Environment – Time for nature

Rudyard Kipling tapped into something essential about the relationship between people and nature when he said, ‘When the world wearies, and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden’. Nature offers solace, hope, reward for patience, peace, space and a sense of being greater than the self. Nature offers insight into life cycles, changing seasons and other living communities. Being in the garden, a park, going for a walk, a bike ride or a swim always makes you feel better. Tramping in the forest, climbing a mountain or kayaking open waters make you feel both greater and smaller at the same time. Even just getting outside and smelling the flowers is a green prescription.

Some say we’re hard wired to appreciate nature for its uses and benefits – the Biophilia hypothesis, as covered in my September 2014 column. But the converse risk is that with increasing technological dependence, urbanisation (New Zealand has one of the highest urban populations per capita in the world), and fear and alienation from the natural world, children in particular, are experiencing ‘nature deficit disorder’.

Nature deficit disorder was described by Richard Louv in his book Last Child in the Woods in 2005. He argues the intrinsic, unified human-nature relationship has been damaged, so there’s now a false separation between us. Cities and transportation are designed and built in ways that bypass or destroy wild areas. The less people interact with and immerse in nature, the less they understand and empathise with it, and the more they fear it. Sedentary lifestyles build in physical limitations to getting into the great outdoors. People, especially children, have become detached from the outside, flourishing natural world, breeding ambivalence, fear and antipathy. Nature is seen as a thing, or object, a place to fear.

Even those who feel a deep empathy with nature and its many varied forms, can become detached or dispassionate as ‘ecophobia’ sets in. Ecophobia is the fear of the ecological problems facing the natural world, the feeling of powerlessness to prevent ecological change. We may come to experience ‘solastalgia’ the ‘pain of seeing wilderness disappear, and the disengagement that comes with that’. Our love of nature hurts because of the abuses we are inflicting upon it and we become averse to that pain, and turn away from that which should bring solace.

Studies show physical activity and exposure to nature are important for good health. Physical health improves with exercise, but being in nature is good for mental health, wellbeing and balance too. Gardening and tree planting have extra benefits.

Every day the media brings us stories of individual and collective doom. Fukushima, war, refugees, climate change, polluted lakes, depleted resources, species extinction, overpopulation and overconsumption … it’s almost all too much to bear. But the irony is that in the face of disaster and collapse, seemingly intractable ecological problems, spending time in nature becomes all the more important.