Connection to Nature
It’s Mental Health Week, and this year it takes the theme of Connecting with Nature. The importance of this connection is undeniable, but it’s worth taking time to think about it a bit more. Drawing on an original idea by psychologist Eric Fromm, entomologist E. O. Wilson first popularised the term Biophilia in 1984, to describe our species’ innate attraction to nature and all the lifeforms and processes it embodies. He recognised that it was hardwired into our DNA through evolution, and that we unconsciously understand our interconnectedness in the greater web of life on the planet.
A body of scientific evidence has been growing ever since, developing in fields such as neuroscience, microbiology and ecopsychology, that reveal how making meaningful connections with nature are essential for our physical and mental wellbeing. Journalist Richard Louv coined the term ‘nature-deficit disorder’ in his 2005 book ‘Last Child in the Woods’, to highlight the impoverishment suffered by decreasing engagement with nature. Recent scientific findings has addressed our ongoing disconnection from nature, caused by the demands and stresses of contemporary life in the modern world.
Nature writing has also been keen to explore the phenomenon of what has become called, after the title of Richard Mabey’s 2005 book, the ‘nature cure’. Yet Mabey himself is ambivalent about the idea, for while the benefits of nature may seem obvious, there is an irony of expecting nature to provide a panacea for our problems, given that it is precisely our maltreatment of nature, that is the cause of them. We have an unhealthy attitude towards nature and yet expect it to heal us.
The very idea of ‘nature' as something ‘out there’, apart from us, is at the root of the problem. The distinction between nature and culture separates our species from all the others around us, with which we have important co-evolutionary and co-dependent relationships. This separation is the product of a long line of Western thinking that views the natural world simply as resources to be extracted for profit. The evidence of the destruction wrought by this attitude runs through colonial history to the transformed geosphere of the Anthropocene in which we live today. Breaking down these mental barriers is the first step towards better mental health. Thinking of nature as a level playing field of equal participants where we are just one among multitudes, puts things into a bigger perspective. Our interconnections with the world around us are what is important, not our ego-centric world views.
Ask not what nature can do for you, but what you can do for nature, because at the end of the day we are part of it, and if we are not tending to the health of the more-than-human world, and instead objectifying and commodifying it for it for our own benefit, then we cannot truly begin to
attend to our own health and wellbeing. We are caught up running around stressing ourselves out in a system that places a price on everything but doesn’t appreciate the value of anything, apart from the accumulation of capital.
So for our health and wellbeing we need to rethink the idea of nature and our interactions with it. We need to look around, and to start appreciating the environments around us for the diversity of species they contain. But we need to appreciate them not for our own benefit, but because they have as much right to exist, in and for themselves, as we do. They have intrinsic value above and beyond our own concerns. We need to think about how we co-habitat with other species, respectfully allowing them their own space. Let’s call it ‘species distancing’, standing back and letting them go about their daily lives, just as we go about ours. From a selfish point of view we need to do this for our mental health, from a selfless point of view we need to do it for the health of the planet we inhabit with our more-than-human neighbours.
