to technological development and novel possibilities for conducting our sports entirely within human made walls and immersive virtual spaces is to ask, ‘Why do humans have agency to play sports to begin with?’ Through a study of biosemiotic key concepts, we find that the naturogenic sporting site provides continuity to constitutive semiotic-agential relations, while the anthropogenic site locks the mover within an anthroposemiotic loop of human-made signscapes. Hence, the naturogenic alternative should be considered to hold primacy in the sports community because it pertains to the processes to which we already owe our unprecedented degree of semiotic freedom, to which, in turn, we owe our vast array of rule-based sports. As for practical or policy implications, we hope to have provided some theoretical evidence and encouragement for a macro-strategic principle for instance where dilemmas between new construction for indoor sports or preservation of wilderness areas for recreational use arise.

Eichberg observed that the technologizing of sports equipment and venues historically has been countered by several green waves since the 18th century. We are happy to observe a similar movement today within the international sporting community, more so on the grassroots level, apparently going through a process of rediscovery. At the same time as esport is included, other additions to the Olympic Games are going in the naturogenic direction, including ocean swimming, off-road biking, and surfing. The new game called ‘adventure races’ surging in popularity as we speak may also reflect a cultural counter motion in line with our own ideas here. Despite these tendencies, our observation is systemically that of Eichberg’s that, in the new geological age of the Anthropocene and our very own semiospatial sphere, ‘the environment of sports has once again become the opposite of nature’ (1982, 55).

A biosemiotic lens and its reanimation of agency’s evolutionary genealogy opens up new ways to understand modern issues in sports related to space and pushes the benchmark against which the concept of ecological sports is understood. The risks from a move to anthropogenic sporting sites at the expense of naturogenic ones could involve a wing-clipped future sportsperson with, compared to previous human generations, less semiotic freedom and agency to excel through the fictions of our rule-based play-worlds. While our biosemiotic reading has dealt mainly with macro processes, we hope our review hereby may provide for richer individual sport experiences too, by accentuating the origin of our cultural nature as animal ludens, and even the most human of meaning-making as biological at heart.

Acknowledgments

This paper was developed as part of Ms. Storaas’ doctoral project in biosemiotic body philosophy at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, for which Professor Loland is the main supervisor. Thanks are due to Kevin Krein for helpful comments on a previous version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Notably, (natural) 'environment’ is used differently as relating to perception depending on the discipline. For example, Gibson’s (Heras-Escribano and de Jesus 2018, 254) use within ecological psychology is mind-dependent, while non-nominalist biosemiotician Deely’s (2014) use is mind-independent as the pre-perceived. Ours is akin to the latter or as a description of physics.

2. While Umwelt is an undifferentiated concept that may denote the perspective of all (sentient) species, the term Lebenswelt has been used to differentiate the individual human’s Umwelt specifically (Deely 2014). In our basic introduction to biosemiotic terminology to sport philosophy, we use the term Umwelt here. Note that both terms are also in use in phenomenology; for a brief review, see Tønnessen et al. (2018).

3. Biosemiotic versions of relational ontology are akin to those found in the views of deep ecologists, most notably in Arne Næss’s (1989) description of relational field ontology.

4. We are, of course, tempted to consider ‘food chain’ a reductionistic and non-agential concept in and of itself but employ it to show where existing discourse comes into play in our review.

5. Sometimes interchangeably referred to as semiotic competence (see for instance Hoffmeyer and Stjernfelt 2016).

6. Unless we were to attribute nature to a Creator, which we are not logically inclined to do.