Nature’s not for everyone
There was a gardens feature on Radio 1 last weekend - nature is properly mainstream. While it’s great news that some of us are, somewhat ironically, spending more time outside during the lockdown, it’s also the perfect time to consider how important the human-nature connection (known as biophilia) is for everyone at all times.
As a long time advocate of biophilia I’ve received the current mood of rediscovering nature and gardens as both heartening and desperately sad in equal measures. Heartening because the evidence matches people’s experience, that nature is good for us. Sad because not everyone has a garden or access to nature, and not everyone feels that the outdoors is for them.
I’m normally reticent about walking through the local nature reserve alone — long held beliefs that there might be a scary man there. But this week I conducted a full risk assessment in my head (practically got out my notebook and pen) and decided to go for it, and it was just lovely. Pretty quiet but still a few dog walkers and families around, so it felt safe. Today though, with fewer people around I didn’t feel I could go in without a little tinge of anxiety. So I stuck to the edge because, as a woman, I have an in-built fear of enclosed public spaces, like we’ve been told to. And a further fear that if something unpleasant happened, then people might say or think “what was she doing alone in the nature reserve?”. So, is nature for me? Yes sure, but not quite in the same way as it is, say, for my husband.
From another perspective - time, space and freedom are not givens in everyone’s lives. As we know, many people in the UK live in small spaces with minimal outdoor space and even if they have green areas in their local vicinity, time may not enable everyone — for example, the busy parents fitting in work and life over 7 days a week - its simple pleasures. When my husband and I lived in inner city Bristol, we often used to comment how in Eastville park, set in a racially diverse part of the city, you wouldn’t see the full diversity of the area reflected in the people going out for a walk (at least from our experiences). In fact our next door neighbours at the time, a Muslim family of six, rarely stepped into our nearest park on the same street as ours. Nature, for a whole host of reasons, isn’t always felt as inclusive by and for ‘everyone’.
One of my go to research books is ‘Ecotherapy’ by Martin Jordan and Joe Hinds. I’ve been reading the bit about Eudemonic Philosophy and Humanistic Nature Relationships. I know — highbrow! Reading this makes me realise that as well as my fear of other people missing out (I’ll call it FOOPMO), I fear we’ve got our quest for happiness all wrong. What being in nature provides us is a closer sense of harmony, meaning and purpose — a closer sense of eudemonia. Eudemonia is about holistic well-being as opposed to hedonic or momentary pleasure. It’s about living in truth to oneself and understanding our place in the world. That’s where we’ll find our true happiness or contentment, according to Aristotle.
Developing a meaningful relationship with nature through our daily walks, our gardens, our indoor plants can be an important precursor, according to Joe Hinds who authored the chapter, to experiencing eudemonia. In psychology, studies into biophilia show us how spending time in nature, or in earshot of birdsong, for example, can make us feel mentally and physically better, it can help improve our cognition, to be more focused and give us a feeling of mindfulness and presence. Getting your hands in the soil is reported to present antidepressant-like properties and being in and around nature is said to make us kinder, more creative and potentially adopt pro-environmental behaviours.
Why it’s taken us so long and a pandemic for our society to begin to wake up to the opportunity of living the ‘good life’ in the philosophical sense (and ok… a bit 1970s BBC sitcom sense too) is baffling but welcome, of course.
As the government starts to plan the loosening of lockdown restrictions, we need to plan how we’re going to cling on to and support better access to what some of us have experienced during this time. We also need to think very carefully about what we’re voting for, how we spend money, how we use the earth’s resources, how we behave and how authentic we are living as our real selves. These aren’t lofty and tenuous links to our relationship with nature — they’re all completely intertwined. We need to rethink in a way that means living and working arrangements enable time, space and freedom for EVERYONE to experience the fundamentals that give our lives purpose. Access to nature is essential to that.
We were starting to lose our way with being human and as if by stealth, lose important species, wildlife and natural habitats in the process. Eudemonia isn’t all about the good times, by the way (that’s purely hedonism), it just as much enables us to feel the “discomfort, pain and tiredness” of life too — just like being in the heart of authentic nature might make you feel at times. The changing weather, a treacherous mountain, a bracing swimming lake, the tiny pinch of a stray ant that gets up your sleeve while gardening. Those feelings that dislodge our comforts and egos are all the more salient to remind us of how it is to be a mortal human.
So, while we slowly get back to rolling news about the stock markets, retail performance, profit and loss sheets, football scores, fashion collections, cars’ mpgs, holidays and the usual way of life, let’s be responsible. Let’s remember, think and learn like a human who is a part of nature and a contributor to what happens to our planet.
With love, stay well and stay safe,
Naomi
